Film review

  • My Fair Lady

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1964)

    Hit stage musicals turned into hit movie musicals of the 1960s were determined to end more happily than the classics of English literature from which they derived or, at least, a bit less unhappily.  Even in West Side Story (1961), and though it’s scant consolation to her, Juliet/Maria survives to mourn the death of Romeo/Tony.  In Oliver! (1968), the out-and-out villain, Bill Sikes, is duly killed but the entertaining one, Fagin, avoids the hangman’s noose and finally sings about changing his nefarious ways.  George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion ends with Professor Henry Higgins alone on stage.  He chuckles to himself at the absurdity of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower-seller whom Higgins has turned into a lady, marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, an upper-class twit – but that, it seems, is what Eliza, who has now abandoned Higgins, is going to do.  In the last moments of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Eliza, after walking out of Higgins’ life, walks back into it.  He loses no time in making clear to her and the audience that he hasn’t changed his ways.  Eliza suddenly has changed, though.  The man who taught her good manners and impeccable diction also infuriated Eliza by treating her as a skivvy – enough for her to throw Higgins’ slippers at him.  Just a couple of scenes ago, when he asked her to come back to him, she coolly suggested that was because ‘You want me back to pick up your slippers’.  Higgins, in the film’s closing line, archly asks, ‘Where the devil are my slippers?’   After he’s had the last word, Eliza smiles fondly and moves towards him.

    I last saw Pygmalion at the Old Vic in 2023.  There was a lot wrong with the production, but that didn’t include Bertie Carvel’s unequivocal portrait of the leading man:  Carvel made clear that Henry Higgins, internationally renowned professor of phonetics, was a middle-aged mother’s boy, incapable of developing adult relationships; at the play’s end, he stood very thoroughly isolated.  I first saw My Fair Lady in the cinema in late 1967, soon after my twelfth birthday.  I can remember feeling let down, even then, by the supposedly happy ending, almost indignant on Eliza’s behalf.  I didn’t realise at the time how much this had to do with Rex Harrison as a performer.  My Fair Lady’s ending appears to vindicate Higgins:  despite being a childish chauvinist, he’s also meant to be irresistible – which may be possible if the man playing him shows some chinks of authentic vulnerability in Higgins’ egotistical armour.  Forget that with Harrison in the role.  The character’s self-satisfaction is indivisible from the actor’s.  Self-satisfaction is Harrison’s trademark – in evidence, before and after this performance, in films as otherwise unalike as Unfaithfully Yours (1948), The Reluctant Debutante (1958) and Doctor Dolittle (1967).

    Rex Harrison is the definitive Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady.  He originated the part on Broadway and in the West End before playing it in Cukor’s picture.  It’s a celebrated, Tony-and-Oscar-winning performance.  It’s widely assumed too that, in performing Higgins’ songs, Harrison invented speak-singing in musicals.  (His success in My Fair Lady certainly helped popularise the technique, but that’s not quite the same thing.)  When an actor replays in a film a part they’ve already played in a successful theatre run, they can seem too comfortable and practised in the role on screen.  Their performance looks to have been fully worked out on stage – has become accomplished in the wrong way.  Harrison gives that impression throughout Cukor’s film, but something worse happens in the single scene between Higgins and Eliza’s father, Alfred – with Stanley Holloway also reprising his role in My Fair Lady’s original productions on both sides of the Atlantic.  In this exchange, one actor (usually Harrison) sometimes anticipates, in a facial reaction or the delivery of a line, what the other actor is saying before he’s finished saying it – because he knows so well what’s coming.

    The film’s other main role was, notoriously, not played by its stage originator in New York and London.  My Fair Lady was a Warner Bros production and Jack Warner decided that Julie Andrews lacked the box-office appeal needed to ensure the film’s commercial success.  (My Fair Lady was eventually made for $17m – equivalent to around $200m nowadays, so considerably more than the budget for, say, Barbie (2023) or Wicked (2024).)   Andrews would no doubt have done her own singing.  The film’s Eliza, Audrey Hepburn, is dubbed by Marni Nixon, but that’s not all that’s wrong with the performance for the first hour or so.  As Eliza – to quote Higgins, a ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’, a ‘squashed cabbage leaf’, etc – Hepburn makes disastrous attempts to come across as downtrodden and to speak broad Cockney.  Higgins likens Eliza’s voice to that of a ‘bilious pigeon’:  Hepburn is painful to listen to, but because she’s so effortful.  It makes the press ridicule of Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in the same year’s Mary Poppins (in which Julie Andrews enjoyed a huge success) seem very unfair.  At least Van Dyke’s accent was fluent, even if it was a strain of Cockney never heard within the sound of Bow Bells.

    Audrey Hepburn hits rock bottom early in the famous episode that culminates in ‘The Rain in Spain’ and, hot on its heels, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’.  Higgins orders Eliza to elocute ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen’:  Hepburn drops each aitch laboriously.  But when, a few screen minutes later, Eliza succeeds in doing as she’s told (‘By George, she’s got it!), it’s also the turning point in Hepburn’s performance.  Once she’s allowed to speak ladylike, even while Eliza’s posh accent is still precarious, Hepburn is freed to act and charm like her usual self.  Julie Andrews’ biggest fans wouldn’t claim she could have looked as Audrey Hepburn does in the scenes at Ascot and the embassy ball.  Nor could Andrews have been as emotionally expressive as Hepburn is, once Eliza realises she’s falling for Higgins, then rebels against his tyranny.  Without Hepburn’s vivacious truthfulness, which illumines Eliza’s longing, the heroine would seem insane as she euphorically sings, ‘I only know when he began to dance with me …’  Rex Harrison, as a partner, gives her nothing – not even romantic inaccessibility.

    Audrey Hepburn was born exquisite, which makes for another apparent similarity between My Fair Lady and Oliver Twist – Dickens’ novel as well as screen versions of the story.  Despite his workhouse origins, Oliver is well-spoken, a quality that reflects both a nobility of spirit and the social class from which he’s descended and to which he’ll eventually return:  Dickens, for all his fierce social conscience, seems to view that as a return home for Oliver.  Eliza Doolittle is a different matter, not only in Pygmalion but in Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay for My Fair Lady, too.  Eliza, when she turns against Higgins, tells him that, by making her a lady, he’s turned her into a social misfit.  It’s in this respect that Audrey Hepburn is a problem in the role throughout the film.  She’s so innately classy that, once she’s speaking beautifully, Hepburn’s Eliza seems to become her true self, not at all a distortion of it.

    Even so, Hepburn’s talent and allure make the second half of My Fair Lady much easier to watch than the first, because she’s more at ease and because Eliza largely dominates the film’s later stages, as Higgins seemed to dominate at the start.  To be fair to Rex Harrison, he’s far from the only problem.  Many people consider My Fair Lady a triumphant climax to George Cukor’s long and distinguished career but I’m not among them.  The opening titles appear against images of glorious flowers, in predominantly pastel shades, while the Lerner and Loewe show’s greatest hits play on the soundtrack.  The floral images are still photographs:  they hint at both the decorative splendour and the visual lethargy of what’s to come over the next (nearly) three hours.  Cecil Beaton’s set and costume designs are wonderful creations, almost always on display.  It was interesting to see My Fair Lady again quite soon after revisiting, also after a long interval, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), in which the opulent settings are vitally inhabited by the people within them.  Cukor’s film could hardly be more different.  Inertia is essential, of course, in the ‘Ascot Gavotte’ sequence, where the upper-crust racegoers’ frozen attitudes and implacable dispassion harmonise with the superbly limited palette of Beaton’s outfits (black and white, grey and cream).  You can also accept the static quality of the embassy ball, to the extent that this is another top-drawer social ritual.  That doesn’t explain, though, why those attending the ball look so ill at ease (look, in other words, like a bunch of extras unsure of what to do).  Both at Ascot and the ball, Eliza, thanks to Audrey Hepburn, is just about the only person on the screen who looks comfortable in what she’s wearing.

    It’s in the musical scenes in and around Covent Garden, though, a place supposedly brimming with proletarian life, that Cukor’s direction is most deficient.  Stanley Holloway’s workshy Alfred Doolittle certainly doesn’t lack performing energy.  There are times when Holloway seems almost literally to be playing to the gallery, as if he were still on stage.  But he does a good job of conveying Doolittle’s dodgy charm – and his brio and rhythm, in both his voice and movement, are sorely needed.  The bit players with whom Holloway must interact are mechanical; other members of the Covent Garden chorus traipse round cluelessly.  Thanks to this and some peculiar editing choices, ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and, especially, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ are arrhythmic.  In the film’s non-singing bits, Cukor has a maddening habit of holding characters’ reaction shots for much too long.  Actors as good as Mona Washbourne, who plays Higgins’ housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, hang around on screen telling us what to read from their expression long after we’ve read it.

    My Fair Lady’s collection of songs is rightly esteemed yet two of the most famous numbers don’t make great sense in the context of the narrative.  You understand why ‘On the Street Where You Live’, with its lovely, sweeping melody and deeply felt lyrics, became a standard; you don’t understand why the song is given to Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who’s otherwise written, and tends to be played, as a figure of fun.  Jeremy Brett’s casting as Freddy here, even though Brett gives one of the film’s most likeable performances, confuses the issue further.  There’s a comic spark between him and Audrey Hepburn, in their conversation at Ascot; this and Brett’s good looks combine to leave you puzzled why Eliza really doesn’t marry Freddy.  Brett also does a nice job not only of lip-syncing to the dubbed voice of Bill Shirley for ‘On the Street Where You Live’ but also of expressing the feeling in Shirley’s singing.  Yet the staging of the number is feeble:  ‘People stop and stare – they don’t bother me’ is a pointless assertion in an empty street.  Later, on the same street, a puzzled, crestfallen Higgins returns home Eliza-less.  Even I’ll admit that Rex Harrison’s rendition of ‘I’ve Accustomed to Her Face’ is a feat (Harrison’s better when he doesn’t have to share the screen).  It might even be touching, if only you believed a word of what he’s speak-singing.  ‘Her joys, her woes, her highs, her lows/Are second nature to me now’ – pull the other one, Professor Harrison-Higgins.

    Gladys Cooper plays her few scenes as Higgins’ mother with easy authority.  As Colonel Pickering, Higgins’ fellow phonetician and, for most of the film, house guest, Wilfrid Hyde-White has much more screen time – too much, given that Hyde-White is just doing his usual eccentric-urbane routine.  It’s rather bizarre when Eliza scolds Higgins by telling him Colonel Pickering has always treated her as a lady, when Pickering has often seemed as oblivious to her feelings as Higgins is, just less explicitly rude.  You have to agree with Pickering, though, when he tells Higgins that ‘one thing I can’t stand about you [is] your confounded complacency’.  In the impossible role of Zoltan Karpathy, the full-of-himself linguistics expert who threatens to unmask Higgins’ protégée as a fraud at the embassy ball, Theodore Bikel is less annoying than the part deserves.  Karpathy, a Hungarian, makes a fool of himself by declaring Eliza also to be Hungarian, and blue-blooded – a princess.  Since she’s aristocratic Audrey Hepburn, you have some sympathy with Karpathy’s mistake.

    The gestation of My Fair Lady‘s happy ending was a longer process than Lionel Bart’s decision to reprieve Fagin in Oliver!  Even though Pygmalion’s first production in 1914 was a success, some audience members, critics and even the play’s first Henry Higgins, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, regretted the downbeat finale.  According to Wikipedia, ‘Tree sought to sweeten Shaw’s ending to please himself and his record houses.  Shaw remained sufficiently irritated to add a postscript essay to the 1916 print edition, “What Happened Afterwards”, for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married’.  He even wrote to Mrs Patrick Campbell, the first Eliza, that ‘When Eliza emancipates herself – when Galatea comes to life – she must not relapse.  She must retain her pride and triumph to the end’.

    When Pygmalion became a British cinema film in 1938, Shaw, who wrote the screen adaptation, was prepared to compromise with a conclusion that allowed Higgins and Eliza a ‘tender farewell scene … followed by one showing Freddy and Eliza happy in their greengrocery-cum-flower shop’ (Wikipedia again).  It was only at a private preview of the final film, directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, who played Higgins to Wendy Hiller’s Eliza, that Shaw discovered that the producer, Gabriel Pascal, had decided to end proceedings with Eliza returning to Higgins.  History doesn’t record whether GBS was at all consoled by winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Pygmalion (though it does record that he was the first man ever to win an Oscar as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature – an achievement unmatched until Bob Dylan completed the double in 2016).  Eliza Doolittle’s unprepared for, last-minute change of heart depends, for its emotional effectiveness, on the chemistry between the players in the two main roles.  Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller have it.  Despite Audrey Hepburn’s best efforts, she and Rex Harrison don’t.   The only way I can cope with My Fair Lady’ s abominable ending is by imagining that in a parallel universe, once Higgins mentioned the slippers, Eliza had second thoughts and made for the exit.

    21 March 2026

  • I Swear

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kirk Jones (2025)

    John Davidson was born in the early 1970s in Galashiels, developed serious Tourette syndrome in pre-adolescence and has suffered from it ever since.  For much of his adult life, he has publicly campaigned for greater recognition and understanding of the condition.  I avoided I Swear on its release in British cinemas last autumn.  The trailer for writer-director Kirk Jones’ dramatisation of Davidson’s life not only suggested a formula film but seemed to tell the story of his tribulations and tenacity in the space of two minutes.  After receiving excellent reviews, I Swear grabbed all the headlines at last month’s BAFTA ceremony for two reasons, one happier than the other.  When the film began streaming on Netflix a couple of weeks later, I decided to try it.

    ‘The problem is not Tourette’s,’ says the film’s John Davidson, ‘the problem is that people don’t know enough about Tourette’s’.  I was one of those people at the start of Kirk Jones’ story and probably still am, but I Swear is educational as well as humanly absorbing.  You hesitate to call such a distressing condition fascinating but that fairly describes the verbal tic of coprolalia.  According to Wikipedia, around 10% of Tourette’s sufferers exhibit coprolalia, ie ‘the involuntary utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks’; as everyone who watched the recent BAFTAs on television knows, John Davidson is among the 10%.  The words he was heard calling out at the ceremony were racially abusive.  Quite a few of us, assuming these outbursts resulted from brief loss of control of his self-censoring equipment, were dismayed to think they expressed Davidson’s real feelings about those at whom he shouted.

    Google’s AI Overview explains that, like the involuntary physical movements that are more commonly part of Tourette’s, coprolalia is a neurobiological tic, ‘caused by “faulty wiring” in the brain’s inhibitory mechanisms’.  Watching I Swear is a better way, though, of understanding that John’s coprolalia isn’t a matter of blurting out what he truly feels – as when, to take one of many examples, he’s interviewed for a job assisting Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan), caretaker at the local community centre, Tommy asks if John can make a decent cup of tea and he replies, ‘Oh aye, I’m good at tea – I use spunk for milk’.  After hearing his coprolalia in action for the best part of the film’s two hours, it’s hard not to see it as, in two ways, phenomenal.  The words John unintentionally comes out with aren’t what he wants to say yet they’re not random either – as ‘spunk for milk’ illustrates, they relate significantly to the situation he’s in.  These momentary verbal eruptions sometimes come so thick and fast they’re discombobulating, sending you on your own flights of fancy – wondering if coprolalia reflects a basic human impulse to be subversive or self-destructive.  John sums up the problem more simply:  ‘I say things that I shouldn’t’.

    In I Swear’s prologue, it’s 2019 and John is at Holyrood Palace to receive an MBE from Queen Elizabeth.  He’s worried about even sitting in the hall, scared he’ll soon say a word out of place – persuaded to take his seat, he promptly does.  Kirk Jones then flashes back to 1983, where John (Scott Ellis Watson at this stage) has a paper round and is about to start secondary school in Galashiels:  we see him with his mother Heather (Shirley Henderson), going to buy his new school uniform.  He’s a highly promising goalkeeper and his father (Steven Cree) arranges for a talent scout to come to the school to watch John in a football match.  It’s around this time that he starts developing serious Tourette’s symptoms (later than the average onset age) – stiff neck, head twitching, spasms of anti-social behaviour both physical and verbal.  After one such episode, the headmaster (Ron Donachie) whips John’s hand with a belt, enough to prevent his using it in goal; this, in combination with the tics, guarantees a disastrous performance for the talent scout, which infuriates his father.  At home, John spits out food at the dinner table.  His parents’ relationship is already strained and Kirk Jones uses the advent of John’s condition as the nail in the marriage’s coffin.  His father walks out, leaving Heather, who works as a hospital nurse, alone to look after John and his three younger siblings.  Derided at school and isolated within the family, John tries and fails to drown himself, after which the narrative jumps forward to 1996.  In his mid-twenties, John (Robert Aramayo) is unemployed and still living with his mother, but not for much longer.

    The next part of the narrative is typical of the film’s rough-and-ready script.  John bumps into Murray Achenbach (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), a friend from schooldays who emigrated to Australia but has recently returned home because his mother is terminally ill with liver cancer.  Murray invites John back to his house for a meal, John daren’t accept but Murray’s mother Dottie (Maxine Peake) insists, undaunted by John’s coprolalic greeting.  She’s soon telling him it’s a family rule that ‘You never have to apologise in this house’.  A few screen minutes later, John has told Heather that he’s moving in with the Achenbachs, and he does.  Dottie’s husband (David Carlyle) is worried she won’t be able to cope, given her own medical condition. His indomitable wife, a mental health nurse, takes it all in her stride – even when, for example, during a supermarket visit, John involuntarily smacks her in the face.  Dottie weans John off the anti-psychotic medication he has long been prescribed but a visit with Murray to a night club ends disastrously:  John’s ticcing leads to a brawl, a night in police custody and an assault charge.  Dottie cheers him up by arranging the interview at the community centre.  Despite John’s outbursts, Tommy Trotter gives him the job.

    You understand why freedom of speech at the Achenbachs’ must have made them a dream family to John Davidson and loving, resourceful Dottie more than a second mother to him.  At this stage of I Swear, though, I couldn’t help thinking she was too good to be true, not least because Dottie’s illness was shaping up as a familiar strain of screen cancer, asymptomatic and painless.  I also wondered if John’s own mother wasn’t being short-changed in the storytelling.  There’s soon an answer to the first objection:  it really was the case, as the film reveals, that Dottie Achenbach had been misdiagnosed with cancer, that a growth in her liver was benign.  But I Swear’s portrait of John’s estranged family, and his mother in particular, continues to nag throughout.

    Kirk Jones, presumably in consultation with John Davidson, probably meant to respect the feelings of people still alive and felt that a least-said-soonest-mended approach made sense, but he doesn’t ignore the Davidson family entirely, not at least once the narrative has eventually returned to its starting point of the MBE investiture and moved forward from there.  Dottie is by John’s side at Holyrood, of course (it’s she who persuades him to go through with the ceremony), and his sister, Caroline (Louise Stewart), also attends.  Sometime afterwards, John visits his mother to show her his MBE medal and says he’s sorry he couldn’t invite her along as well.  Shirley Henderson plays conscientious, woebegone Heather Davidson sympathetically enough, but her part is so underwritten that the treatment of John’s mother still feels unkind.  That said, the rest of the Achenbach family is just about written out of the story too once Dottie gets the good news about her health.  Given how much she’s in the film, it’s a relief that Maxine Peake is better than usual.

    But I Swear is really about one character and depends on two performances.  Scott Ellis Watson is excellent as the boy John, his unusual face and melancholy quality anticipating what’s to come for John’s older self.  And Robert Aramayo is tremendous.  In the first 1996 scene, John gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom.  Several jerking head movements later, he’s briefly still and the look of contained pain on Aramayo’s face is eloquent:  you see both John’s apprehension of the day ahead and how physically exhausting Tourette’s must be.  Although these moments aren’t the last where John is wearied by redundant, convulsive movement, they epitomise the wonder of Aramayo’s achievement over the course of the film.  His technical mastery of John’s various tics, requiring precision and complete consistency, doesn’t in the least impede his creation of a rich, affecting personality.

    There’s no denying either that John’s condition has its comical side, most enjoyably shown in Peter Mullan’s brilliantly bemused reactions during John’s job interview.  Tommy Trotter’s tone turns gruff just once in that scene, when John’s uncontrolled right arm strikes Tommy’s beloved dog.  Later in the story, John is living independently and gets his own dog.  The short sequence that sees the pair preparing to cross a busy road is also very funny.  ‘Go on then! Stay!  Go on then! Stay!’, John keeps saying as traffic whizzes past.  The animal knows the drill and ignores the first instruction, but you realise how tricky life must be for a dog with an owner like this.  (This bit is reprised, along with John’s thumping Dottie in the supermarket, in a montage of video clips of the real John Davidson over the closing credits.  I was baffled that such incidents had been recorded:  it turns out they’re from a series of BBC TV documentaries about Davidson of which I knew nothing – John’s Not Mad (1989), The Boy Can’t Help It (2002) and Tourettes: I Swear I Can’t Help It (2009).)

    Did it really happen that John got the job at the community centre on the very day that Dottie learned she didn’t have cancer and that, when she sent him out that same evening to buy a celebration Chinese takeaway, he was beaten up by two men in revenge for yelling abuse at a young woman and ended up in hospital with quite serious injuries?  Was it the case that Tommy Trotter died suddenly, almost immediately after appearing as a character witness at John’s assault trial and delivering a passionate and persuasive defence of him?   You watch these episodes in I Swear suspecting that Kirk Jones is reworking events to deliver extra emotional impact yet not minding at all.  You so admire what Robert Aramayo is doing, and so much like the person he’s creating on screen, that audience manipulation seems a small price to pay:  the actor’s talent and truth transcend it.  At Tommy’s funeral, John is shown alone in a room behind the nave, grieving apart from the main congregation so as not to disturb the solemn service.  This is very moving.

    Robert Aramayo supplied the happy headlines for I Swear at the BAFTAs.  His win in the Rising Star category was probably expected; his win in the Best Actor category certainly wasn’t but was thoroughly deserved.  This portrait takes high rank among performances in what might be called the cinema of disability (though John Davidson would probably resent the phrase) – it’s up there with Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker (1962), Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989), Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything (2013).  The later parts of the film focusing on John’s developing and successful advocacy work, are far from imaginative; right at the end, his visit to the University of Nottingham in 2023, to test a non-invasive median nerve stimulation (MNS) device designed for Tourette’s sufferers, runs the risk of being no more than a matter of bringing his story up to date.  It’s a lot more than that, thanks to a short sequence in which John, wearing the MNS bracelet, manages to walk through the university library in incredulous, triumphant silence.  I still don’t think my reasons for staying away from I Swear in the cinema last year were wrong but I’m so glad to have seen it now.

    14 March 2026

     

     

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