Movie: My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)
This is the first Audrey Hepburn film I've seen and it's easy to see why she was so beloved. She essentially plays four different iterations of her character here - a coarse flower girl, a sincere pupil grappling with proper language and etiquette, an aristocrat, and an educated, confident working class woman. She is always effortlessly charming and likable, which is in this case more important than being effortlessly convincing. Eliza Doolittle's supposedly unadorned working class accent at the beginning is, even within the theatrical needs of the film, so over the top that it comes off as more affected than the posh speech of Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguistics professor who has bet his 'friend' Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hide-Whyte) that in just a couple of weeks he can pass off common Eliza as a duchess of wealth and sophistication.
Hepburn's performance is further challenged by the studio's demands, against her wishes, to dub most of the songs. As the camera is pointed straight at Eliza (often in close-up) during many of her songs, Hepburn's lyp sincing is extremely obvious and distracting. The dubbing however works in the film's favor during its greatest sequence at the Ascot race course, where the highest of Brtish high society meets to observe each other, solidify their place in the hierarchy and occasionally watch a horse race, This crowd is introduced in a series of still shots that are made to look like Impressionist paintings. All people are dressed in similar, yet distinctly different costumes in various shades of grey, black and white. The interplay of various colors and shapes creates some of the most impressive compositions I've ever seen in a film, and things only get better when Cukor introduces movement to these shots. The movement is however deliberately stiff and mechanical, as if we are watching diorama theatre, or one of those museum experiments where they take a classical painting and use the latest technology to stimulate/re-imagine the movements of the work's subjects.
The sequence is not only a technical and stylistic wonder, it also completely re-arranges how we are supposed to see this film. Up until then Henry Higgins is presented as an obviously intelligent person who is comfortable with his position at the center of the London upper class. There are some jabs at his arrogance and chauvinism, but the film mostly doesn't seem to doubt the idea that it is just and right that this man is supposed to teach Eliza the ways of the world and that she will be obviously better off if she listens to him. In the process, it reproduces some, generously called, old-fashioned (even for 1964) ideas about class and gneder. In combination with the comfortably traditional musical theatre songs, it's easy to get the impression that beyond Audrey Hepburn, the movie doesn't have a lot going for it, especially if you are not a fan of populist American musical theatre. However, even before we get to Ascot, there is a fantasy sequence where Eliza dreams of the King murdering Henry, and an unexpected aside in which the house staff bursts into song demanding better working conditions. By the time Henry Higgins shows up at the horse races wearing a discordant brown suit, and is almost shunned by his mother for his lack of manners, you have to admit the movie is actually doing stuff.
What the movie is doing, among other things, is show how language, class and appearance are being used to hide more uncomfortable truths about both individuals and society as a whole. It is succesful in part thanks to the great performance of Rex Harrison who allows you to interpret Henry Higgins' posh, self-centered intellectualism as the defence mechanism of either a ragingly insecure charlatan mysoginist or a deeply closeted homosexual, without ever tipping his hand as to what interpretation should be correct (he is helped by the brilliantly ambigous song "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"). It's worth noting too that even if you ignore the satirical subtext, Higgins succesfully passing off Eliza as a duchess is in itself quite a pointed criticicsm of the Britisch class system. Unfortunately, as this was a major, highly expensive, studio film it can't end on the note it's been building up to and tacks on an entirely unfitting happy ending. It's as if The Social Network would have included a final frame showing that Zuckerberg's friend request is accepted.
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