Who Needs Music?

I recently saw the Leslie Howard/Wendy Hiller Pygmalion at LACMA. Good comedies should be seen on the big screen with a crowd.

It goes without saying this is the best film adaptation of Shaw. (Too bad the print was poor.) There's not that much competition. It helps that the play is more an attempt at a West End hit than usual for Shaw. His lengthy discussions in other plays don't film quite so well.

Of course, what's a light comedy for Shaw is deep for anyone else. His characters are more incisive than you usually see on screen (even in a potboiler like this), and his subject, beneath the anti-romantic romantic comedy, is society and class.

It's a tricky play to pull off, because it has what's known in Hollywood as "third-act problems." The first two-thirds of the movie (and the play) are one brilliant comic sequence after another, but then after Eliza succeeds at the embassy ball, a more serious drama develops, threatening to destroy the light mood. (This is definitely intentional. Others might end soon after the ball, but while Shaw can be fun, he doesn't believe in being frivolous.) As long as Higgins and Pickering are involved in a project to pass her off, there's forward momentum, but the going gets heavy when the motion stops and we're left with two people who both feel hurt.

Shaw didn't want Higgins and Eliza to get together, but every storytelling convention says they should. And the film, which Shaw wrote, but with collaborators, not only fills in what's goes on between the scenes, but also has the suggestion at the end that the two are meant for each other. Shaw probably didn't fully approve, but he did ultimately like the movie. (It came out when he was the grand old man of theatre, a Nobel Prize winner in his 80s. He won an Osar, which he considered an impertinence.)

A lot of people watch this movie and hear music cues for My Fair Lady. I find Shaw's writing quite enough. (He hated musicalization of his work, and forbade it during his lifetime. He said the music of his own words would have to do.) Yet, without this movie, My Fair Lady wouldn't have happened. Others had tried to adapt Pygmalion by going back to the play, but it was Alan Jay Lerner who figured that the movie opened things up enough to make a musical work. Some of the most famous scenes from the show--Higgins teaching Eliza, the ball--are in the movie, but not in the original play. The film version is the missing link between Pygmalion the play and My Fair Lady the musical.

P.S. I never noticed before, but the movie version appears to be set in the "present" of the late 1930s. The musical goes back to the original period. I guess they figured (correctly) it just wouldn't play in 1956.