Talking Pictures

[poliphilo]

We have my mother watching Talking Pictures most of the time now. It makes no difference to her what she's sat in front of- and I like the sound it makes- each film a little different- better than I like the noise of the daytime TV shows on the mainstream channels- the reality shows and the quiz shows- which sound essentially the same day after day. Mostly we don't watch with her but going in and out with cups of tea I get little glimpses of fascinating things- the images of a London that no longer exists in an Ealing comedy, the extraordinary expressionist visuals in an obscure film directed by Cameron Menzies, the outback landscapes in an otherwise tedious movie about bushwhackers, Kenneth More and Charles Hawtrey doing an unlikely double act in a mild comedy about mild criminality. Every so often- tall trees among the cinematic scrub- they'll show a bone fide classic. Yesterday we had Rene Clement's version of Shaw's Pygmalion- with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller- which is a delight- and I watched it all the way through.

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[sovay]

Yesterday we had Rene Clement's version of Shaw's Pygmalion- with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller- which is a delight- and I watched it all the way through.

I believe it was produced by Gabriel Pascal and directed by Anthony Asquith, but I adore it. It is the only version that makes me believe the ending I can no longer swallow in My Fair Lady. (It may prevent me from rewatching My Fair Lady at all.)

[poliphilo]

You're quite right: Gabriel Pascal it is. He was the producer. Howard and Asquith are credited as co-directors.

Shaw ended the play on a note of ambiguity- and was, I believe, unhappy that the film went a little further in hinting at future romance- and wrote an afterword to the play as printed that marries Eliza to Freddy and explains why Galatea would never pair off with Pygmalion. He'd have been very cross with Lerner and Loewe.

[sovay]

and was, I believe, unhappy that the film went a little further in hinting at future romance-

I don't necessarily read Eliza and Higgins as a romantic prospect; I do believe them as intelligent people with chemistry, which doesn't have to be the same thing. There's something of a twist in this version that isn't present in either the original play or the later musical, where Eliza may be lacking in grammar and class graces but she's got a first-rate mind and she understands people, which Higgins for all his education really does not—we see it every time he hasn't got the pedagogic upper hand; he falls back on confrontation or he flails—and so all the while he thinks he's sculpting a duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf, he himself is being knocked into human shape without really noticing and by the time he does, it's almost too late. It's not even anti-Shavian, since in so many of his plays his characters get their unexamined assumptions thrown back in their faces: Raina's romantic notions of chivalry in Arms and the Man, Barbara Undershaft's save-a-soul favoring of pie in the sky over wages in hand in Major Barbara, just about everyone's attitudes toward class and sexuality in Mrs. Warren's Profession. Higgins gets kicked in the pants by his own human susceptibility and has to face it. It works beautifully with Hiller and Howard, who convince me absolutely as intellectual equals, with more emotional intelligence on her side and more geekery on his. I've never seen anyone else try it.

[poliphilo]

I do love Audrey Hepburn but- no- she doesn't do nearly as much with the part as Hiller.

Shaw would also have hated the way Cecil Beaton smothered his work in frocks.