My Fair Lady (1964) Queer Film. Cukor’s Late-Career Triumph A+

Adapted from the 1956 Lerner and Lowe stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play Pygmalion. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and direction by George Cukor. Costumes and set-design by Cecil Beaton – with George James Hopkins and Ken Adam (a gay threesome!). Cinematography by Harry Stradling.

Winner of eight Oscars, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Set-Design, Best Costumes and Best Cinematography.

Why can’t a woman be more like a man

Henry Higgins to Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady (1964)

My Fair Lady, the 1964 American musical-comedy-drama, was George Cukor’s late-career triumph. It is fitting that, in his emeritus years, Hollywood’s most renowned gay director was able to deliver the screen’s most relaxed and blissfully at ease gay couple while, at the same time, reveling in the gay camp of Cecil Beaton’s magnificent set and costume designs.

The couple is, of course, phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison, reprising his role from the stage musical) and Colonel Hugh Pickering (a marvelous Wilfrid Hyde-White). The two actors are perfect together, practically finishing one another’s sentences and capturing the essence of a relationship that stems from a long cohabitation. Whether they are confirmed bachelors or lovers seems immaterial. As with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, they are, in many ways, the perfect gay couple.

Then, into their lives, comes a poor Cockney flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn, replacing Julie Andrews from the stage musical) who overhears Higgins, as he casually wagers with Pickering that he could teach her to speak English so well she could pass for a duchess in Edwardian London or better yet, from Eliza’s viewpoint, secure employment in a flower shop. Yet, even at the film’s denouement, when it appears that Higgins has achieved his Pygmalion goals and transformed Eliza into a Lady, and the two have fallen in love, we do not honestly believe it. We know that in the next unshown reel, Eliza is out, and our two Edwardian gentlemen are back together in their men-only sanctuary.

The movie is a delight from beginning to end, and if Audrey seems more at ease in the latter half of the film, where she plays Eliza as a Lady, that may be because these scenes are more in keeping with the Audrey persona we have come to know and love. She had signed on to the movie thinking that she was going to be doing her own singing – she had accomplished this with aplomb in “Funny Face” – and was bitterly disappointed when the decision was made to dub her voice with Marni Nixon’s vocals.

With Stanley Holloway as Eliza’s father and Gladys Cooper as Henry’s mother (both were Oscar-nominated) and gay actor Jeremy Brett as Eliza’s suitor Freddy Eynsford-Hill. He sings a rousing version of On the Street Where You Live (dubbed by Bill Shirley).

The soundtrack contains the following Lerner and Lowe classics:

Wouldn’t It Be Lovely

With a Little Bit of Luck

Just You Wait (Henry Higgins)

The Rain in Spain

I Could Have Danced All Night

Ascot Gavotte

On the Street Where You Live

You Did It

Show Me

Get Me to the Church on Time

I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face

Warner Bros.

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