A very sexist movie
This movie is quite sexist and demeaning towards a Women. A movie like this would never have been made today.
shareHere we go again. The world was not created in 2000. This play was written in 1914 - the Edwardian Era - and it was light years away from today's ways of thinking, both for the good and the bad. Eliza and Higgins are products of their time, and as much as rewriting history seems to be in vogue, we can't re-imagine Eliza as a kick-ass, tattoo sporting overly pierced, foulmouthed harridan. Such women did not exist then, nor would Higgins treatment of her, hard as it may be to swallow, would have been considered sexist and demeaning - her own father hardly treated her more humanly. If any film dealing with subject matter that predates the 21st century is offensive to you, why don't you take every measure to avoid seeing them?
shareThe movie IS sexist. It is also classist. On both counts GBS ought to have known better and his own awkward ending hardly gets around this.
Regardless, the film itself is made in the 1960s- the idea that it needs to preserve screwed up depictions of people to be in some way authentic to an era, is ridiculous.
And your relativism is misguided. Women in the Edwardian era most certainly DID become doctors and lawyers and teachers and entrepreneurs. The idea that independent women 'did not exist' then is historical garbage. It might have been uncommon, and it was certainly difficult, but to deny the possibility is just ignorant.
In the movie, Eliza's father refuses her any money, ostensibly to protect her from the burdens of middle class morality, but he declares, without any apparent hint of irony, that she is now equipped to make a go of life for herself. It is a pity that neither GBS nor the film makers thought to take this to its proper resolution and instead give us a working class woman scrubbed up nicely who is dependent for her happiness and security on the largess of men.
That GBS wrote the play when the suffragette movement was already a generation old and the movie version was made when the feminist movement was in full stride, makes any appeal to 'unawareness' disingenuous.
And don't even get me started on the classist claptrap in this GBS BS.
the movie version was made when the feminist movement was in full stride
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It is true that the suffragettes were very active at the time this play was written. There were the militant and non militant suffragettes. The non militant ones believed in peaceful protest, writing letters, petitioning etc. The militant ones went out and smashed windows and set fire to letter boxes and put bombs in Westminster Abbey and Lloyd George's house.
shareShaw ought to have known better? That's what he wrote it about--the relationships between classes, and between men and women. You totally missed the point of "Pygmalion", that is if you've ever even read or seen it, and you know nothing about Shaw.
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