My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)
Audrey Hepburn
My Fair Lady has one of the greatest scores of any musical, by Lerner and Loewe, with many songs which have become standards, such as With a Little Bit of Luck, Wouldn’t It Be Loverly and On the Street Where You Live. It is also one of the most gorgeous musicals to look at, making full use of Super Panavision, with its dazzling Cecil Beaton costumes and colourful sets. It wasn’t filmed on location in London, but Covent Garden flower market and the dingy back streets look convincing enough to me, while scenes like the Embassy ball and Ascot have all the visual flamboyance you’d expect from director George Cukor, aided by art director Gene Allen. Yet this celebrated film was allowed to deteriorate into a sorry state and needed full-scale restoration by the mid-1990s. The DVD I have, part of an Audrey Hepburn box set, features the restored print, looking great, plus several special features – and there are also a couple of different two-disc special editions available, as well as a region 1 Blu-ray. But what I’d really like would be to see this on the big screen some day.
This was one of the first musicals that I came to love, as a child of the 1960s. But the version I knew back then was the soundtrack of the Broadway show, starring Julie Andrews as Shaw’s Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, whose life is transformed when eccentric phonetics expert Henry Higgins decides to teach her to speak “like a lady”. My mother had a copy of the LP which someone had brought back for her from America (it wasn’t allowed to be sold in the UK at that time, presumably for copyright reasons), and we listened to it endlessly. So when I hear anyone else singing those songs, I still always have Julie’s voice in the back of my head somewhere.
My Week with Marilyn/The Prince and the Showgirl
Films about classic cinema are proving very popular at the moment. There’s The Artist, a tribute to silent cinema – and My Week with Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne and Kenneth Branagh, which goes behind the scenes of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957. After watching this alternately amusing and bitter-sweet slice of nostalgia, I saw the earlier film (yes, I know it would have made more sense to do this the other way round!), and was struck not only by how well the new movie captures its mood at times, but also, to my surprise, by the similarities in theme between the two.
Each of these two movies is a period piece – with the new film being directed by Simon Curtis, who also helmed the BBC’s costume drama Cranford. (He brings the same loving attention to detail to this film as he did in that mini-series, both in re-creating the 1950s and in showing the 1950s’ version of 1911 in the restaged movie scenes.) Each is set against the background of a major event – a royal wedding in one, the making of a great film in the other. Also, each film is about a couple temporarily thrown together by circumstances, although they are from different worlds. And each shows a younger person who isn’t famous seduced by the fame and glamour surrounding an older, damaged stranger, but having to come back down to earth and return to real life at the end.
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
After watching a great production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I at the Globe Theatre in London this autumn (sadly I didn’t make it to Part II), I was keen to see Orson Welles’ take on Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight. This film is less well-known than Welles’ other Shakespearean movies, and, for complicated reasons of copyright, until this month was only available on Spanish and Brazilian DVDs. I watched it on a Spanish DVD which I borrowed from a friend, with subtitles, which can easily be removed, and a good-quality picture. I have now heard that it has just been issued on a UK DVD as an exclusive from the HMV stores and website – I haven’t as yet heard from anyone who has bought this release and do not know what the quality is like, but a couple of people have suggested it is best to be cautious.
It’s a shame this film is so little-known, because it is excellent, with a towering performance by Welles as Falstaff dominating throughout. Just under two hours long, it brings together Falstaff’s main scenes from both the Henry IV plays, and the account of his death from Henry V. This works extremely well – I didn’t spot the joins and as far as I could tell most of the greatest scenes and speeches from Part I seemed to be intact, although it would have been nice to have a bit more of Henry Percy (Norman Rodway). I have a feeling that rather more of Part II has been cut, but it doesn’t feel rushed. And all the dialogue is taken from Shakespeare’s text, with just a couple of brief pieces of bridging narration by Ralph Richardson.
