When I was visiting my friend in Qatar, I found a copy of My Fair Lady in a DVD sale bin. I adored that movie as a child and thought that my own children might enjoy it as well. At any rate, I figured it would make a nice change of pace from a steady diet of Disney and Pixar creations.
We watched it over two nights last weekend. It started out well enough – I still love the music (I could have danced all night!) and Audrey Hepburn never ceases to be a pleasure to watch. And though it was a little long for the children, they liked the community aspect of all of us sitting down to watch together – or perhaps it was the popcorn.
Things took a turn downhill for me in the second half of the movie – after Eliza has successfully transformed herself from a flower girl with a lower class accent into a lady. Her inexplicable fixation with Henry Higgins never bothered me as a child but it bothered me tremendously as an adult. Why should she like that self-centered, self-important, arrogant, gas-head? She does all the work and wins his bet for him but he takes all the credit! I loved the scene where she’s left him to go and stay at his mother’s house and then tells him off. And he does finally see the error of his ways and admits to himself that he misses her. But the ending was just too much – Eliza ruins the fact that she stood up to him by going back to him and he, instead of admitting to her face that he was wrong, gets a smug look on his face and smiles because he’s gotten his way once again. The End.
If I had my way, Eliza would have left Henry Higgins to the company of Colonel Pickering and married the prince of Transylvania instead. Harumph.
My children didn’t seem disturbed by it, and I realize that I’m judging an old movie by today’s standards, which isn’t fair. Be that as it may, the Best Picture of 1964 wouldn’t make it out of a focus group with that ending today, and I wish I hadn’t ruined my own pleasant childhood recollections of that movie by watching it again.
Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait…
