Cinema
Pygmalion
Synopsis
One evening, at Covent Garden, as the theatres let out, a man notes down in a notebook everything said by a flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who takes him for a policeman. He is Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics; before Colonel Pickering, whom he has met there, he boasts that he can pass this girl off as a duchess. The next day, Eliza comes to his house and offers to pay for diction lessons.
Context
The author of the play signed the screenplay and the dialogue, with three adapters, and shared with them the Oscar for screenwriting, which he found offensive: to offer him an honour as if no one had ever heard of him was, he said, an insult, and one might as well have sent one to King George to be king of England. He did not come to the ceremony. He disapproved of the ending wanted by the producer, Gabriel Pascal. The film was directed by two men, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, who also plays the professor.
Who it is for
One hour thirty-six in its British version; the play was later adapted as a musical, in 1956, and brought to the screen again in 1964.
Prizes and reception
Shaw is, with Bob Dylan, one of the two laureates of both the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1925, and an Oscar, received in 1939 for this film.
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