This isn’t exactly like My Fair Lady (sorry, if you’re looking for that)! There are NO songs (plus or minus, depending on the viewer), it’s in B&W, and considered a more realistic version of George Bernard Shaw’s story (inspired by Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea). In contrast to Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza, Brit actress Wendy Hiller (who some of you may know from the beloved Canadian Anne of Avonlea mini-series) is more of a plain Jane, though tall and elegant in bearing (when she has to be). Leslie Howard’s Prof. Higgins is younger (a plus, IF you want to play up the romance angle) than Rex Harrison. His speech is less showy, more matter-of-fact, yet still cutting (esp. towards Eliza).

Howard also co-directed this film (as I learned from TCM); he’s much more than Ashley from Gone with the Wind.  Though his looks and usual style of acting are NOT my favorite, you have to respect a guy w/ such a long line of (mostly well-made) films. There are a few points in this film where my attention drifted (just being real- it’s a ’30s film after all). I think fans of this story (and classics in general) should give it a watch. 

There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. -Eliza explains at tea (to Mrs. Higgins’ guests)

Walk? Not bloody likely. I’m going in a taxi. -Eliza declares to Freddy when he offers to walk her home 

Some Trivia re: the Film:

Shaw was the first person to have won both the Academy Award and the Nobel Prize. 

The first British film to use the word “bloody” in its dialogue; this word was an expletive , so considered extremely vulgar.

In the British version, Howard says “damn;” in the American one, he says “hang” or “confounded.” This was a year before David O. Selznick fought the Hays Office over permission for Clark Gable to say “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” at the end of Gone with the Wind (1939).

The scene in which Eliza accidentally swallows a marble during an elocution lesson does not appear in the original play. During rehearsals for this scene, a pained expression came over Hiller’s face; when she spat out the marbles she had in her mouth she said, “Leslie, I’ve swallowed one!” Howard replied: “Never mind, there are plenty more.” This caused such amusement among the crew that it was added to the film, then later to its musical version, My Fair Lady.