Apples and Elizas

I think Michael Sragow makes an invidious comparison when he states that the 1938 production of “Pygmalion,” directed by Anthony Asquith, “adds emotional coloring to George Bernard Shaw’s play without smothering it in chic the way George Cukor’s ‘My Fair Lady’ did” (“Think British Films Are a Cold Lot? Not so Jolly Fast,” May 2).

In fact, this is like comparing apples and oranges. The 1938 movie is an adaptation of Shaw’s comedy--done by the author himself--and it has the virtues of a traditional, well-made British production: superb performances and fidelity to the text. “My Fair Lady,” however, was based upon a Broadway show adapted from the play by Alan Jay Lerner, who also did the screen adaptation--and the “chic” Sragow complains about had already been injected into the show by Cecil Beaton.

In other words, the motion picture “My Fair Lady” is two generations removed from its source, and it is just as misleading and unfair to simply confront it with “Pygmalion”--play or movie--as it would be to compare “Cabaret” with John Van Druten’s “I Am a Camera” or Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories,” upon which the Van Druten play and the musical were based, without taking into account the important changes that occurred each time the story was shifted into a different medium.

What Warner Bros. expected was a musical and it makes sense to compare “My Fair Lady” in the first place with other works in the same genre and not with a film version of a purely dramatic work. Considering that Cukor had to direct the film with Jack Warner, William Paley and Cecil Beaton breathing down his neck to make sure he didn’t change a detail of one of the biggest hits in Broadway history--hardly a happy situation for a highly talented director--I think he did a remarkable job of preserving the dramatic nuances of Shaw’s play while giving the studio the kind of classy musical it hoped to get.

DAVE CLAYTON

San Diego