The video's great too; I had no idea Leslie Howard had been in Pygmalion!
He's so good! I grew up on My Fair Lady, both original cast recording and 1964 film, but Howard and Wendy Hiller became my definitive Higgins and Eliza almost as soon as I'd seen them. I have an antique post about the 1938 Pygmalion which I keep meaning to revisit, both because it was early in my adult rediscovery of Howard and could have been better-written and also because some of my opinions have changed—my tolerance for Rex Harrison's Higgins seems to have dropped with the years, for one—but my affection for Howard and Hiller remains unaltered and I stand by the paradoxically more believable romantic potential of trash fire dork Henry Higgins. I shortchanged Hiller, but what she communicates effortlessly is that her Eliza's as smart as Higgins and far less afraid of people, which is why he doesn't know what to do with her or his feelings about her or the fact that he has feelings, really, phonetics are so much easier. The line about the Shavian irony of the casting is referring once again to half-immigrant Jewish Howard embodying quintessential, unassailable Englishness, like the flawlessness of Eliza's diction and accent giving away that she's an—aristocratic, romantic, thanks to Karpathy's Hungarian interpretation—impostor after all, because the people who are born on the outside of something are the ones who have to learn to perform it perfectly. Look, find the film wherever you can and watch it. I'll try to rewrite/re-review it someday.
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The video's great too; I had no idea Leslie Howard had been in Pygmalion!
He's so good! I grew up on My Fair Lady, both original cast recording and 1964 film, but Howard and Wendy Hiller became my definitive Higgins and Eliza almost as soon as I'd seen them. I have an antique post about the 1938 Pygmalion which I keep meaning to revisit, both because it was early in my adult rediscovery of Howard and could have been better-written and also because some of my opinions have changed—my tolerance for Rex Harrison's Higgins seems to have dropped with the years, for one—but my affection for Howard and Hiller remains unaltered and I stand by the paradoxically more believable romantic potential of trash fire dork Henry Higgins. I shortchanged Hiller, but what she communicates effortlessly is that her Eliza's as smart as Higgins and far less afraid of people, which is why he doesn't know what to do with her or his feelings about her or the fact that he has feelings, really, phonetics are so much easier. The line about the Shavian irony of the casting is referring once again to half-immigrant Jewish Howard embodying quintessential, unassailable Englishness, like the flawlessness of Eliza's diction and accent giving away that she's an—aristocratic, romantic, thanks to Karpathy's Hungarian interpretation—impostor after all, because the people who are born on the outside of something are the ones who have to learn to perform it perfectly. Look, find the film wherever you can and watch it. I'll try to rewrite/re-review it someday.