Fountain Theatre Schedule
Screenings daily 7:30 p.m. ?Sunday matinee 2:30 p.m.
The Fountain Theatre ?2469 Calle De Guadalupe ?Mesilla, NM ?575.524.8287
Oct. 24-30
Pygmalion
Dir: Anthony Asquith/Leslie Howard, 1938 (UK),
89 min. English
Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller), ekes out a living selling flowers to wealthy slummers. Higgins is one of these slummers, loitering among the lower classes to sharpen his skills at identifying people’s home and history by their dialect. He brags about these skills and claims he could transform even a "guttersnipe" like Eliza into a "duchess" by revamping her language. She takes him seriously, showing up unannounced at his mansion and offering him a shilling to teach her "manners" and good speech. Higgins becomes a paradigm of upper-crust creepiness, capricious and bullying in his attempt to wring a duchess out of the "sodden cabbage leaf" Eliza. Later she renders the normally babblesome Higgins speechless when she quietly affirms her humanity at the expense of his: "I sold flowers … I didn’t sell myself." Performances are uniformly fine, but the standout is unquestionably Wendy Hiller. With one of the great faces in classic British cinema and a charisma almost alarming in an actress only 25 when the film was shot, she evokes both the rough Eliza and the nouveau Miss Doolittle with scintillating power. Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal.
