With fervent hope I tried to like My Fair Lady. I did research in advance of screening the film to ensure I knew a few things about its central creative personalities. I planned ahead for the 170-minutes running time and I made sure I was in the most optimistic of moods. I even put on a false front with the hope I'd end up liking it but the bottom line is My Fair Lady doesn't measure up.

As an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's famous play "Pygmalion," screenwriter and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner worked with composer Frederick Loewe to create a light-hearted musical. It was re-christened "My Fair Lady" and unveiled under Broadway's limelight where it was a hit featuring Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. Unfortunately its central conceit about refining a lower class woman under the tutelage of a cold and demanding man now seems not just reactionary but downright repulsive in the face of what's supposed to be a love story.

Among Lerner and Loewe's changes was an update of the lead male character into being an aristocratic British phonetics professor from Shaw's sculptor. So too is the lead female character transformed from being a bit of sculpting clay into a feisty and opinionated London "guttersnipe" in the musical's parlance. Despite these changes, however, the plotline remains remarkably similar to "Pygmalion" since Higgins wants to create a perfect lady from an imperfect source.

First meeting Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) on a London street where she sells flowers while growling at passersby, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) is revealed as a world famous phonetics professor. Boasting to his friend Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he can transform any common woman into a regal beauty through speech and etiquette training, Eliza hears the wager and volunteers for the good professor.

At first antagonistic concerning their mutual ambitions Higgins and Eliza gradually become allies in the cause of making her a lady. His household staff learns to love her, she learns to covet the world he introduces her to and in a parallel adventure her destitute father Alfred (Stanley Holloway) becomes a member of the prosperous middle class. Through several misadventures Eliza finally emerges at a ball in the Queen's honor and is mistaken for a Hungarian duchess despite her cockney background. Naturally Higgins is tickled at having won his bet with Pickering but he disregards Eliza's feeling of betrayal at being treated like a business transaction so she leaves him without any warning.

Realizing perhaps too late that he's an insensitive clod, Higgins tries to woo her back with his superior reasoning but he only increases her frustration at being treated like a trophy. Forlorn, lost and saddened by the prospect of living the rest of his life without Eliza at his side, Higgins listens to an old recording of her speaking with him at the outset of their efforts to transform her when, just as required by the dictates of the genre, Eliza returns to him now convinced of his eccentric devotion.

Budgeted at $17 million My Fair Lady went on to earn nearly $34 million at the domestic box office. Readjusted to reflect its rentals actually returned to producers the film was likely a modest success. But it also won a Best Motion Picture statuette for Jack Warner as the icing on the cake of his long career as one of Hollywood's original movie moguls.

Filmed with such musical numbers as "The Rain in Spain" and "Just You Wait", My Fair Lady was a veritable awards magnet at the Golden Globes and Oscars. Winning three of five citations at the former and eight of 12 at the latter, it left its competition in the dust. Nominated for the top Academy Award against Becket, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Mary Poppins and Zorba the Greek, George Cukor's film was an overwhelming popular and critical favorite. It featured long flowing costumes, intricate and lavishly produced sets, rich colors, an early 20th century setting, an appealing ingénue in the title role and a pleasant supporting cast. Significantly an unknown named Marni Nixon dubbed Hepburn's singing voice despite her lengthy preparation for the role and it's this falsity that somehow injures the entire production.

Dubbing one person for another in musical films defies an old-fashioned idea about truth in performance. That My Fair Lady so easily eschewed this convention even though Hepburn's voice was reportedly quite good is a kind of violence towards the actress very much in keeping with the kind of narrative violence applied to Eliza Doolittle.

Said differently Hepburn's physical person was considered ideal for the movie version of Lerner and Loewe's musical, probably due to considerations both commercial and artistic. Unfortunately her voice was thought to be inadequate so it was replaced just as Eliza's personality was submerged beneath the wishes and requirements of Henry Higgins.

Par for the patriarchal tone of the movie this creative accretion and performance-as-combination was not applied to Harrison whose musical numbers are far less demanding. In fact one obvious criticism of the film is the way he wanders through his songs with spoken word soliloquies. Like Robert Preston in The Music Man he is a talker, not a singer, and it's significant that his place in the film is to polish his pupil's comportment even though he, himself, cannot carry a tune.

Once remembering how the Academy neglected to honor the Beatles picture A Hard Day's Night and that they shut out Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove from the major awards of 1964, it seems to me that they lavished far too much praise on Cukor's movie. It's likely that such attention was a response to the film's excellent pedigree but it's also another example of how Hollywood tends to celebrate work from industry insiders even when it's not particularly remarkable.

To this end My Fair Lady was a film adaptation of a commercially and critically important Broadway production and it was the prestige project of Warner Bros. in 1964. Featuring the same beloved Lerner and Loewe music and script from the stage production, it also employed the original male lead, Rex Harrison, while replacing Julie Andrews with Audrey Hepburn over Harrison's objections.

In the end the film's legacy is one of extraordinary fame and accomplishment. I concur on its being famous and accomplished though the one doesn't add up to the other. My Fair Lady's fame is relative and its accomplishments don't extend to a basic idea about romantic love, or to its ideas about truth in performance.