Review of My Fair Lady (1964) by Arun S — 10 Oct 2011

Apart from the bloated runtime, I really don't have much to nitpick about it, but this was SO not for me. A wager is placed between two upper-class gentlemen on if a professor of linguistics (Rex Harrison) can take a common, cockney flower girl (Audrey Hepburn) and transform her into a woman of social acceptance.

I watched this movie mainly as research, and I will say that there have only been a very few select musicals in movie form that have grabbed me. This is not one of them. I read the script first (gotta stop doing that), and it is faithful to the stage play almost verbatim.

The biggest strength of this version is that it has a whole lot of charm. Hepburn is irresistible and magnetic, you can't help but love her, and Harrison does well as the astute Professor Higgins.

It's the characters that keep it engaging... to a point. Three hours is too long for a musical, at least by my tastes, and it's not even that there's a lot of fat that could have been trimmed; it's just a long story.

One thing I also found is that the music isn't terribly catchy; when I watch a musical, I usually walk away with one or two songs stuck in my head. That's not the case here. I can tell this movie is good, and if musicals are your thing, you should go out of your way to see this, but it's never been a genre that I really appreciate, so I was bored through a lot of this.