The London of 1912 is not a forgiving place. Making a living on the dirty streets takes determination and grit. If you’re a flower girl, for instance, you pick up the small, discarded droppings from large flower shipments, wrap up your tiny bundles and try to sell them—a ha’penny each—to the swells.
Even when it’s pouring rain you stand there, wet and dripping, in hopes of a sale while members of London’s society class wait for umbrellas and cabs.
But even flower girls have a sense of self-respect. And as one flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, hawks her meager wares, she spies a man watching her and taking notes. And be he police or detective, that is a step too far.
“I’m a good girl, I am,” she proclaims. “I ain’t done nuthin’ wrong by speaking to the gen’leman. I’ve a right to sell flowers if’n I keep off the kerb. I’m a respectable girl: so ‘elp me, I never spoke to ‘im ‘cept so far as to buy a flower off me,” she concludes with indignant fire.
That, however, sets something quite unexpected in motion.
For just as Eliza is no bad girl, the man she speaks to is no detective. No, he’s actually a pompous phonetics specialist named Professor Henry Higgins. And he’s taking notes on her speech, determining her origins and where she was raised based on her digraphs and diphthongs.
And before you can say Cap’n, buy a posey? Higgins has gone from comparing the woman’s speech to the “crooning of a bilious pigeon,” to proclaiming his ability to improve her through diligent training.
“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days,” Higgins states over-loudly and with great confidence. “Well, sir, in six months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”
The cockney working-class girl, Eliza, is initially offended. But then she thinks about what it might be like to improve her job prospects, perhaps even become a real flower shop girl. It would offer the possibility of simple comfort. It would be “loverly.” So she seeks the professor out and asks him to proceed.
Colonel Pickering, Higgins’ friend and fellow linguist, thrills at the concept. In fact, he’s eager enough to see the idea made possible, that he guarantees to cover expenses if Higgins proves successful.
Higgins smugly agrees.
So begins the story of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, a most unlikely pair.
Professor Henry Higgins is not a particularly likable sort. He’s arrogant, and he feels as though he’s intellectually superior to most everyone he meets. For the professor, Eliza is little more than a challenge that he hopes will eventually prove out his mastery of the English language.
None of that is particularly positive. But Eliza’s impact on Higgins is. She softens his hard-bitten ways and forces him to see her as a person, not just an experiment. Higgins eventually sings that he’s grown “Accustomed to Her Face,” but in reality, Eliza is singularly responsible for opening Higgins’ eyes to feelings and thoughts he’s never had before.
And though there’s an obvious attraction between these two disparate individuals, it’s equally obvious that they grow to respect each other. And in the end, it’s apparent that both have grown, though Eliza’s growth is more noticeable.
Early on, Eliza dreams longingly of simple, but seemingly impossible pleasures in the song “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”
“All I want is a room somewhere
Far away from the cold night air
With one enormous chair
Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?”
The song illustrates that the simple pleasures of life, such as protection and tender love, are often the greatest pleasures.
Alfie Doolittle, Eliza’s dustman father, is no man of God. But in the song “With a Little Bit of Luck,” he references God several times. For instance, he sings:
“The Lord above made liquor for temptation,
To see if man could turn away from sin.
The Lord above made liquor for temptation, but
With a little bit of luck, with a little bit of luck
When temptation comes you’ll give right in.”
Later in the musical, Alfie is going to marry. But he spends the night carousing with women (who hug, nuzzle and kiss him) and getting drunk with the single request that his friends, “Get Me to the Church on Time.” And when his friends finally do drag him off to the wedding, they carry him like a corpse heading off to burial.
Higgins references “the devil” several times as a phrase of speech, such as, “You look the very devil.” During one argument with the arrogant Higgins, Eliza makes it clear that he is “not the beginning or the end,” a reference to God being the “Alpha and the Omega” in the book of Revelation.
Alfie Doolittle also happens to be a man who declares himself a free spirit. He’s penniless, with no ties and no moral anchors.
Not only does Alfie declare that he’s living unmarried with a woman while having trysts as he pleases, but he hints that he was never married to Eliza’s mother.
When he gets wind of Eliza living with “a gentleman,” he gets the wrong idea about the arrangement and goes to see Higgins. He’s not offended by any possible unsavory things, but demands five pounds as his cut. He even goes so far as to suggest he’d sell Eliza for 50 pounds.
Meanwhile, Higgins’ housekeeper suggests that it’s not right that Eliza, a single woman, is living in the professor’s home. After Higgins insists that she will be living with them, the woman then has to pull in other maids to strip Eliza and get her in a bath (offscreen). Even Pickering wonders if Higgins is a man of good character when it comes to women. But Higgins brushes the comment off and declares his general disdain for women altogether.
Once Eliza is “properly instructed” and given some beautiful clothes, she suddenly becomes the target of several men’s attention. One guy, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, becomes so smitten with her that he spends long hours outside the professor’s home in hopes of meeting or catching a glimpse of her.
When he and Eliza finally encounter one another, she tells the handsome guy to stop mooning over her and “show her” what he’s feeling, suggesting something more physical. But Freddy never complies.
There’s not a lot of actual violence in this story’s mix, but there are threats aimed in Eliza’s direction. For instance, Alfie suggests that he’ll take his belt off and beat Eliza if she doesn’t show him proper respect by giving him some money. And Higgins says his housekeeper should “wallop” the young woman if she does not obey. The housekeeper later forces a screaming Eliza into a steaming tub (though we don’t see it).
The only person who does get thumped, however, is Alfie, who’s hit on the head by a marching suffragette. Eliza reaches angrily for Higgins with clawed fingers during an argument, but she doesn’t make contact.
There are some 15 uses of the word “d–n” in the dialogue and songs, along with an exclamation of “Move your bloomin’ a–!” There are a couple English crudities that pop up in the form of the words “blinkin’” and “bloody.” And God’s name is misused once.
Higgins references “language that would make a sailor blush” in a song.
Eliza makes it clear that “nobody ever saw the sign of liquor on me.” Her father Alfie, however, is a drunkard and we see him and others tossing back pints of ale and taking swigs from whiskey bottles (not to mention singing about the stuff). Higgins and Pickering drink port.
Pickering smokes a cigar.
When we first meet Alfie, his friends say that he hasn’t seen Eliza for months. And yet he still expects her to give him money. Higgins repeatedly tosses demeaning comments at Eliza, suggesting she’s “a draggletailed guttersnipe, and “so horribly dirty” and the like.
The musical My Fair Lady took home a whopping 12 Oscars from the 1965 Academy Awards presentation, including Best Movie, Best Director (George Cukor) and Best Actor (for Rex Harrison, who played Higgins). It’s a beautifully crafted musical adapted from the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion, written by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe. And it was also a critical and commercial success back in its day, becoming the second highest-grossing film of 1964.
All of that said, however, this film is, well, a little problematic these 60 years later.
The MPAA’s original G-rating might be a tad misleading, for one thing. I would suggest that this pic’s language alone easily bumps its rating up to at least a PG. (See more above.) But more importantly, there are some rather immoral elements gleefully woven throughout the movie’s sprightly tunes and winking dialogue that are well worth considering before you snuggle in with your family and a bucket of popcorn.
For one thing, flower girl Eliza’s dad is a mess. He’s a heavy-drinking cockney roustabout who’s very happy to go through life drunken and penniless, with no ethics whatsoever. He talks of happily living promiscuously while at the same time extorting his daughter’s male admirer for quick cash. And all his bouncy musical numbers winkingly celebrate and lightly chuckle at his very human flaws.
More striking, however, is the fact that Henry Higgins’ and Eliza Doolittle’s relationship is, well, what the denizens of 2024 would call extremely toxic. Sure, it’s all supposed to be taking place in London of 1912. But Higgins is sexist, elitist, prideful, insensitive, verbally insulting and altogether self-focused. His and Eliza’s relationship is uneasy at best and emotionally abusive at worst. And that’s particularly unsettling when you get to the end of the musical and Higgins stops all his introspective self-examination to superciliously call out to a meekly returning Eliza, “Where the devil are my slippers?”
Not exactly your typical romantic ending.
Of course, all of those character deficiencies are part of the social and relational point that this musical is trying to explore. The broadly crafted Higgins is something of an elitist jerk. But we see his self-made wall of indifference and foolish ego begin to crumble in light of Eliza’s influence—an impact he has obviously never been faced with before. Eliza needed to learn and grow. But Higgins needed change of a far different—and far more important—type.
Of course, at its core this is all meant to be pure escapism with a romantic musical twist: a broad but well-performed treat for the eyes and ears. But if taken with a grain of salt and a bit of thought, this colorful musical could offer up some unexpected male/female discussion-fodder worthy of a good chew.
If, that is, you don’t mind the less savory bits.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
