My Fair Lady (1964)

A professor (Rex Harrison) of phonetics makes a bet with another phonetics expert (Wilfrid Hyde White) that he can turn a cockney flower girl (Audrey Hepburn) into an elegant lady. Based on PYGMALION by George Bernard Shaw, MY FAIR LADY was turned into a now legendary Broadway musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. But the George Cukor directed film version is problematic. Lerner wrote the screenplay but the film makers treat the material as if it were untouchable and nothing must be done to it and the play is basically transposed to the movie screen with Harry Stradling's camera basically there to record it for posterity. Which does not for a movie make unless you consider the material sacrosanct. The film looks stunning, there's no question about that but it doesn't move. The casting of Audrey Hepburn doesn't work either. She's perfect as the elegant transformed Eliza (Why wouldn't she be? She's Audrey Hepburn!) but she's hopeless as the cockney Eliza, artificial and unbelievable. Harrison having done the role so many times on stage is perfection if slightly rote. But those songs are heavenly! With Stanley Holloway, Gladys Cooper, Theodore Bikel, Jeremy Brett, Isobel Elsom, Mona Washbourne and Henry Daniell (who died after one day's shooting).