My Fair Lady (1964)

 

Genre: Drama/Musical 

Time: 2h 50mins

Director: George Cukor

Quick Summary: In 1910s London, snobbish phonetics professor Henry Higgins agrees to a wager that he can make crude flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, presentable in high society.

I found this to be a beautiful film with all the intricate sets and backgrounds, many of them being bold, full of patterns or choosing to completely contrast the characters' costumes. They were so stunning to look at too, full of details and extravagant when needed. What I found interesting was how clean everything looked, nothing was too cluttered or had too much going on. It knew where to fill itself out visually and when to leave a nice plain view.

I loved how funny the script was. A lot of it was very smart and witty with a lot of the characters perfectly bouncing off each other with equally smart remarks and japes. The humour can be described as very dry or "older", so some people might not enjoy it as much as I did. 

For being a musical, a lot of the songs didn't impress me. Most of them were spoken words, which truthfully can be a nice change of pace but when it's every other song that isn't sung by "Eliza", they get very boring and interesting. I found that a few characters I didn't care too much about, their songs seemed to go for way too long compared to others which really lost my interest. They could of either been cut down or cut completely honestly.

I also realised as the film hit the 2-hour mark a lot of the dialogue and plot points seemed to repeat themselves and go in a mini cycle for a while, and with pretty much another hour to go it made it drag a bit. Honestly, I think they should have just cut the last hour down to 20 mins since the majority of the last hour left a bit of a down note for me. What the first 2 hours had built up, got thrown onto the floor to make room for the conflict part of the story, which really could have progressed within 20 mins, especially watching how it was actually solved. 

Truth be told, I didn't love the ending, but I didn't hate it either. It just felt strange after watching the fallout of our main two characters, and I still don't understand if they were romantically interested in each other or not. This didn't need them to be romantically together in my eyes, I preferred them as close friends. 

 I still really enjoy this film as I personally think this has not aged at all. This still holds up to this day. Even though this almost hits the 3-hour time mark, it still is enjoyable to watch. 

7/10

"The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated."