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Pygmalion
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Pygmalion (1938) More at IMDbPro »

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Overview

User Rating:
8.0/10   2,404 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Up 17% in popularity this week. See rank & trends on IMDbPro.
Writers:
George Bernard Shaw (play)
George Bernard Shaw (scenario and dialogue)
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Contact:
View company contact information for Pygmalion on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
3 March 1939 (USA) more
Genre:
Comedy | Drama | Romance more
Tagline:
He picked up a girl from the gutter - and changed her into a glamorous society butterfly ! . . . See Wendy Hiller, new star discovery, in this amazing role ! more
Plot:
Shaw's play in which a Victorian dialect expert bets that he can teach a lower-class girl to speak proper English and thus be taken for a lady. full summary | add synopsis
Awards:
Won Oscar. Another 1 win & 4 nominations more
NewsDesk:
(6 articles)
Knightley Waits For My Fair Lady Role
 (From WENN. 13 March 2009, 9:20 AM, PDT)

Colony Theatre Company's Candida to Begin Previews February 4
 (From BroadwayWorld.com. 15 January 2009, 9:41 PM, PST)

User Comments:
By George, they got it the first time... more

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)
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Additional Details

Also Known As:
Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (UK) (complete title)
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Runtime:
96 min | USA:89 min
Country:
UK
Language:
English
Aspect Ratio:
1.37 : 1 more
Sound Mix:
Mono (Western Electric Wide Range System)

Fun Stuff

Trivia:
The original Broadway production of "Pgymalion" opened at the Park Theater opening October 12, 1914 and ran for 72 performances. The play premiered in a German translation at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on October 16, 1913 and in English at His Majesty's Theatre in London on April 11, 1914 and starred 'Mrs Patrick Campbell'. more
Quotes:
Prof. Henry Higgins: Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba! more
Movie Connections:
Referenced in From the Ends of the Earth (1939) more

FAQ

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14 out of 17 people found the following comment useful:-
By George, they got it the first time..., 2 June 2004
Author: seven_keys2003 from Corpus Christi, Texas

George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian Socialist who editorialized and lectured on the need for uprooting obsolete notions of a rigid English class-structure in order for individuals to realize their full potential. He wrote the play "Pygmalion" in 1912 and 1913 as part-social protest, part-satire, part-comic farce. Its central character, Henry Higgins, a London teacher of elocution and expert in regional phonetics, makes a small wager with his friend and colleague, Colonel George Pickering, that he can take a waif from the streets and pass her off as the cream of the social crop. Using a pedagogical technique consisting mostly of almost inhumane badgering and humiliation, he manages to pull off the feat with unexpected success – but at an emotional cost he did not quite foresee.

Besides the inventive montage sequences displaying the frustration and exhilaration of linguist Higgins as he transforms Eliza Doolittle from Cockney flower-girl to the statuesque, gowned beauty who's mistaken for a royal princess at a diplomatic reception, there are other items which failed to materialize in Shaw's original transcript – the use, for example, of the phrases, "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains" and "Hurricanes hardly happen in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire," both of which became lyrics for Lerner and Lowe's musical version of the play

Additionally, in Shaw's original play, Higgins's irritating Hungarian nemesis is not given a name; here, for the first time, he is dubbed "Kaparthy."

Leslie Howard, who co-directed with Anthony Asquith, plays Higgins as the antithesis to the character for whom Howard became most famous to American audiences – that of the dreamy, romantic Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind." His Henry Higgins is hard-nosed realism to the core - diabolical, profane, impatient, sometimes maddening. Howard beautifully caricatures the obsessive personality of a scientist who lives for nothing else but his work, and the rest of the world be hanged. And as Eliza, Wendy Hiller was never lovelier. The exoticism of such contemporaries as June Duprez and Merle Oberon may have tickled the fancy of an Alexander Korda, but in Ms. Hiller, rarely has the screen enjoyed the advantage of such beauty and intelligence combined. She even has her coy moments, particularly when Eliza is "tried out" at a tea party given by Higgins's mother. Her carefully high-toned enunciation of "the new slang" is timed to perfection.

This 1938 version of Shaw's classic, unfortunately, leaves one with the feeling that at the end - with Higgins quietly demanding to know from Eliza the whereabouts of his slippers - both student and mentor "live happily ever after." This sappy conclusion must have been a compromise on the part of Pascal, although one finds it mystifying that Shaw would have ever endorsed such a sentimental ending. For, as Shaw had written at the end of his play over two decades earlier, "the rest of the story need not be shewn (Shaw's spelling)...if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the...reach-me-downs of the rag shop in which Romance keeps its stock of happy endings..." The playwright then proceeded into seven pages of prose, describing an epilogue wherein Eliza married Freddy Eynsford-Hill and the generous Colonel Pickering set up the happy couple in a business near Victoria Station. As for the relationship between Higgins and Eliza, according to Shaw, "(to this day) he storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins." As is the aftermath of most good stories, the worm turned.

With Wilfrid Lawson as Eliza's father, Alfred; Scott Sunderland as Pickering; and David Tree impersonates the shallow but inoffensive Freddy in high style. (He would do the same with the role of Charles Lomax three years later in "Major Barbara.") If the American schleps and male-pushovers that Ralph Bellamy used to play in "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday" ever had a British opposite-number, David Tree was it; he did the upper-class twit better than anyone.

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