A conceited professor of phonetics (Rex Harrison) tasks himself with taking a working-class girl named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) and educating her sufficiently so that she can pose as a member of high society.
Hepburn and Harrison have plenty of charisma and charm, but pretty much everything else falls flat. Elisa’s dustman father (Stanley Holloway) is an embarrassing disaster. The “chorus” scenes don’t really work, either, and the rather abusive treatment of Elisa is played for laughs in a way that you can’t imagine happening in a modern film. In narrative terms, the two transformative moments – Elisa learning to enunciate and the pair realising they are in love – are both completely thrown away, buried in pointless filler set pieces and side plots that drag out the running time.
I liked Harrison’s talk-sing delivery of his song lyrics. The style almost approaches rap. But beyond a couple of memorable songs, all you’re left with is two talented actors struggling to rise above a drab and tiresome mess.
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