Pygmalion (1938)

Somehow I've wound up with a bit of a backlog of watched movies to blog about, which I suppose isn't a bad thing. Among them is the 1938 version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

This is one of those movies where a lot of people probably already know the basic plot, since it's based on a well-known play and there's the famous musical remake My Fair Lady. Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) sells flowers outside Covent Garden, London, a decidedly working-class job at best. One night as she's selling those flowers there's a strange guy writing down everything she's saying, a fact which unnerves her since she thinks this is the police about to nick her for a crime that she hasn't committed.

That man is, in fact, Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard), a linguist who has spent his career studying regional accents, which in the UK aren't just regional but class-based. Higgins is clearly of a higher social class than Doolittle, and knows it.

After Higgins reveals his identity and another patron, Freddy Hill (David Tree) gives Doolittle a relatively substantial sum for the whole basket of flowers, Eliza decides she wants to dake diction lessons so that she can get a higher-class job, showing up unexpectedly at Higgins' house. This is actually fortuitous for Henry. He's got a guest in Col. Pickering (Scott Sunderland), a fellow linguist but not as good as Henry. The two men make a bet that Henry can change Eliza not just in accent, but in manners, to the point that she can fool the upper crust into thinking she's of noble birth.

Eliza isn't necessarily thrilled with it at first, but Henry's offering her better job prospects regardless of the outcome, and she'll have a nice place to stay for a few months, so she eventually takes them up to be the subject. You can guess what happens next, which is that Eliza becomes an apt pupil and starts thinking for herself. She and Henry are also falling in love with each other although neither is prepared to admit that.

Pygmalion is a very well-made movie, albeit one that I did have some problems with, which are mostly down to the story. Henry Higgins is written as a really selfish character who winds up being rather an unlikeable jerk. That might have something to do with Shaw not wanting the play to have the typically happy ending of boy and girl winding up together at the end. Hiller also has some cringe-inducing scenes courtesy of the script, such as when she goes to visit Henry's mother. But Hiller is quite good in her role, as is Howard. Wilfrid Lawson also does well as Eliza's father.

The one good thing about Pygmalion is that it doesn't have the songs that My Fair Lady does. This isn't the sort of material that lends itself to being a musical if you're not a big fan of musicals (which I'm not). Pygmalion is a pretty darn good movie that's definitely worth a watch. The TCM Shop lists a DVD that looks like a sketchy gray-market MOD disk, while Amazon has it on Prime Video.