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azdak at 02:44pm on 20/07/2007
azdak at 02:44pm on 20/07/2007Last night, in the interests of research for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alteregothon, I watched My Fair Lady. It was longer than I remembered (was it The Sound of Music that set the trend for musicals with an "intermission"?) and has to be the least dancey version of a musical ever - occasionally Eliza will lift her skirts and skip a step or two, and they let Stanley Holloway shuffle his feet a bit - but otherwise the choreography seems to be limited to walking up and down vegetable carts. And the dream sequence with the King has to be the least imaginitive dream sequence EVAH. I felt, even more strongly than last time around, that Audrey Hepburn is miscast - I think I know what they were going for, namely the money shots when she walks in in her Ascot frock, and then Embassy Ball gown, but she cannot handle early Eliza at all. In a film that's so much about speech and accent, it's a bit thick casting a female lead who's hopelessly at sea trying to talk cockney - she's even worse than Dick van Dyke, and at least Mary Poppins didn't actually have pronunciation as a theme. Even leaving aside the fact that an American audience wouldn't know how awful her accent is, her whole portrayal of a working class girl is completely unconvincing (my nine year old said dubiously during her first scene "Has she got the main role?"). And of course her singing was dubbed, and unfortunately the lines show when the voice switches from Hepburn to Marnie Nixon. It made me wonder what Julie Andrews would have been like in the role. I'd always thought the problem with our Jules would be her total inability to be sensual (the love scene in The Sound of Music is the most unerotic encounter in the history of cinema), but she might have managed to transition from flower girl to duchess better, and of course she's actually English, so the accent couldn't have been worse.
On the plus side, however, Rex Harrison is even more brilliant than I remembered. He has wonderful lines, of course, but his delivery is exquisite, and he makes Higgins so awful and yet so oddly sympathetic, and so incredibly funny in his rudeness and unshakeable self-confidence. I read recently that he refused to mime along to a voiceover when filming his songs on the grounds that he never performed them the same way twice, so they had to invent a way of wiring him up so that he could be recorded live; and that sense of freshness and immediacy really comes across. I adore him. Also, it is a great inspiration to see someone who can barely sing a note becoming a musical star without being dubbed. Hmmm, if Julie Andrews played Eliza, perhaps Rex H. could have played Captain von Trapp - just imagine his version of Edelweiss!
alteregothon, I watched My Fair Lady. It was longer than I remembered (was it The Sound of Music that set the trend for musicals with an "intermission"?) and has to be the least dancey version of a musical ever - occasionally Eliza will lift her skirts and skip a step or two, and they let Stanley Holloway shuffle his feet a bit - but otherwise the choreography seems to be limited to walking up and down vegetable carts. And the dream sequence with the King has to be the least imaginitive dream sequence EVAH. I felt, even more strongly than last time around, that Audrey Hepburn is miscast - I think I know what they were going for, namely the money shots when she walks in in her Ascot frock, and then Embassy Ball gown, but she cannot handle early Eliza at all. In a film that's so much about speech and accent, it's a bit thick casting a female lead who's hopelessly at sea trying to talk cockney - she's even worse than Dick van Dyke, and at least Mary Poppins didn't actually have pronunciation as a theme. Even leaving aside the fact that an American audience wouldn't know how awful her accent is, her whole portrayal of a working class girl is completely unconvincing (my nine year old said dubiously during her first scene "Has she got the main role?"). And of course her singing was dubbed, and unfortunately the lines show when the voice switches from Hepburn to Marnie Nixon. It made me wonder what Julie Andrews would have been like in the role. I'd always thought the problem with our Jules would be her total inability to be sensual (the love scene in The Sound of Music is the most unerotic encounter in the history of cinema), but she might have managed to transition from flower girl to duchess better, and of course she's actually English, so the accent couldn't have been worse. On the plus side, however, Rex Harrison is even more brilliant than I remembered. He has wonderful lines, of course, but his delivery is exquisite, and he makes Higgins so awful and yet so oddly sympathetic, and so incredibly funny in his rudeness and unshakeable self-confidence. I read recently that he refused to mime along to a voiceover when filming his songs on the grounds that he never performed them the same way twice, so they had to invent a way of wiring him up so that he could be recorded live; and that sense of freshness and immediacy really comes across. I adore him. Also, it is a great inspiration to see someone who can barely sing a note becoming a musical star without being dubbed. Hmmm, if Julie Andrews played Eliza, perhaps Rex H. could have played Captain von Trapp - just imagine his version of Edelweiss!