Flashback, October 1964: Witty, Wise ‘My Fair Lady’ Opens

My Fair Lady, that wittiest and wisest of movie musicals, opened at New York’s Criterion Theater this week 50 years ago, on its way to cleaning up at the box office and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Over the years, it has become something of a fashion for certain film buffs to bemoan the big-screen adaptation of the 1956 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Perhaps my favorite movie blogger, “Self-Styled Siren,” even includes it on a list of the 10 Worst Best Picture Oscar winners.

I have to part company with her (and the by-no-means-inconsiderable cohort she represents), though. Within a minute of watching the film, I’m smiling and laughing; days after watching it, one of its magnificent melodies still linger in my mind. In short, it fulfills what has to be one of the functions of a movie: it moves me, in the most direct (and, in this case, joyful) way.

Why does it succeed? I’ve boiled it down to these reasons:

*Its libretto. Even many of the best of the Golden Age of Musicals in Hollywood forced viewers to endure tissue-thin stories and characters for, say, a half-hour’s worth of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in all their glory. This was not a problem for any show based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), which furnished some of his most pungent reflections on class. Yet no less than Oscar Hammerstein II, generally regarded as the greatest librettist in Broadway history, had been unable to translate this into a musical, agreeing with partner Richard Rodgers that the cold intellect of Prof. Henry Higgins wouldn’t translate well into a musical. it took librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to use the same strategy for Broadway (and, later, film) gold that John Huston had used to create his version of The Maltese Falcon when three earlier versions had failed: i.e., use the dialogue that’s already there.

*Those songs—ingenious, funny, beautiful. “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “The Rain in Spain,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”, “Just You Wait,” “Why Can’t the English?”, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and my favorite, “The Street Where You Live.” I’ve run through only half the show’s titles, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’ve missed a great one. How much better can it get than this?

*Sure-handed direction. Critics often speak of the Best Director Oscar won by George Cukor for My Fair Lady as a consolation prize for the movies he should have won it for (e.g., David Copperfield, The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib). But this underestimates both the obstacles he faced and the style with which he brought the whole thing off. For all the money spent ($17 million—a record for a Warner Brothers musical up to that time), Cukor shot the film on time and economically, steering the massive project through a male star (Rex Harrison) who had almost destroyed the confidence of his leading lady (Julie Andrews) on Broadway; a current leading lady (Audrey Hepburn) annoyed that she wouldn’t be allowed to sing the songs she had trained months to do; a costume designer (Cecil Beaton) constantly bent on getting his way; and a studio head (Jack L. Warner) who kept bumptiously interfering with production. As a molder of acting talent, he may have had his own take on this retelling of the tale of Pygmalion: “Anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever,” he told friend Gavin Lambert. That, in a sense, becomes what Higgins does with Eliza.

*The bounteous production design.  Beaton’s costumes were indeed stunning—so much so that the crew burst into applause upon seeing Hepburn in Eliza’s costume for the ball for the first time. But art director Gene Allen influenced the stylized look of the movie even more so—notably through the Ascot sequence, in which trompe l'oeil sets convey how outsider Eliza might see the race and its onlookers.

*Rex Harrison. “Sexy Rexy” could be a royal SOB when not appearing before an audience, as I discussed in a post on the centennial of his birth. But his charm was such that he was one of the few actors who could have made it remotely possible that Eliza would not walk away forever from her bullying, insensitive teacher.

*Audrey Hepburn. Warner insisted that Andrews, who originated the role of Liza on Broadway, would not have the requisite box-office pull to help the film recoup its investment, so he offered the role to Hepburn. That turned out to be a mistake when Warner was forced to hire Marni Nixon to dub his star’s voice. The revelation of that resulted in one of the great snubs in Oscar history: though the film earned 12 nominations, Hepburn’s name was conspicuously missing. Yet this was deeply unfair to the actress: Academy Award voters, before and after, have nominated other performers who had their voices dubbed (Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams) and even presented statuettes to actors who were clearly lip-synching (Jamie Foxx in Ray, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose). Hepburn’s acting, dubbed vocals or not, was characteristically marvelous.

*Stanley Holloway. In one of the great might-have-beens in film history, James Cagney turned down the role of Eliza’s father, coalman Alfred P. Doolittle. The power of the actor in that supporting role might have been such that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Warner hadn’t been tempted to retitle the project Cockney Doodle Dandy. But, three years into retirement from the silver screen, Cagney was having too much fun painting to go before the cameras again—especially if it meant more work with Warner, who had subjected him to countless bruising contract suspensions while the actor was with the studio. That opened the door to Stanley Holloway, who got to repeat his show-stopping role as Mr. Doolittle on Broadway.

Even more than most films, My Fair Lady was filled with all kinds of drama. But one of the most astonishing tales associated with it came at its premiere. Warner was set to escort the daughter of CBS Chairman Bill Paley (who had sold him the rights to the musical) to the event. But when she became sick, he enlisted the services of a call girl working the bar at the hotel where he was staying. The story goes that, Higgins-like, he passed the working girl off as “Lady Cavendish.” The ploy worked.

That anecdote would, on the surface, sound too impossible to be believed. But Warner was a womanizer, and crass. Moreover, in Hollywood, it’s always best to keep in the back of the mind this proposition: No matter how preposterous a story is, there is an at least 80% chance that it it true.

This Day in Film History (Garland’s “A Star is Born” Premieres)

September 29, 1954—In Los Angeles’s Pantages Theater, the world’s first televised film premiere was held for A Star Is Born, a drama with music featuring a now-classic torch song, “The Man That Got Away.”

But for Judy Garland, making a comeback on the silver screen after too many pills, a suicide attempt and termination by long-time employer MGM, what “got away” was an Oscar for her magnificent, gutsy, career-defining performance.

By general agreement, the film is the best of the four basic treatments of the same story stretching from 1932 to 1976. 

But for nearly 30 years after its release, most people did not realize just how classic it was, because Warner Brothers deleted nearly 30 minutes from the running time after the premiere to boost the number of showings per day and its box-office receipts.

The minutes cut were not just any minutes, either. Maybe if director George Cukor were around, he’d either have been able to plead his case or, at least, snip out the least essential portions from the original 181 minutes. 

But, like Orson Welles during the cutting of The Magnificent Ambersons, he was far away on location with another project. He could do nothing but howl as the studio took a meat cleaver to a film as much a landmark to him (his first musical and color film) as it was to Garland.

Notice that I wrote it was as much a landmark to Cukor as to Garland, not that it was as important. Give the lady credit: Even while still a 20-year-old studio ingénue, not a worn-out veteran dismissed as a shaky has-been by many in the industry, Frances Gumm/Judy Garland sensed an affinity with Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester.

On December 28, 1942, she played the role for a 60-minute straight-drama version on the Lux Radio Theater. Shortly thereafter, she began advocating to MGM the idea of a movie musical based on the story.

The studio, understandably eyeing musicals as an escapist genre, pooh-poohed the idea—and, even given the talents enlisted for the project a decade later (not just Garland and Cukor, but also costar James Mason, screenwriter Moss Hart, lyricist Ira Gershwin and composer Harold Arlen), they were right to wonder if they’d see any money from this.

Making something artistic—even truthful—was another matter entirely.

The cut footage in the ’54 version testifies to the filmmakers’ complicated, uncompromising version. As good as the numbers are, I wasn’t as upset by the loss of "Here's What I'm Here For" and "Lose That Long Face" as by the straight dramatic portion.

Some of the latter lost scenes neatly foreshadow how much Vicki Lester and alcoholic star-in-decline Norman Maine (played by Mason) will risk. More important, they make viewers realize why they’re so devoted to each other.

I’m going to play devil’s advocate just for a second: Warner Brothers was right in claiming the scenes didn’t really advance the plot. 

And God knows that modern filmmakers could learn a thing or two from notably unsentimental studio production heads about the virtue of economy.

But overall, Cukor was right: less really was less in this case. Cukor subscribed, at least here, to Frank Capra’s contention that every film needs one scene that doesn’t advance the plot but makes you care about the characters. 

The missing scenes from A Star Is Born do precisely that.

In one crucial sequence, Maine convinces Esther to quit the jazz band and come to Hollywood for a screen test he’ll arrange. 

But the actor has been whisked away to shoot on location, and Esther has to battle unemployment and unsympathetic film personnel to find him.

Instead of becoming an overnight sensation, we now see, Vicki has had to pay her dues. And, despite the generosity he’s displayed, we see enough hints of Norman’s unreliability to know that there will be significant trouble in this relationship.

One can see why Norman loves Vicki, all right—in the three-minute sequence (still in the butchered version of the film) where she belts out “The Man That Got Away,” she invests the intimate setting of a smoky after-hours nightclub with enough passion to fill an arena. She may be young, but she has heart.

But why Vicki would be interested in him is another matter. 

His downward trajectory has already been well established in the opening sequence, when the drunken actor misbehaves at a charity event and is only saved from worse embarrassment by Vicki’s adept improvisation of getting him into her act. Getting together with him, then, is already stupid, and might well be crazy.

The missing minutes supply her motivation. At first glance, they would seem to be the polar opposite of the “Man That Got Away” sequence—an extended montage in several locations, rather than one, continuous take in a single tightly controlled frame, as with the song. But I would argue that they combine to create a common metaphor.

With the small jazz combo backing her in the song, Vicki feels comfortable enough to cut loose, to let her emotions out and take chance. It’s an absolute necessity in the entertainment world, we’re about to discover.

Beneath the love story of A Star Is Born is a savage dissection of Hollywood—a community, we’ll soon find out, that does not, unlike its boast at the opening charitable event, “look after its own.” 

It’s capricious in evaluating raw young talent, then unforgiving of veterans' mistakes. To preserve your career, your ego, even your sanity in this environment, you need a cocoon.

Vicki finds it—briefly—in a creative way among the supportive jazzmen that night, but she needs it in her personal life. That’s what Norman tries to provide, and that’s why, when his world shatters, viewer sympathy is on his side.

Twenty-nine years later, film historian-detective Ronald Haver tracked down all but five of the missing minutes. With a largely complete audio track but only some footage, he used stills to flesh out the story.

We now have at least a bit of a sense what the audience in the Pantages saw in Garland’s performance: not only that this magical voice remained intact from her MGM days, but that she was an actress of power and depth.

In the scene where she asks the sympathetic studio boss played by Charles Bickford why Norman is so intent on destroying himself, her delivery is informed by her own experiences. She is really channeling why she felt so intent on wrecking her life.

Warner Brothers ended up damaging only themselves by deleting the footage from the film.

True, the movie ended up more than doubling its initial $2.5 million budget, but the studio might have been able to recoup more—and preserve intact a classic, in the bargain—if they hadn’t trimmed these scenes that showcased Garland’s acting talent.

Instead, the Academy Award for Best Actress that year went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. Kelly would go on to deliver better, more luminous performances (e.g., Rear Window) in her short career. But that ended up being Garland’s last best chance at the Oscar. 

Groucho Marx spoke for many when he sent her a telegram saying it was “the greatest robbery since Brink’s.”