Dude, you have no idea how happy I am to see a Pygmalion secret. :D The movie and play need so much love. That said, I do have a rebuttal.
"Pretty enough"? Erm, Eliza isn't supposed to be a fashion model…the whole POINT is that she's a relatively average girl who is able to improve her station in life solely through elocution and culture lessons. (While it no doubt helped, the fact that she had access to grooming products and money for nicer clothes was incidental.) No, Wendy Hiller wasn't Audrey Hepburn, but then again who freakin' was? She was an unknown personally handpicked by Shaw (who, by the way, was extremely unhappy with the romantic angle tacked onto the end of the film version) because she impressed him with her acting.
I'd say that comparisons between the straight film and the film of the musical usually boil down to that Hiller was more convincing as the flower girl, while Hepburn was more convincing as the lady. The fact that the characters in both versions (male AND female) all react to lady!Eliza so strongly isn't that she is supposed to be Beautiful All Along, but that she was SO ill-mannered and filthy that any improvement renders her unrecognizable. Remember, she didn't just learn how to talk better: she learned how to be a lady, including changing her posture, walk, gestures, tone of voice, vocabulary...Higgins and Pickering virtually changed her into an entirely different human being in six months' time, with the result that she's unable to relate to the people in her old life.
(And no, I don't ship it, although I don't care if people do, and totally understand the desire for improved eye candy in films. Heck, I'm one of the few people doing a happy dance over my girlcrush Keira Knightley landing the role in a remake of MFL. Because a) I truly feel that she is an appropriately cast, talented actor who is up to the challenge of performing in a big-budget musical film [I've seen footage of her singing and her voice is better than Hepburn's], and b) she's adorable.)
(Also, obligatory "Leslie Howard, would totally hit that" remark.)
102.
"Pretty enough"? Erm, Eliza isn't supposed to be a fashion model…the whole POINT is that she's a relatively average girl who is able to improve her station in life solely through elocution and culture lessons. (While it no doubt helped, the fact that she had access to grooming products and money for nicer clothes was incidental.) No, Wendy Hiller wasn't Audrey Hepburn, but then again who freakin' was? She was an unknown personally handpicked by Shaw (who, by the way, was extremely unhappy with the romantic angle tacked onto the end of the film version) because she impressed him with her acting.
I'd say that comparisons between the straight film and the film of the musical usually boil down to that Hiller was more convincing as the flower girl, while Hepburn was more convincing as the lady. The fact that the characters in both versions (male AND female) all react to lady!Eliza so strongly isn't that she is supposed to be Beautiful All Along, but that she was SO ill-mannered and filthy that any improvement renders her unrecognizable. Remember, she didn't just learn how to talk better: she learned how to be a lady, including changing her posture, walk, gestures, tone of voice, vocabulary...Higgins and Pickering virtually changed her into an entirely different human being in six months' time, with the result that she's unable to relate to the people in her old life.
(And no, I don't ship it, although I don't care if people do, and totally understand the desire for improved eye candy in films. Heck, I'm one of the few people doing a happy dance over my girlcrush Keira Knightley landing the role in a remake of MFL. Because a) I truly feel that she is an appropriately cast, talented actor who is up to the challenge of performing in a big-budget musical film [I've seen footage of her singing and her voice is better than Hepburn's], and b) she's adorable.)
(Also, obligatory "Leslie Howard, would totally hit that" remark.)