The Sound of Beau Belle

Rewatched MY FAIR LADY and loved it up until that ending.

(Beautifully designed, of course, by Cecil Beaton, and Rex Harrison on top form, and Audrey I think is GOOD but it’s a shame her singing is dubbed. Incredibly, they get away with having her sing a bit in her own voice, then go through a door and Marni Nixon is pouring out of her throat on the other side. And it sort of works.

Still, Audrey must have been looking at Sexy Rexy and thinking, How come he gets away with speak-singing his lines, and I have to be revoiced by a complete stranger?)

Looked back at Asquith’s PYGMALION and it’s the same, only different.

Asquith made his film while George Bernard Shaw was still alive. Shaw was adamant that Eliza Dolittle shouldn’t end up with Professor Higgins. He had his reasons worked out. Higgins, he wrote, had an impossibly strong and perfect mother, and no lover or wife could hope to live up to that. But, though the Higgins mother is indeed impressive when we meet her, I don’t think we necessarily draw that conclusion. Our objection to the romantic pairing is mainly that Higgins has treated Eliza abominably and there’s little reason to think he can change. And there’s no indication that Eliza LIKES being treated like a dog. It doesn’t have the shuddersome taboo quality of MARTHA or even THE SEVENTH VEIL.

On the other hand, the audience is strongly influenced by the fact that the two spend the whole film sparring, and in the romantic comedy genre that usually means they end up together. Both titles, that of the original play and that of the musical, imply that this is to be a love story. Eliza has another, arguably more suitable romantic interest, but he gets very little time to make an impression, so we are tempted to file him under S for schnook. Even when he’s played by the highly suitable Jeremy Brett and gets a glorious song, The Street Where You Live, it’s hard for him to acquire the necessary weight. He’s also somewhat ineffectual, but in Shaw’s mind, that was why he’d be a good match for the powerhouse that is Miss Dolittle. She could run him efficiently, which is what he needs. But the audience doesn’t necessarily make the leap to that conclusion.

So neither partner seems quite suitable. It’d certainly be difficult for a rewrite to make Higgins seem like a reformed character, and while GBS was on the scene, such a thing was unthinkable. In this light, Asquith’s solution was pretty clever.

He has Eliza (Wendy Hiller) return to Higgins (Leslie Howard). Higgins, taking her return entirely for granted, tells her to fetch his slippers, like a dog. Asquith shoots this from Eliza’s point of view, so the film ends on the back of HH’s head. We never see her reaction.

SOMEHOW Asquith got GBS, who had script approval on all films of his work, to sign off on this. I think he managed it b reusing the slippers line from earlier in the play, so there are no words here GBS hasn’t written, and by not showing Eliza’s reaction he could argue that it’s entirely possible that she storms off in a huff two seconds after The End fades out. It’s highly unlikely that most audience members would reach any conclusion other than that HH and ED were to be married, but a tinge of plausible deniability has been preserved.

George Cukor, filming MY FAIR LADY, doesn’t go in for ending on close-ups, and certainly not close-ups of the backs of people’s heads. One of his great qualities is his withholding of clpse-ups for the longest possible time, so that they really have an impact, but another of his great qualities is his theatricality. He ends the scene with a wide shot Audrey Hepburn standing in the doorway, Rex sitting smugly in his armchair, waiting for the curtain to fall. Audrey steps slowly towards him, accepting her fate. The fact that we’ve seen Rex’s self-satisfaction rather than the back of his hat, and his head tilting the other way, and Audrey’s look of docile adoration, changes this from a cunning bodge to a full-fledged betrayal of GBS’ intentions and an endorsement of male supremacy. Rex must have been happy about that, and I guess Audrey just went with the flow.

So I think that ending isn’t likely to be a popular one anymore, it certainly felt like a cold slap to us. A lot of really enjoyable old movies end with unacceptable pairings. We just watched BEAUTY AND THE BOSS, and rooted for the girl to wind up with David Manners, only for her to go for Warren William, on a double bill with CROONER, in which we rooted for the girl to wind up with Ken Murray, only for her to wind up with David Manners.

There’s a good modern dress Dutch film of PYGMALION, made the year before Asquith’s. At the end of this one, when HH gives Eliza (the excellent Lily Bouwmeester) an errand, she has a ready reply:

MY FAIR LADY stars Holly Golightly; Julius Caesar; Pendlebury; Crabbin; Mrs. Henry Vale; Sherlock Holmes; Rance Muhammitz / Dave; Matron – Staff; Angelica Muir; Ayesha; Garbitsch; Mrs. Cratchit; Alfred the butler; and Og Oggilby.

Maximum Effort

We started yesterday with King of the Movies — a 1978 BBC special in which the nonagenarian Henry King reminisces about his career. This accompanied an extensive BBC2 series of his films, an astonishing event to think of now. Unwisely, the show was programmed opposite an actual King film, which meant we had, for once, a relatively sparsely attended event in which the air-con could really roll up its sleeves and get down to business. The show itself was highly enjoyable, with King a terrific raconteur.

THE WARRIOR’S HUSBAND (1933) is a startling Fox film, from a Broadway play which had been a hit for Katharine Hepburn. Elissa Landi, in the lead, seems to have modeled her performance on KH, with lots of thigh-slapping and chin-jutting.

The story deals with gender war — Amazons versus Greeks — but the style is pure Loony Tunes, with “You Great Big Beautiful Doll” played on the soundtrack as Ernest Truex admires himself. Warrior women include Marjorie Rambeau and Maude Eburn (her helmet visor forever slamming shut with a cartoon twang), and David Manners turns up to show us what a real man looks like (!). Also two quick moments of interest amid the generally cheesy jokes: two black male dressmakers put their arms around each other — the comedy is blurring the lines between 1933 servant class and ancient slave class, between men performing women’s roles and men being gay, between men as female dressmakers and men as camp tailors. And then there’s Landi’s bath scene, resting chin and elbows on the brim of a huge raised bath, before throwing herself backwards into a backstroke, affording a few frames’ glimpse of what DeMille framed out in her milk bath scene with Claudette Colbert in SIGN OF THE CROSS.

Well, Fiona fell asleep in this film, which is not a distinguished picture but a very odd one. And then she did it again in TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH, which is a very good Henry King picture with Gregory Peckory cast against type and compelled to do some real acting.

The early scenes contain the boldest stuff — violence, blood and dismemberment are not shown, but they’re DESCRIBED in graphic detail. Based on what I saw in MEMPHIS BELLE and THE COLD BLUE, the depiction of the US Air Force’s activities in Britain is fairly accurate. Unusually, there’s no flying stuff until near the end, when sadly the movie becomes a fruit salad of model effects, studio process shots and footage from Wyler’s aerial documentary and additional material courtesy of the Luftwaffe.

Peck’s mission is to discover what “Maximum Effort” really means — how much a flight crew can take without falling apart psychologically. Well, we had reached Maximum Effort at Bologna, after eight days, so we staggered through Buster Keaton’s MY WIFE’S RELATIONS — a version incorporating both Cohen Media’s restored footage and Lobster’s newly-discovered ending, which may never be shown again — and then collapsed back at our Airbnb.

I’m still convinced the film would work better if you put BOTH endings together, but there’s no evidence it was ever screened that way…

Today’s the last FULL day of Il Cinema Ritrovato but there are more screenings tomorrow and our flight back is on Monday. More to come.

Age Cannot Wither Him (more than it already has)

THE MUMMY (1932) is historically unique in being the only Universal horror movie with a main title carved out of waffles.

It’s also a really beautiful movie, and Universal’s Blu-ray does it justice. Sadly my images here are from the DVD as I don’t have Blu-ray frame-grabbing skills or technology yet. A lot has been written about the film so I can’t swear my observations are original, but here, in the interests of promoting a spectacular new box set, are my ~

TEN PLUGS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

1) David Manners’ character name here is absurdly apt: Frank Whemple. One just can’t imagine another actor embodying that name so perfectly.

2) I love how Karloff’s magic pool shows him flashbacks of Ancient Egypt without sound — because sync sound is a new development in Hollywood, so obviously they couldn’t have had it in Ancient Egypt.

3) They’ve shamelessly cloned the plot of DRACULA, but it gets even more interesting now that the threat isn’t just foreign, but non-white. The movie becomes a struggle for the soul of the half-English, half-Egyptian Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann). Obviously, her Aryan side has to win.

4) Helps that Karloff is so thin — he actually has the perfect physique for this, whereas he needed padding out for FRANKENSTEIN.

5) That opening scene — “He went for a little walk” — is really a perfect horror short. It would stand alone without any trouble.

6) Karloff’s mummification scene gave me nightmares, or at any rate disturbed me deeply as a kid, watching the BBC2 Friday night horror double feature. Don’t know if I had actual nightmares, but I was too scared to sleep right away. I guess I saw DRACULA the first week but wasn’t allowed to stay up any later for FRANKENSTEIN. The second week must’ve been THE MUMMY and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, because I didn’t see the Whale films until a few years later. In week three, though, I saw SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, and found that far more exciting than the two more languid movies I’d thus far experienced.

7) I love Karl Freund’s theatrical lighting changes — where did he get that idea? There’s the lighting change on Karloff’s eyes which shows his hypnotic power, and there’s the mood lighting around Boris’s psychic paddling pool.

8) Zita Johann (in her Vera West costumes) is indeed alluring. She was married to John Houseman but John Huston put her through his windscreen in a drunk driving incident, and did that lead to divorce? One can picture Huston trying to explain what she was doing in his car: “I put her face through the windscreen but that’s as far as it went, honest!” (She was OK.)

9) Edward Van Sloan doesn’t seem to be doing his strange quasi-Scottish accent here. Where did a Minnesotan with a Dutch name acquire that posh Kelvinside lilt?

10) Can’t wait to watch the Jack Pierce documentary, but Fiona would kill me if I ran it without her.

Buy this thing ~

Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection [Blu-ray] [1931][Region Free]