the toy
by Douglas Messerli
George
Bernard Shaw, W. P. Liscomb, Cecil Lewis (scenario and dialogue), Ian
Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald and Kay Walsh (uncredited dialogue), Anthony
Asquith and Leslie Howard (directors) Pygmalion
/ 1938
The next day, she takes up his challenge, offering to pay for English
lessons! Her stay in Higgins' house, along with Colonel George Pickering (Scott
Sunderland)—a fellow dialect specialist Higgins has run into outside the opera
(whom you might even describe as a "pick up")—results in the musical
version, in a growing love-hate relationship between Higgins and Doolittle. In
the 1938 film version, however, things are kept at a lower temperature, as the
two men, Higgins and Pickering, dally with Eliza as if she were a toy, Higgins
almost torturing her as she suffers through his cruel teachings (a sequence
shot by a young David Lean, on his first assignment as editor).
Her escape from the Higgins household after the two, Higgins and
Pickering, celebrate her success at the great ball as primarily their doing, seems the only choice she
might have made. There is no room for her in the all-male world Higgins has
created. His wish for her to return—"Get out and come home and don't be a
fool!" to which Higgins' mother responds "Very nicely put indeed,
Henry. No woman could resist such an invitation"—hints at no romantic
intentions, but merely the fact that he and Pickering have become dependent on
her as a kind of feminine form of entertainment. Aren't most dolls (with the
exceptions of Ken and G.I. Joe) female?
Eliza's return, accordingly—an ending which Shaw himself opposed—is
utterly ambiguous, as is Higgins' response: "Where the devil are my
slippers, Eliza?" It suggests that if she is to stay, nothing will change.
As Higgins' put it earlier to her: "If you can't appreciate what you've
got, you'd better get what you can appreciate."

It has always struck me, moreover, that Higgins is, at heart, the
greatest of prigs, a man who transforms both Eliza and her father, Alfred
(Wilfrid Lawson) from unwashed creatures of the street into figures fit for the
middle class. It is no accident that the first thing that he insists after he
agrees to take on Eliza as a pupil is that she wash up, to which she pleads,
"I'm a good girl, I am!" But he, as we soon learn, is not necessarily
a good man. For Higgins remains an outsider, not even welcome in his mother's
house. Which may explain Shaw's desire to cast the less attractive Charles
Laughton—whom one might say specialized in playing demented characters such as
Nero, Dr. Moreau, murderers and other such types—in the role of Higgins.
Los
Angeles, July 25, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment