Pygmalion (1938)

Directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard

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This week’s delight in language here at Word and Song continues with what for Debra and me is a discovered gem, and not just a hunk of amethyst in the rough. It’s an emerald of dramatic art, perfectly conceived and brilliantly executed. We might expect as much, because the author of the play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw, also wrote the screenplay to adapt it to the screen. He wasn’t alone at that — he did it together with one of the stars of the film, the intelligent and genteel Leslie Howard (you’ll know him as the dream-ridden southern gentleman in Gone With the Wind, but see him as the art-collector and writer in the Canadian Rockies in the tremendous English-Canadian-American wartime film, The 49th Parallel). Not only that, but Howard also co-directed the film, with one of England’s most successful directors, Anthony Asquith — see his work in that relentless examination of human failure, yet not beyond redemption, in The Browning Version (1951, with Michael Redgrave; not the remake in the 1990’s). So we have three men of a broad array of talents, uniting to transform what I think is Shaw’s best play into one of the best screen versions of any play that I’ve ever seen. And yet that still isn’t the most gripping feature of this film. What is? Well, the opening credits read, “And Introducing WENDY HILLER.”

She plays Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney girl who sells flowers in Covent Garden, “discovered” by Professor Henry Higgins (Howard). He’s an expert in articulatory phonetics: what shapes we make with our tongue, lips, teeth, and palate, and what we do with our breath, vocal cords, and oral cavity, to make the several hundred sounds that carry meaning among the human languages. You’ll know by now that that’s a hobby of mine, too. I just learned the other day that one of the “S” sounds in Hebrew was probably an unvoiced L, spelled in Welsh as LL, and hard for English speakers to distinguish from TH or SH — and it made my day. Higgins meets a Colonel Pickering right at the same time as his first altercation with Eliza, and Pickering himself has just arrived from India to meet Higgins, because he too is a linguist. One thing leads to another, what with Eliza shouting and being as Cockney as it is possible to be, and Higgins says he’s going to take her home and turn her, in three months, into someone who can pass herself off as a duchess. Say after me, everybody, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains!”

Shaw, of course, was no kind of Christian, but even he could not help absorbing some of the Christian sense that man is made in the image of God — the “divine spark,” as Higgins puts it, manifest most clearly in language. He also knew, somehow, that the most profound dramas involve redemption, and that, in an odd and utterly delightful way, is what we get in Pygmalion. The classical allusion is instructive. Pygmalion, in Greek myth, was a sculptor who carved Galataea, a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her, and prayed to the gods to make her come alive, which she did. Essentially, Higgins is setting himself up as a Pygmalion, but we see that there’s also a real hubris and a moral obtuseness about him. He’s going to make it so that Eliza can fool people into thinking that she’s a princess, all the while forgetting that just because she is a human being she is already more than any mere social status can confer. We see that he himself has a good deal of learning to do, including in the area of speech and manners — and plain old right and wrong! The human “creator” is himself an object of change, of conversion of heart. He is being re-fashioned, or rather he must finally submit to the grace of being remade, if he is really to live.

But don’t let me give you the impression that it’s all seriousness here! Pygmalion is a very funny movie, with many a scene of high comic fancy. Why, I almost — almost! — can understand why my hero, G. K. Chesterton, was such good friends with him. Surely that ought to go into the case for Saint Gilbert Keith’s canonization. The social situations are comic, the language flubs are comic, even Eliza’s halfway state, trying very hard to keep her pronunciation steady while not having anything sensible to say, is high comedy — often laugh-out-loud. But behold the great Wendy Hiller near the beginning of her career. It wasn’t actually her first film, regardless of what the credits say. But supposing it were, I’d say that it is the single greatest breakout performance of any actress I’ve ever seen.

Your smaller children might not “get” the humor, but otherwise, this is a film for the whole rest of the family.

Our Film of the Week is available free right now on PLEX. Click on the image above to view it. You may also be able to watch “Pygmalion” on Youtube, but the version we found there was a bit grainy and muffles. Happy watching!

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Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.