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And I don't know what's good for me
Last night I taped My Fair Lady (1964) off TCM, and tonight my mother and I watched it for the first time in over ten years.* I am very fond of Shaw in almost any incarnation, but one of the points I particularly love about the musical (and not the play, although I have not yet been able to check the 1938 film version for a missing link) is the twist that the source material acquires, as the myth of Pygmalion doubles back on itself to bite Henry Higgins in the ass. He thinks he's sculpting a duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf. What he doesn't realize is that the same process has started to chip him into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. I was serenely independent and content before we met! Surely I could always be that way again—and yet . . . And it is this aspect that interests me far more than whether we are meant to interpret the ending as a tentative romance. More on this, perhaps, when I am not so direly sleepy.
The fact that Peter S. Beagle has a Nebula really makes me happy.
*I own and regularly listen to the original Broadway cast recording, and on my shelf are a published libretto and several editions of Pygmalion, but it's been established that I cannot have seen the film any later than ninth grade and probably my mother introduced me to it a year or so earlier. Most of the movies I saw until late high school and early college followed this pattern: one or both of my parents would suddenly look up in the middle of a conversation and say, "You haven't seen—?" and about two days later, we'd rent it. I suspect I saw some very odd films that way at an impressionable age. (Like I would have turned out normal otherwise . . .)
The fact that Peter S. Beagle has a Nebula really makes me happy.
*I own and regularly listen to the original Broadway cast recording, and on my shelf are a published libretto and several editions of Pygmalion, but it's been established that I cannot have seen the film any later than ninth grade and probably my mother introduced me to it a year or so earlier. Most of the movies I saw until late high school and early college followed this pattern: one or both of my parents would suddenly look up in the middle of a conversation and say, "You haven't seen—?" and about two days later, we'd rent it. I suspect I saw some very odd films that way at an impressionable age. (Like I would have turned out normal otherwise . . .)
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I would like very much to see that. I kept looking at him in My Fair Lady and thinking, "But he's so young . . ."
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my reaction as well. so young, as so goonie! *g*
the source material acquires, as the myth of Pygmalion doubles back on itself to bite Henry Higgins in the ass. He thinks he's sculpting a duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf. What he doesn't realize is that the same process has started to chip him into a reasonable facsimile of a human being.
indeed! that's always been my favorite bit of watching the film, seeing how his work with Eliza affects Higins's character. I very much like the way you describe it. it's been a very long time since I saw Pygmalion; I was quite little and remember asserting that Leslie Howard was a complete loon. thinking of the story always reminds me of A Winter's Tale. (although, looking at wikipedia, there are an awful lot of other things it could remind me of!)
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Hee. Lucky. I have been looking for that version of Pygmalion for years; I should have thought to check Criterion first!
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Your grandparents were made of awesome.
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