My Fair Lady (1964) Warner Bros. 📢 Director: George Cukor 💰 Producer: Jack L. Warner 👫 Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gladys Cooper, Jeremy Brett, Theodore Bikel. 🏆 Awards ceremony: -37th Academy Awards: April 5, 1965. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California. 🎭 Other films nominated for Best Picture this year: -Becket. -Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. -Mary Poppins. -Zorba The Greek. 📕 Plot summary: Eliza Doolittle (AUDREY HEPBURN) is a scruffy-looking, Cockney-speaking flower-seller on the streets of London. She is approached by Professor Higgins who offers to train her voice to be more elegant and thus turn her into a 'lady'. Higgins has an associate by the name of Colonel Pickering (a real old fart type of an elderly gentleman played by WILFRID HYDE-WHITE) who wages a bet with the professor that it cannot be done within six months. Slowly, Eliza begins to transform from her awful pronunciations into those of a more sophisticated young lady. Eliza and Higgins have a falling out when Eliza realizes she is being used but eventually returns to him in the end. 💥 Standout scene: There were three scenes that made me laugh out loud: One was the bit where Eliza has the marbles in her mouth and accidentally swallows one of them; another was at the race track when she suddenly cries out 'Come on Dover, move your bloomin' arse!'. But the best scene was when the house servants are trying to get Eliza to take off her clothes so that they can give her a bath. The sounds of commotion echoing through the house and her screams of what a 'good girl' she is were comical and a real injection into the movie. 🔑 Facts: -The 37th Academy Awards. -Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, it won 8: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Rex Harrison), Art Direction (color), Cinematography (color), Costume Design (color), Music (adaptation or treatment), Sound. -Audrey Hepburn replaced Julie Andrews in the role she played on the stage. 🙂 Personal opinion: This was one of the most famous films I had never seen before viewing it for this project. The first 10 minutes were mediocre, which gave me a bad feeling that the rest of it was not going to improve much but to its credit the film does pick up and grows in momentum until about the halfway mark when it suddenly runs out of steam and breaks down completely to the point of almost flat-lining. There is an awfully long period where Audrey Hepburn has no dialogue after dominating the film up until that point. Half the songs are crappy, boring and forgettable and the other half are merely okay (my pick of the bunch being 'Get Me To The Church On Time'). The scenes at the Ascot race track were humorous due to Audrey Hepburn hamming up that accent of hers ('how do you do?'). The fact that Audrey Hepburn (who was tremendous) didn't even get nominated for Best Actress is criminal. Ironically that award was won by Julie Andrews for MARY POPPINS - ironic because Julie Andrews originally played the part of Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady. And keeping with irony, I honestly thought that if you took out all of the songs from this musical then you have a fairly half-decent movie! It's the songs that spoil it, including a very misogynistic one called 'Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man'. To quote a line from Rex Harrison in the film, "Thank God that's over". Did it deserve the Oscar? ✅YES. ⭐️5½/10

Review date: 12 March 2025