My Fair Lady, 1964 (Grade A)

Director: George Cukor
Awards -- Lots and Lots--ran aways with the Academy awards, got Golden Globes, and Bafta awards, and is in at least 2 of AFI Best 100 lists.
Cast:  Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison. Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde-White, Gladys Cooper, Jeremy Brett, Theodore Bikel, Mona Washbourne, Isobel Elsom, John Holland, Alan Napier, Marni Nixon

sez says: I am surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie after all these years! We decided to watch this because we had just viewed the 1930s version (titled Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's original title). We wanted to look at IF and HOW the story might have been changed from 1930 to 1960.   Well much to our surprise, much of the script is verbatim. (Shaw himself did the screenplay for the 1930's version).  And while  My Fair Lady is punctuated with Lerner and Loew Show Tunes (many of which are very clever songs) the music did not alter, in any substantial way, the core story.  There is less talk in the this 1960s version about the evils of middle class morality--and the final conversation between Higgins and Dolittle --where Higgins denounces marriage--is cut from the 1960s version.  The race track replaces mothers house for Eliza's first outing...and what a grand job is done of that bit of the movie, where the upper class presnets itself as a bland, emotionless bunch. The sexism in the lyrics of some of the songs is tempered by it being tongue-in-cheek "Why Can't a Woman Be Like A Man" etc.