Rating: 
Summary: Audrey Hepburn is wonderful!
Review: Well, I just picked this up and it is delightful. Real chemistry between Harrison and Hepburn. The dvd has a cool feature where you get to hear Hepburn's actual voice in two songs and it makes you wonder why they felt the need to dub; however, it was the way of the time the movie was made. I guess it's tough to compete with the voice of Julie Andrews, but looking at it from contemporary thought, I believe the combination of Hepburn's voice and acting ability would have really withstood all the criticism in not having Andrews play the role. Hepburn's acting performance is just fantastic, and she really deserves all the praise for being one of the finest actresses in film history. Place this performance with Roman Holiday, Sabrina, two for the road, wait until dark, breakfast at tiffanys... and you have quite the actress. The combination of sound and picture make this a great dvd.
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Summary: Obvious Why This Film is a Classic!
Review: A timeless classic. In the film I see people like those I actually know! Rex Harrison is masterful as Henry Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn does a delightful job as Liza Doolittle. A film that still has appeal and charm after almost 40 years!...
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: This is one of the few movies I've seen that I actually liked better than the book (Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion) even though the book was also good. Henry Higgins(Rex Harrison), a rich bachelor with an obsession for language, makes a bet that he can transform Eliza Doolittle(Audrey Hepburn), a poor girl who lives on the streets and has terrible language skills, into a fine, well-spoken lady. Eliza begs him to teach her how to speak properly because of her desire to move away from her low class stature. Eventually her speaking skills become so good, that she is mistaken for royalty by a noted specialist in language(Theodore Bikel) and becomes envy of all the ladies and the desire of all the men(this is during the ball scene, one of the best and most exquisite parts of the movie). What makes this movie so marvelous is the actors and the music. The casting in My Fair Lady is perfect. Audrey Hepburn is not only gorgeous as a proper lady, but also amazing(not to mention very funny) as a commoner; she plays the role of a poor girl with bad upbringing flawlessly-the way she talks and carries herself are right on. Rex Harrison is also spectactular in the role of Henry Higgins and the two of them together have great on-screen chemistry. Both of them are dynamic characters who learn from their experiences and change accordingly throughout the entire film. My favorite character of all is Alfred Doolittle(Stanley Holloway). Holloway is hilarious as Alfie, Eliza's cockney father. The other, minor characters are also well-casted. The most appealing thing about My Fair Lady is the music. "I Could Have Danced All Night" is probably the most well-known song from this movie and also the greatest. Another notable song include "On the Street where you Live", sung by Eliza's admirer, Freddy(Jeremy Brett). There are many additional songs that are famous in the movie including "Wouldn't it be loverly?", "Get me to the church on time" and several others. The DVD itself has a few good features-a commentary by the art director, and a featurette about the costumes, makeup, etc. Not the greatest set of DVD features, but they are still not too bad, considering the fact that this movie was made nearly forty years ago. This is definitely one of the best movies I own-one I know I will probably end up watching over and over again. It's no wonder My Fair Lady won Best Picture(and many other Oscars) the year it was made-it has superb acting, beautiful costumes, terrific music, and also a mixture of comedy and romance.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone's Fair Lady rules
Review: The true standout in this film is the plot itself --- working girl wishes to better her flower-selling career by improving her diction, and the speech teacher wishes to prove something about society by using her in a bet. The girl works hard and, in the process, falls in love with the teacher, who barely thinks of her in return. Hepburn shines as Eliza, even with the singing of Marni Nixon as her singing voice (who also sang for Natalie Wood in West Side Story.) But Rex Harrison is the true star in his piggish, ambitious, gruff Henry Higgins. He seems to truly believe his words as he sings the reasons of why "I shall Never let a woman in my life". Stanley Holloway as Eliza's drunken father in "Get Me to the Church on Time" is also a winner. Looking at the men in her life, it's no wonder Eliza wants to improve herself rather than look for a man to help her out! (Julie Andrews created the role on Broadway and then beat out Hepburn for Best Actress with "Mary Poppins", so all's well that ends well! I can't imagine either movie being made with another actress in that role.)
Rating:
Summary: delightful
Review: This is a wonderful musical that I enjoy whenever I watch it. It is so funny to see Eliza Doolittle sound out the vowels! The singing is impeccable. Who knew that Audrey Hepburn had a singing voice double? You could never tell by looking at this movie. :-) My favorite scene is when Eliza is "unmasked" at the horse races. :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Some Kudos for Stan
Review: There seems to be quite a bit of controversy about this one, particularly regarding the issue of Hepburn vs. Andrews. I have admired the work of both these grand ladies for many years, and would rather not become embroiled in that particular argument. I would, however, like to offer a compliment to the one actor who, in my opinion, stole the show: the respected English music hall veteran Stanley Holloway. His spirited portrayal of the imperturbable and totally unscrupulous Alfred P. Doolittle made this film special. While I have to agree with some of the viewers that the film bogs down quite badly at times, Alfie keeps it interesting. Mr. Holloway's performance alone is worth the price of admission.
Rating:
Summary: A Simply Beautiful Film
Review: This visually stunning film is a delight that never grows old (even after 38 years) and remains the standard by which all movie musicals should be judged. Audrey Hepburn makes one of the all-time greatest entrances in movie history as she descends a staircase about to be escorted to a Grande Ball by Prof. Henry ("'enry 'iggins")Higgins played by the late Rex Harrison. the songs featured here are also unforgettable, my personal faves being; "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" and "I Could've Danced All Night". There really isn't much new I can say about this film but I would reccomend viewing it in the widescreen, letterbox edition over standard VHS as it gives you the entire picture in all it's epic glory, as it was originally intended. This great film never grows old and belongs in any comprehensive film collection.
Rating:
Summary: Lahverley.
Review: When cinephiles go to heaven, most will rush straight for the projection room screening the original cuts of 'The Magnificent Ambersons' and 'The Red Badge Of Courage'. Of course, so will I , but first I'll take a peek at the 'restored' version of 'My Fair Lady', the one in which dubmeistress Marni Nixon's blandly functional singing is replaced by Audrey Hepburn's own, her limited, hesitent, fragile voice infinitely more moving and appropriate to her role as Eliza Doolittle, the flowergirl taken from the gutter by the gentleman-phonetician Henry Higgins, who places a bet with fellow linguist Colonel Pickering that he can pass her off as gentry at an Embassy Ball. The true, tantalising joy of this DVD, surpassing anything in the film itself, is its footage of Audrey's audition singing, which was deemed inadequate for the soulless pageant planned by Jack Warner, but now quivering with all the haunted pathos, yearning, grace, wit and rapture of which only Audrey was capable. Although I think it is more defensible thematically and visually than its detractors allow, 'Lady' would still be a mechanical bore were it not for the performance of Audrey. Famously and contentiously, Julie Andrews, the original stage Eliza, was dropped because she wasn't a star name, and even today, many regret that decsion. But 'Lady' moves precisely because it is an Audrey Hepburn picture, one of those duckling-blooming-into-duchess roles essential to her. Andrews may have been broadly convincing as a Cockney guttersnipe, but there is no way she could have pulled off the regal elegance required for part two. Because director Cukor rightly disdains realism, it doesn't matter that Audrey's impersonation of a Cockney is a failure - what matters is that the audience knows the actress is the acme of aristocratic refinement, and is willing to undergo the exquisite torture of seeing those precious features and that precious voice grotesquely distorted for the ephiphanic pleasure of seeing them as if rising from the dead. The fact that Audrey's own beautiful English was inflected by her Dutch background gives her a 'foreigness' that further adds to her alienation. And Andrews could never have captured the sadness or vulnerabilty that lay just beneath Audrey's self-possessed chic, qualities that see Shaw's brittle comedy crack into tragedy - witness her appearance on top of Higgins' stairs on the night of the ball, in off-white and noose-like pearls, descending with all the melancholic majesty of a dying swan, donning a clostral velvet cape as if condemning herself to a nunnery. After the broad pantomime of the Covent Garden sequences and the rollicking celebrations around 'The Rain In Spain', the contrast is almost too much to bear, and Higgins' once hysterical jibes wound like the most brutal of blows. 'Lady' is dismissed by 'serious' film fans as the last lumbering dinosaur of an already fossilised studio system. Certainly, the film is a failure as a musical - I don't believe for a moment the legendary Herme Pan had anything to do with the stillborn choreography; and the the switches from drama to music are ungainly. Any attempt to frame complex shots or even move the camera seem to have been blocked by the heavy decor. Viewed as a George Cukor film, however, and 'Lady' is a triumph. It is a film that insists upon its own rigid artifice and theatricality (brilliantly freezing into anti-illusionistic tableaux, or breaking into undiegetic choral commentary) to recreate a social system in which human beings ossified like mannequins, or mummies in a museum; the construction of all human interaction ('language', class, gender) is meticulously analysed. For all its lavish production values, this is not a film to wallow in - it has a hard, flat, stark, grey, often ugly look. The cold, Higgins-like brilliance of Shaw's only readable play is tempered by the humanising of Eliza, while the cultural milieu from which it sprang is contextualised to add layers of meaning - Holmes is like Sherlock Holmes, an eecentric bachelor genius with slightly dimmer sidekick and loyal housekeeper, who can 'read' the unmanagable city and its inhabitants by (verbal) clues; like a HG Wells mad professor, he uses the latest scientific gadgetry in his 'laboratory' to create a new human being; the relationship between Higgins and Pickering has all the epigrammatic homosociability of Wilde, while the presence of the Transylvanian Queen and predatory males invokes another fellow Irishman, Bram Stoker. In fact, it is only when unalloyed Shaw intrudes - for instance Alfred Doolittle's tiresome paradoxes about 'middle-class morality' - that the film threatens to stall. Perhaps the real subject of the film, cued in the budding flowers of the opening titles, is Eliza's sexuality, potentially deviant and disruptive, and often suspect to accusations of vice, which must be controlled for more 'respectable' barter. She is a kind of wild child, an animalistic savage who must be 'tamed' by benevolent Imperialists like the gentleman scholar and the Raj officer. Alan Jay Lerner's unfailingly witty book is a vast improvement on the original, and the songs are such a delight that straight filming of the musical would be pleasure enough. Each character and mood has its own type of music - Higgins declaims in Gilbert&Sullivan-type patter-song, especially in those two classes of misogyny 'But Let A woman In Your Life...' and 'Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man'; Alfred's Victorian working-class pub singalongs; Freddie's sappy operetta; and, most treasurably, Eliza's lyric rapture, soaring with 'I Could Hae Danced All Night', curdling into the Grand Guignol of 'Just You Wait, 'enry 'iggins', in which she fantasises murdering her tormentor.
Rating:
Summary: What Movie Musicals Should Be
Review: This is one of my favorite musicals, along with 1776. It takes its plot from Shaw's Pygmalion and does a terrifc job of turning a Broadway hit into a big-screen smash. Whereas Shaw's play was an indictment of society's tendency to place birth above ability, the movie gently ignores that aspect to focus on the relationship between Higgins and Dolittle. Dr. Higgins is a noted linguist who believes that speech is the only thing that seperates us from the animals and if a person could use speech properly, that person could rise to the top of society, ignoring birth and upbringing. He attempts to prove is theory by taking Eliza Dolittle, Hepburn, an unwashed flower peddler from lower London, into his home to teach her etiquette and proper speech. His teaching transforms Eliza who becomes the rage of London society. Eliza falls for Higgins is is blissfully unaware of his feelings ntil she leaves. She returns to a happy ending.
Rex Harrison is perfect as the pompous, self-satisfied, insensitive Professor Higgins. His performance is unsurpassed except for Audrey Hepburn. Her performance is one of her most brilliant and a star in her crown of achievement.
The movie glosses over some of the play's biting satire, softening it, as when Higgins laments about why a woman can't be more like a man or when Eliza complains that, after her transformation, she can no longer work for a living but must be married off to a rich husband but Higgins says she can get a job in a dress boutique.
For sheer escapist fun, the movie is terrific. Get it.
Rating:
Summary: Love This Movie and I'm a Guy
Review: Normally I don't like musicals at all. Maybe 'West Side Story' but that's about it. With 'My Fair Lady', however, I watch it over and over. The DVD version is excellent. It even has an intermission just like in the theatre. Get it. You'll be hearing the songs in your head for a long time.
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