Pygmalion (1938)

Directors:

Anthony Asquith
Leslie Howard

Writers:

George Bernard Shaw (play)
George Bernard Shaw (scenario and dialogue)

Release Date:

3 March 1939 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Romance

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 !

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.

Plot Keywords:

Bet | Language | English | Professor | Flowers

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 1 win & 4 nominations

Cast

Leslie Howard	...	Professor Henry Higgins
Wendy Hiller	...	Eliza Doolittle
Wilfrid Lawson	...	Alfred Doolittle
Marie Lohr	...	Mrs. Higgins
Scott Sunderland	...	Colonel George Pickering
Jean Cadell	...	Mrs. Pearce
David Tree	...	Freddy Eynsford-Hill
Everley Gregg	...	Mrs. Eynsford-Hill
Leueen MacGrath	...	Clara Eynsford Hill
Esme Percy	...	Count Aristid Karpathy
Violet Vanbrugh	...	Ambassadress
Iris Hoey	...	Ysabel, Social Reporter
Viola Tree	...	Perfide, Social Reporter
Irene Browne	...	Duchess (as Irene Brown)
Kate Cutler	...	Grand Old Lady

Also Known As:

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (UK) (complete title)
Der Roman eines Blumenmädchens (West Germany) [de]
Pigmalião (Brazil) [pt]
Pigmalión (Argentina) [es]
Pigmalione (Italy) [it]
Pygmalion (Denmark) [da]
Pygmalion (Finland) [fi]
Pygmalion (Greece) [el]

Runtime:

96 min | USA:89 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Wide Range System)

Certification:

Canada:G (Ontario) | South Korea:12 | West Germany:6 | Australia:G | Finland:S | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved (PCA #4845)

Filming Locations:

Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, UK

Company:

Gabriel Pascal Productions

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'.

Quotes:

Eliza Doolittle: Walk? Not bloody likely. I'm going to take a taxi.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Simpsons: Pygmoelian (#11.16)" (2000)

G.B Shaw's Take On Selfhood, British Empire Classism and Romance

This is one of my favorite films, as a writer, as an actor and as one who teaches phonetics, for self-apparent reasons. This is an attempt in fictional form by Fabian socialist and enemy of imperial pseudo-Christian monarchy (pragmatism) George Bernard Shaw to argue several things. One is that if life is a performance, then appearance and speech matter more than character in his present period of history; hence the choice by him of the "Pygmalion" style transformation of one Eliza Doolittlie by professor Henry Higgings into a butterfly instead of a "draggletailed guttersnipe". Of course. he chose her because she looked intelligent and reacted more than other flower girls in the zone outside a theater where she what been selling flowers by night. But his boast that he could make over this product of the East End and its cockney dialect, which he considers to be less-than-human as a speech pattern, is not believed by his colleague, George Pickering, himself more a student of India's many languages than of phonetics per se, and taken on by Higgins as a guest after their meeting that very night. The next day, the young woman who has overheard both his criticisms of her speech and his boast about her potential opportunities comes and offers money so that he will teach her. Higgins is a monster socially, professorial type in this interpretation of the Shavian play--but he agrees to take her on as a cold scientific proof of the rightness of his theories, without regard to Eliza's feelings. It is enough she has had the courage to dare to approach him. He has her undressed, given a bath, and outfitted in new clothes, since he has burned the old ones. When her father hears what she is doing, he comes around to protest the loss of her income, blaming the Professor's actions as representing a potential reputational problem for his daughter. He is given money and sent away never to return; and he decides to get married, after demonstrating remarkable natural speechmaking abilities. The training continues, a rigorous one; Higgins' mother protests and is rebuffed. The housekeeper has to remind Higgins Eliza is human. Pickering treats the girl like a duchess, and Higgins excuses his own rudeness by arguing that he is the same with everyone--he treats duchesses as if they were flower girls. Finally the Professor's methods succeed. Her father's native cleverness with language may be at play in her, but she masters the upper-class accent by her own exhausting work. Then she is groomed for presentation "in society". Due to her success in this endeavor, her Cockney stories and odd grammar being taken as a new sort of courtly speech game, she causes one Freddy Eynesford-Hill to fall in love with her. She disrupts the Ascot Races with her exhortation to her horse, and then is taken back to Higgins' rooms to be groomed for her last battle--presentation at a diplomatic function where the Queen will be present. She carries the night with a triumphant and lovely appearance, fooling an Hungarian bogus phonetician to the extent that he believes her to be royalty herself. Then in the cold light of dawn, she realizes what has happened. She has lost her old niche in Britain's Imperial caste-ridden society, and she has nowhere to go. Higgins upbraids her for being ungrateful; but he is proud that she is her own person now. He ignores the insuperable social-class barriers set against her in England's totalitarian system. She runs off, to escape him, professing that she will marry Freddy, whose mother has a great deal of money. But in the end, realizing he really wants her to stay, she returns--with no promises, no guarantees, and no regrets on her part. He has made her independent and she chooses to be in love with him, perhaps forever. For his part, he has fallen in love with the perfection of his own creation. This is a B/W production, and quite different from the later Lerner and Loewe musical version with its many familiar numbers. It is a good and frequently an eloquent play, I argue, one demonstrably filled with witticisms, interesting comedic characters and memorable lines. The film is deliberate in places, but the dialogue for the most part plays very very well in my opinion. W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis were credited along G.B. Shaw for the screenplay; Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard did the directing. Harry Stradling Sr. was cinematographer; art direction was by Arthur Bryant. And the costumes were designed by Schiapparelli among others. In the cast, Leslie Howard makes a good understated Higgins-professor impersonator; Wendy Hiller is lovely and stunningly good as Eliza Doolittle. Marie Lohr plays Higgins' mother, Scott Sunderland a sympathetic Pickering, Wilfrid Lawson a charismatic and inebriate Alfred P. Dolittle. Others in the cast included David Tree as Freddy, Esme Percy as the Hungarian phonetics hack, Jean Cadell, very good as the housekeeper, and Everly Gregg as Mrs. Eynesford-Hill. The difference between this intelligent satire with comedy and the musical comedy with satire seems extraordinary to me; the distinction might be likened to a great actor one spoke to at his own home during a quiet party in soft lighting, and then watching him repeat the remarks at a vast Washington DC party to a hundred reporters in the midst of an inauguration ball. While I enjoy the musical version for its clever songs, I prefer the original version for its intelligence and focus on human value--the value of one human; and why such a commodity needs to be judged in this world, and protected from anyone's losing his rights and opportunities within any society because precisely those governmental guarantors who in some Age were charged with seeing that he/she did not do so failed to offer protection.