Old Show, New Trick

Pygmalion (Gabriel Pascal) is Bernard Shaw's famed comedy about the transformation of a Cockney flower girl into a lady by a phonetics expert; the simultaneous transformation of the phonetics expert into a human being by the flower girl. As the first authorized, full-length screen version of a play by the world's No. 1 living dramatist, Pygmalion could scarcely have avoided being important. It could easily have avoided being good. As produced by Gabriel Pascal and acted by Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, it is not merely good but practically perfect.

Pygmalion delighted both critics and cinemaddicts in England, where it has been playing for seven weeks. It is likely to delight U. S. critics and cinemaddicts. More significant, it pleased its own author. Heretofore adamant in refusing to sell cinema rights of his plays (with the exception of two shorts: How He Lied to Her Husband, Arms and the Man), Bernard Shaw not only helped write the script for Pygmalion but agreed to let Producer Pascal film all his other plays. Producer Pascal will soon start work on Caesar and Cleopatra.

How Producer Pascal acquired possession of the world's richest mine of entertainment material would be as good a story as how the heroine of Pygmalion acquired the poise of a duchess but for the fact that it is utterly implausible. A squat, fervent, irascible Transylvanian, ex-farmer, cavalry officer and economist. Producer Pascal's best previous contribution to cinema was Franz Lehar's Frederica. His reward for the ripple of applause which it aroused in 1932 was a succession of minor jobs producing shorts.

In 1935, after spending six months in Hollywood doing nothing, Pascal left in disgust. He arrived in London and out of a clear sky called Playwright Shaw, whom he had never met. Pascal said he wanted to produce Shaw's plays.

Practically every producer in Hollywood has tried to buy the rights to Bernard Shaw's plays at one time or another. Playwright Shaw's most famed reply to such offers was that which he made to Sam Goldwyn. When the most egregious producer in the world assured him that his work would be treated not as a commercial venture but as art, Shaw answered, "Mr. Goldwyn, you are interested in art and I am interested in money."

When Playwright Shaw asked Pascal how much money he had, Pascal replied: "Fifteen shillings and sixpence--but I owe a pound." As much delighted with this effrontery as with Pascal's obvious admiration for his work, Playwright Shaw gave him a pound to pay his debts, agreed to the experiment. With Shaw's approval for his project he had little trouble getting as much as he needed. He assembled about $250,000--less than Hollywood spends on most quickies. He hired Screenwriters W. P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis to write a scenario, rented a studio and set to work.

Said Playwright Shaw: "I am going to teach Americans one of the things they don't know--how to put English drama on the screen. Every word will be written by me. Not the least regard will be paid to American ideas, except to avoid them as much as possible."

Shaw did indeed write all the dialogue for Pygmalion, which was taken verbatim from the stage play except for two new scenes showing Eliza's first bath and her first ball. In doing so, however, he showed his regard for American ideas to the extent of allowing most of Eliza's Cockney dialect in the opening scenes to be cut.

Shaw visited the set the day production started "to impress the producers with confidence and courage." Conferences between himself and his collaborators thereafter were held in his Whitehall Court home.

The member of the cast of Pygmalion whose work pleased everyone was 26-year-old Wendy Hiller. Famed as the star of Love on the Dole, whose coauthor, Ronald Gow, she married in 1937, Wendy Hiller plays Eliza with a minimum of frills, and complete sincerity. To her, as much as to Playwright Shaw and Producer Pascal, goes the credit for making Pygmalion come to life on the screen more completely than it ever did upon the stage.

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