Pygmalion2.0191

Cukor, George, director. My Fair Lady, motion picture musical comedy, adapted from Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner, after Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. 1964. Released on DVD 1998 by Warner Home Video.

Linguistics professor Henry Higgins (Harrison) sets out to manufacture a glorious woman from a “deliciously low” street urchin named Eliza Dolittle (Hepburn). In fact, she nearly reinvents him.
Cukor’s lush motion picture adapts the Broadway musical by Lerner & Loewe, which was in turn an adaptation of Asquith & Howard's 1938 Pygmalion, which was in turn an adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s stage-play Pygmalion. Because Cukor’s adaptation bears no overt acknowledgement of the (Ovidian) source myth, academic questions about the nature of adaptation are fairly asked here. But the film is so engaging that those questions can very well go unasked. (See Mythmatters Aug 2012 and ibid. Sept 2014) Since Lerner & Loewe's, then Cukor's musical makes no overt allusion to Pygmalion (per se) nor to the myth, one may wonder whether its creators know of the classical ancestory of their plot.