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Oscar bloggers don't have a lot to do between March and October, so that's the time we use to play catchup, trying to shorten our list of movies we really should have seen by now. The number of Best Picture winning films that I haven't seen is depressingly long, which is why I'm making it my mission to shorten that list by as much as possible between now and when Oscar season revs up again.

The Movie: My Fair Lady, Directed by George Cukor, Written by Alan Jay Lerner

What it Won
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor in a Leading Role, George Harrison
Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color
Best Cinematography, Color
Best Costume Design, Color
Best Sound
Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment

Also Nominated For
Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Stanley Holloway
Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Gladys Cooper
Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Best Film Editing

Its Competition
Becket
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Mary Poppins
Zorba the Greek

Other Notable Films Nominated for Awards
Goldfinger
A Hard Day's Night
Marriage Italian Style
The Night of the Iguana
The Pink Panther
Robin and the Seven Hoods
Seven Days in May
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

What I Brought Into It

If there is one thing I am as obsessed with as movies it is musical theater, and yet I had fairly limited familiarity with this classic musical before seeing the film. I knew the basics of the story, of course, partially because of how often it is parodied by comedies (an early Family Guy episode spoofs the show particularly well), and I had heard virtually every song, but never in any kind of order or context. I had a vague understanding that Eliza had a love interest, but I didn't know that the song “The Street Where You Live” was from this show. I also didn't know that her father was important to the plot.

But my expectations were extremely high, as they tend to be for adaptations of classic musicals. Sometimes my expectations are met or exceeded, as they were with West Side Story, Cabaret, and Chicago, and sometimes I find myself profoundly underwhelmed, as I did with The Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd, and Rent. Very often my high expectations burn me, but I feel that if a director is working with a great stage musical they should be able to bring to life on screen. It shouldn't be that difficult. And yet...

What I Took Out of It

My Fair Lady is an absolute mess. I mean, of all of the ways to bring a musical from the stage to the screen, it seems as if this was the worst possible way to do it. Director George Cukor clearly decided that since the stage production was so popular that he would make the film seem as much like a stage musical as possible. The problem is that what works well on the stage rarely works on the screen. If something is obviously fake on stage it will feel theatrical, but if something is obviously fake in a movie it will just seem ridiculous. How can you take a scene in a film seriously when a bunch of characters walk through a square, pause randomly for dramatic effect, and then all start moving again in unison?

The opening scene features a group of people all standing around watching some guy sing about how terribly poor people speak. Seriously, they just kind of stand there, listening raptly but never interrupting, and then immediately disperse after he is finished. It is the sort of scene that would work well on stage but comes off as absurd and distracting in a film. The staged aspect reminded me of the film adaptation of the stage musical The Producers, which failed to capture the comedy of the stage musical by too literally translating the style of the show. But Susan Stroman had the excuse of being a theater director making her big screen debut and being woefully unprepared for the job. George Cukor had a long, storied film career - which included four Best Director nominations - to his name before taking on My Fair Lady. He should know better.

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