With a little fine-tuning, they were able to give the dialogue a more natural sound to it. While a musical is known for musical numbers, the songs sound simply fabulous in this Dolby Digital 5.
The opening credits sound remarkably robust as the orchestra plays alongside the digitally-generated credits. Well, they have answered and with the additional supplements, this new version is a no-brainer to purchase. Though the first disc contains the movie intermission and all and the same commentary track, the second disc is where all of the supplements are located.
For instance, Nixon takes control during some of the songs, etc. The second disc is where the rest of the supplements are located. Next up we have some audio of Director George Cukor as he directs actress Bina Rothschild on a couple of key lines.
Interestingly enough, many of the audio-only segments were found when Harris and Katz were doing their investigating for the re-issue in Rex Harrison is interviewed on the radio telling about the shoot they had just finished production as various posters flash across the screen. For instance, they concentrate on the costume design, production design as well as the art direction.
Lastly, there are some architectural drawings that show the scale of what was built for the movie. There is also some footage from the 37 th Academy Awards with Jack Warner and George Cukor accepting their respective statues. Some text-based awards are shown as well. Webber, on the other hand, speaks of the play and not really much about the movie. The movie is enjoyable, if not campy at times. Review by: Matt Brighton Posted on: January 28th, Even by today's bloated standards, that is not a bad little haul at all.
It made My Fair Lady one of the most successful films of all time at the time and that has not changed with the passage of nearly forty years. This is the film adaptation of the musical stage hit formulated by the renowned Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, which itself was based upon the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.
The story of course goes even further back to Ancient Greece and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. Interestingly enough, this was by no means the first film to bring the story to the big screen and in George Bernard Shaw himself won an Oscar for best Screenplay for the effort he wrote for the film Pygmalion starring Leslie Howard. For those unfamiliar with the plot, the broad story is that of one Professor Henry Higgins Rex Harrison and his efforts to turn one Miss Eliza Doolittle Audrey Hepburn from a cockney flower girl into an English lady in time for the Embassy Ball six months hence.
All of this intended work was for the sake of a bet with Colonel Pickering Wilfrid Hyde-White that he could educate any girl sufficiently well enough to be able to pass her off as a respectable English lady to all of respected society - hence the Embassy Ball. Along the way he forgets that he is dealing with a real live person and that such people actually have feelings, including the capacity for love.
The story forms the basis of one of the great plays of the twentieth century, and the musical stage play was no less successful in that field either. Its transition to the big screen was personally handled by Jack L.
That is a lot of money even today, so back in those days you can well imagine that it was a vast fortune to toss at a play. As a result of that huge spend to get the rights, obviously little or nothing was spared in order to ensure its success on the big screen. Rex Harrison reprised his stage role as Professor Henry Higgins, and in many ways it is now completely inconceivable that the role could have been played by anyone else, so perfect in the role is he.
Quite simply put - he is Professor Higgins and always will be. Rather surprisingly for a musical, Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle - surprising in that whilst she can certainly sing, she simply did not have the voice apparently to carry this role and hence the reason for the singing dubs by Marni Nixon. The good money was on Julie Andrews reprising her stage role, very logical since she could both act and sing to a very high standard.
Whilst there are certainly no qualms regarding Audrey Hepburn 's acting, her fight to be able to sing "her" songs was ultimately lost. On the evidence presented in the extras, this now seems a most lamentable decision. Whilst not technically a great singer, she was certainly more than capable and the efforts of hers that we can hear certainly indicate that she carried off the songs very well indeed and would have provided a much more natural song style that suited the role much better than the efforts of the far more technically qualified Marni Nixon.
The support cast was very effective throughout, especially with Stanley Holloway reprising his stage role of Alfred P. Doolittle and the always competent Wilfrid Hyde-White providing a very effective Colonel Pickering to counterpoint the performance of Rex Harrison. Just as it was throughout the film, it is obvious that some care went into the selection of the cast. All of which would mean nothing unless the story was brought together by some great direction - which was obviously the case with the renowned George Cukor at the helm.
Whilst I would not willingly sit down for over two and a half hours to watch a musical, I have to confess that this moves at a very nice pace and keeps the interest level up throughout. And as for the efforts of the restoration team The original Region 4 release was always one of the best musicals to have graced the release schedule and was highly recommendable in its own right.
The price alone makes that position even more obvious. A glorious bargain in every way. Don't wish to see plot synopses in the future? Change your configuration. Transfer Quality Video One surprising thing about the transfer is that it is a new remaster and not just a recycle of the previous release with a second, extras, disc added to the package. We know this as several extras have moved from the feature disc to the extras disc, a couple of subtitle options have been lopped from the disc and the layer change point has changed.
Since this is a remaster, the lack of care in the process is a little surprising, as evidence by the staggering presence of aliasing throughout the transfer. The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2. This is slightly different to the theatrical ratio but not drastically so. Overall, the transfer is sharp and very well defined throughout - except for the one intentional sequence done with the old Vaseline on the lens trick. The shadow detail is quite exceptional for a film of this age, which matches the fine detail caught by the camera throughout.
There were no real problems at all with grain and this in general has come up marvellously clean in the restoration. Just be aware that, as pointed out in the audio commentary, some of the film, most notably the opening credits sequence, has been virtually recomposed as the original had significant degradation for various reasons. The colours are beautifully rendered throughout, and consistently so, with some wonderful contrast between the vibrant colours of the society gowns and the muted colours of the flower markets at Covent Garden.
Overall, this is a wonderfully vibrant transfer, generally of quite rich tones with no hint of oversaturation at all. There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer.
In comparison to the earlier release, which I admit was reviewed on a different player and viewed on a different television, this effort is much more obviously blighted with film-to-video artefacts. Aliasing is by far the most obvious problem, and whilst mainly tending towards minor most of the time there are certainly plenty of obvious and nasty looking efforts.
Furniture creates most of the problems and you will be hard-pressed to ignore the issue at times. Examples may be found in the architrave at , the basket at , the timber panelling at , the furniture at , the ink rack at and so on and so on. Frankly it got to the stage where I found the problem very tiresome as you simply reach the stage where it cannot be ignored.
Whilst the restoration certainly cleaned the film up very well in general, there are still film artefacts floating around, mainly of the small white speck variety.
However, at you will note a whopping great film artefact that looks like it might be an adhesive tag presumably taping together two pieces of film. If this was in the original release which I confess to not having had the time to check yet , I am staggered that I missed it. George Cukor. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Pompous phonetics Professor Henry Higgins Sir Rex Harrison is so sure of his abilities that he takes it upon himself to transform a Cockney working-class girl into someone who can pass for a cultured member of high society.
His subject turns out to be the lovely Eliza Doolittle Audrey Hepburn , who agrees to speech lessons to improve her job prospects. Higgins and Eliza clash, then form an unlikely bond, one that is threatened by aristocratic suitor Freddy Eynsford-Hill Jeremy Brett. The loverliest motion picture of them all! Drama Family Musical Romance. Did you know Edit.
Trivia When Audrey Hepburn Eliza Doolittle was first informed that her voice wasn't strong enough and that she would have to be dubbed, she walked out. She returned the next day and, in a typically graceful Hepburn gesture, apologized to everybody for her "wicked behavior. Goofs When Prof. Higgins sings "An Ordinary Man" he turns on several phonographs, seconds later he turns off one of them but all of the sounds stop.
Quotes Eliza Doolittle : The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. Crazy credits In the posters, playbills and the original cast album for the stage version of "My Fair Lady", the credits always read "based on Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion' ", letting the audience know what play "My Fair Lady" was actually adapted from.
The movie credits simply read "from a play by Bernard Shaw". Alternate versions In the remastered version of the film, some of the scene changes are changed from sudden cuts to wipe outs, as they probably were when the film was released.
When CBS Fox released it on video originally, they were changed to sudden cuts. Soundtracks Why Can't the English? User reviews Review. Top review. Almost Brilliant. During the first two hours of this movie, I had thought that it was the greatest musical ever brought to film. It's only during the last hour that it begins to languish and plod.
It goes to show that film is a tricky medium, and regardless of how great musicals can be, live action simply isn't as interesting when it's recorded. Although they may have been spectacular to see on stage, movie audiences will yearn to see more about Eliza and wonder why the director spends so much time on her father.
On the brighter side, I believe that I have never seen Audrey Hepburn in a more perfect role.
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