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Pygmalion

A phonetics professor bets he can pass a Covent Garden flower girl off as a duchess — then discovers he has made a woman who will not go back to the gutter. Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard’s 1938 film of George Bernard Shaw’s play is the definitive screen Pygmalion: Howard directs and stars as Henry Higgins; Wendy Hiller, in her first great film role, is Eliza Doolittle, all grit and vowels until the gown and the Embassy ball. Shaw himself worked on the screenplay (and won an Oscar for it), allowing a gentler ending than the stage while keeping the class war and the jokes intact. Asquith, son of a prime minister and a precise craftsman of British talkies, stages drawing rooms and rain-soaked streets with equal bite. The template for My Fair Lady — and still sharper without the songs.

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