My Fair Lady (1964)

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.
Upper crust phonetics Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) agrees to a wager that he can make brash London speaking flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) presentable in high society.
Lerner and Loewe's Broadway version of George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" comes to the big screen and is an utter joy. A winner of 8 well deserved Oscars, pic boasts top line performances, songs that either gladden or melt the heart, gorgeous costumes (Cecil Beaton) and in director George Cukor the venture had a man who knew how to blend together the theatrical with the core basics of human interactions.
Julie Andrews had played Eliza Doolittle on the stage and it was something of a sore point to many that Hepburn got the gig for this filmic version. It really doesn't matter, Andrews went off and made another ode to joy in "Mary Poppins", while here Hepburn (dubbed by the wonderful Marni Nixon for the musical numbers) absolutely lights up the screen by being funny, heart warming and simply gorgeous in equal measures.
Not for everyone of course, it asks for a lot of patience since it runs at 170 minutes, while some back story issues (which I care not a jot to write about) irk others. Yet to me this is never one where I find myself looking at the clock, I'm too busy tapping my feet and being beguiled by it all. If you buy into it the first time you ever watch it? then you will find it's a love that lasts forever. Bloomin Loverly! 9/10

A recent survey asserted that the English had the sexiest accents in the world. Perhaps not exactly the sort of recognition "Prof. Henry Higgins" (Rex Harrison) was seeking when, exasperated by the standards of his native language being spoken around London, he plucks poor "Eliza" (Audrey Hepburn") from her flower-selling and promises his equally plummy friend "Col. Pickering" (Wilfred Hyde-White) that he can train her to pass in more refined society as a Duchess. Despite her initially raucous protestations - exemplifying his very point, the two lock in a battle of wills that ultimately challenges both of their opinions of each other, and dare we even suspect - engenders perhaps some respect... or more...? Oscar, BAFTA & Golden Globe winning Harrison is superb as the jovially pompous professor whose disdain for just about everything and everyone is writ large, Hepburn (with a lot of musical assistance from Marni Nixon) manages the transformation from "gutter snipe" to "toff" magnificently and there are some wonderfully characterful contributions from Stanley Holloway as her (rather venal) father; from Gladys Cooper as his rather astute mother and of course the arbiter of all things elocutionary - "Prof. Karpathy" (Theodore Bikel) who famously concludes that our poor "Eliza" is Hungarian! George Cukor has worked his magic well here with a superbly colourful, pithy and engaging adaptation of the original Shaw story and the score from Lerner and Loewe offers us some of the best rhyming lyrics ever put on paper: "Why Can't The English" and "I could have Danced All Night" being two particular favourites as well as Holloway's cracking "I'm Getting Married in the Morning". In a time of much more in-your-face politically correct dramatisations, I think folks could take a look at this cleverly constructed swipe at intellectual and sexual "superiority" and see the best man win - even if she isn't a man...