Pygmalion (1938) - Episode 1

Episode 1: Pygmalion (1938)

The original myth of Pygmalion is actually kind of creepy. (And there are non-rhyming translations, but I thought the rhyme was cooler.) Pygmalion is a guy who hated women after seeing some prostitutes. So instead of getting a real wife, he decides to make a sculpture of the “ideal woman.”

Pygmalion, of course, falls in love with his statue and starts making out with it. Then, on a feast-day celebrating Venus, the goddess of love, Pygmalion almost asks for his statue to come to life, but he realizes that would be crazy, so he asks instead for a bride that looks just like his statue. But Venus knows what he really meant, so when Pygmalion fondles and kisses the statue when he gets home, its lips turn warm and it comes to life, apparently undisturbed that her first experience as a human being is making out  with her creator.

But everything’s cool and within ten months, their first son is born.

This is basically the most misogynistic, creepy version of Pinocchio ever.

And George Bernard Shaw, author of both the stage play and screenplay for Pygmalion, realized that.  The play Pygmalion, perhaps better known for the musical it inspired, My Fair Lady, is not about a literal statue coming to life. It is about a low-class Cockney flower girl who is, in a sense, “brought to life” by being transformed into a duchess, or at least someone who can pass for one, by the pompous Professor Henry Higgins. But unlike the original Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins—the man who trains flower girl Eliza Doolittle to be a duchess—finds that he cannot control Eliza now that she has the ability to think for herself, and the play ends with Eliza leaving Henry, presumably to never return.

Okay, if this story has been sounding familiar to you, you’re might be confused right now because, as you remember it, the story ends with Eliza coming back to the professor. Allow me to explain why.

When George Bernard Shaw first put pen to paper, this was how the play ended:

HIGGINS … [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I'd make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I'm not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you're a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can't behave himself in church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman's pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy em all right enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

I personally enjoy this ending to the play, because Higgins gets what’s been coming to him by using Eliza as his slipper-retriever and he’s still too thickheaded to realize it. But audiences couldn’t bear the thought of the male and female protagonists of a play not getting together in the end, so the original actors playing Higgins and Eliza ended the play with Higgins tossing a bouquet of flowers to Eliza.

Shaw did not like this, and actually wrote a “sequel” to Pygmalion in prose that’s actually pretty boring, detailing exactly what happens to the characters after the play ends. Eliza Doolittle doesn’t marry Henry Higgins. She marries another character named Freddy.

When the movie version was made in 1938, even though Shaw wrote the screenplay, a new ending was created without his permission in which, after Eliza leaves Henry to marry Freddy, she returns and Higgins, misogynistic as ever, asks her for his slippers.

When the musical My Fair Lady was created, based on Pygmalion, it actually wasn’t adapted from the play—it was adapted from the 1938 screenplay, which included some new scenes like the one at the ball—and the infamous ending. When the Broadway musical was filmed as a movie in 1964—keeping Rex Harrison as Higgins from the Broadway run but replacing Julie Andrews as Eliza with Audrey Hepburn because Andrews wasn’t famous enough—the changed ending from the 1938 film was immortalized in audience’s minds forever.

What would George Bernard Shaw think of this ending? Well, he actually conceded that it was “too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about,” though he refused to call it a “happy ending,” saying “I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”

Just as Shaw retold an old myth in a drastic new way, his take on the myth would be retold in many drastic new ways as well. I’ve already mentioned the musical and film adaption of the same, My Fair Lady. The play has been filmed several times, but its legacy lives on in such classics as Pretty Woman, about a prostitute who undergoes an Eliza-like transformation, She’s All That, a movie about a high schooler who bets he can turn any girl into Prom Queen (which actually referenced Pretty Woman), and…can we not talk about Selfie? Okay, Selfie was a quickly cancelled ABC series about “Eliza Dooley,” a sales rep who hires “Henry Higgs” to help her improve her image. Literally, it didn’t even last 3 months on air. Finally, there’s Galatea by Emily Short, an interactive fiction, if you want to call it that, where you can have a conversation with the statue in a museum.

Other fun facts: Pygmalion wasn’t the only time George Bernard Shaw adapted a classic myth into a drastically different retelling. His play Man and Superman, (no, not the DC Comics character) was his version of the classic Don Juan story, which incidentally also involves a statue coming to life. Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, as the story is generally told, is a man of…loose morals, shall we say, who seduces a girl and ends up killing her father, but the father comes back to life in the form of a statue. Don invites the statue to dinner and the statue generally ends up dragging Don Juan to hell, though in some versions, apparently, Don Juan is saved. This story is probably most popular because of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. (If you’ve seen Sherlock Holmes 2: Game of Shadows, that’s the opera that appears in the movie. It’s also in Amadeus, but pretty much every Mozart opera is in that movie.) In Man and Superman, however, Shaw flipped the story on its head by having Jack Tanner, the Don Juan character, pursued by the woman, Ann.

Pygmalion (1938) is in the public domain, and can be watched for free online at archive.org:

Next week's movie: The original Greek myth of Pygmalion is reminiscent of the more modern classic Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. This 1950 film does not involve anybody coming to life, but the main character has a physical feature that may invite comparisons to Pinocchio.