Warner Brothers Justice Society: World War II (2021) New Images!
Made for a reported $224,000 budget, Doctor X earned nearly $600,000, further proving that the genre was highly profitable. The film has gone on to achieve a firm cult-film status. Perhaps most memorable, the film is mentioned in the musical play The Rocky Horror Show (and later the film version The Rocky Horror Picture Show) written by Richard O' Brien.
Scott MacQueen who
recently worked on another Pre-Code horror Mystery of the Wax
Museum (1933) has made it his mission to bring Doctor X back to
horrifying life. In an exclusive interview, Scott discusses with me the labor
of love resurrecting this 1930s horror classic.
When did you start
restoring Doctor X?
SM: This round of restoration began in 2020. The print was turned up by Ron Haver when he
was working on his A Star Is Born restoration in the early 1980s. In
1985, Bob Gitt did an analog restoration which was a matter of making a color
Internegative on camera-negative stock, wetgate. It was done very carefully by
Pete Commandini and he probably got the very best results that could be done at
that time with the tools available. Bob re-recorded the sound and did basic
de-clicking to make a new track. Flashforward to 2021 and, thirty-five plus
years later, we have new digital tools. Now, we can do things you could never
dream of in the analog realm. We proposed the project to The Film Foundation,
who partnered on the restoration with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
What state was the
original material in?
SM: Doctor X only
survives in that single 1932 nitrate print. It was very scratched and battered.
It had a lot of clicks and scratches and scrapes and perforation damage. Digital
was a great help to address issues like that. The print has splices from wear
and use, similar to the Mystery of the
Wax Museum print that we worked with in the prior season for The Film
Foundation. At Warner Bros. back in the day, they must have cobbled together a
‘best copy’ from several prints that they had on hand. The point was to have a
fairly good studio viewing copy without spending the money to make a new one
or, by that time the two-color process was not available. When you look at two-color
prints from that time period, no two look alike. Often the color drifts
throughout the reel based on the dye exhaustion during the printing. There are pick-ups often where the reel end
from one source was completed by another and the color temperature would change.
You get to the last minute of a reel and suddenly it can pop from cold to warm,
or warm to cold, because you are going to a different print made at a different
time. We were able to correct it almost imperceptibly. We were still stuck with
a jump cut at times because a frame was often lost when they assembled the
print. For example, it might pop forward one frame, so you are aware of that
pop.
When the Blu-ray comes out, it will have examples of before-and-after,
and the audience will be able to see these differences. That will be quite an
education for what we faced. We did have fragments from a second print that
turned up which allowed us to fix one egregious break in the film and return
part of a scene and dialogue that were missing from the Warner Bros. studio
print. That studio print has been sent out for public screenings many, many
times in the last fifty years, so there were loses and damage today compared to
the 1985 preservation negative. Projectionists
made additional sets of change-over cues by slashing the frames and applying ink for their house change-over cues. We had to work around all of that.
What was the most
challenging aspect of this specific restoration undertaking?
SM: The most challenging moment in the whole restoration is
at the mounting of Reel 1A to 1B. Though the prints would have been sent out in
one-thousand-foot rolls in 1932, in later years the practice was to double them
up into two-thousand-foot reels. Where those two reels were joined there was
footage and an entire line missing. Only twenty-frames (less than one second)
remained of an eight-second shot where Lionel Atwill talks to the policemen. I
took the audio from the black-and-white version (shot contemporaneously for
foreign release) and placed that in position where there was missing audio. The
difficulty with the scene was it’s a moving camera shot. We were able to get
all of the missing dialogue but still lacked six full seconds of picture. There
were twenty frames in UCLA’s print, there were eighty-eight frames that we
could use from the Library of Congress scraps. It was scratched and damaged
worse than ours, terrible color, but we were able to patch it in and did digital
restoration to paint out the scratches, as was done for the entire film. We
re-balanced the color and then we had to make sure it was in the same register,
with the same sizing as the frames we had. After that, we had something like one
hundred-and-forty-five frames. We had to do frame-stretching to fill out those
missing fifty-frames. Now when we hear Lionel Atwill say, “I spent twenty-six
years building up the reputation of this institution”, there is still this
weird jump-cut in the middle of the shot, so it’s a compromise. That was the
most difficult fix and probably the most resourcefulness solution we
encountered.
MV: That’s incredible. This reminds me of when you did the
restored audio for Mystery of the Wax
Museum.
SM: Yes, in Wax Museum I went on an expedition into
darkest Warner Bros. and watched every Glenda Farrell movie from that period to
find her saying, “Keep your trap shut” in the movie Life Begins.
(Both laugh)
MV: I think that’s just incredible, the lengths you will go
to preserve a film.
SM: Thanks. There are actually two more examples like that
in Doctor X. For example, when Dr.
Xavier reenacts the Moon Killer murders, he presents wax figures to his shackled
audience, describing them as “people whose lives were snuffed out.” There’s a splice in the color print. Going
back to the black-and-white version, Lionel says, “Peoples whose lives were
snuffed out to satisfy the desires of a monster.” We were able to move the line
just a few seconds earlier in the shot. We just moved the line a couple of
frames to make room for, “…desires of a monster!” (Laughs).
There’s another oddity I discovered during my final
evaluation. During the play-within-the-play reenactment, all of the doctors are
shackled to their seats. Curtiz is cutting from face to face and he cuts to a
shot of Professor Haines, who exclaims, “Doctor, I protest!” I realized it was
the wrong shot of him. He was looking off over his shoulder to the left-hand
side and I’m thinking, “That doesn’t feel right because you should see his lips
moving.” Normally I’d check the film in my workroom, but due to the COVID-19
lock-down, I called down to our post house, Roundabout, and asked them to check
this spot on the nitrate print. They confirmed that there was a splice, and the
“wrong” shot was there. We pulled the 1985 preservation negative and there was the
correct shot of Professor Haines facing forward saying, “Doctor, I protest!”
Somewhere between 1985 and 2021, someone replaced that shot in the nitrate
print. Where they got that shot from and why they did it is an absolute
mystery. We scanned that one shot from the 1985 negative. Those were the major
oddities that we encountered.
SM: It was considered, but the additional cost might have
defeated us. I understand that Warner Bros. recently announced that it will be
included on the Blu-ray.
MV: The black-and-white is interesting because it contains
alternate footage, some of which you already mentioned.
SM: I read about the original production reports and learned that about the alternate shoot when I wrote about the film in 1985 for American Cinematographer magazine. The reports showed that the unit shot side-by-side unless something was complex, in which case Technicolor shot first. Differences that I remember are the Mott Street Morgue sign in Reel One; it’s a travelling shot in color and a stationary shot in black-and-white. When Lee Tracey’s in the “bawdy house,” as the script calls it, Mae Busch as the Madam approaches Lee and in one version she asks, “Didn’t I meet you in Havana?” and in the other version she asks, “Didn’t I meet you in Bermuda?” Also, there’s a scene where Lee Tracy is locked in the closet full of bones -- I love it, in the script it’s written, “This is the room where they keep all the bones and skeletons. We all have one, don’t we? So, while Tracy’s in there, he jostles a skeleton and it starts to bounce, and he starts to sing a song and clap his hands for it to dance to. In each version he ad-libs a different tune.
There are other differences such as the camera elevation. Some
shots are at eye level versus shooting up or shooting down.
But, in the synthetic flesh sequence as Preston Foster is transforming, he’s
been stirring the pot and putting the glop on himself. There is a dissolve to a
high shot way from the back with his hands on his head as he finishes shaping
it into a cone; then it cuts to a front shot where his face is lowered and he raises
up to camera, revealing now he has hair. In the black-and-white version there
is no shot from behind of his conehead. I suspect they dropped it to avoid
having to make another dissolve in an already-complex series.
Did you need to work
with a shooting script to aid in the restoration?
SM: No. I had read the script years ago, but it was of no
value to the restoration. The film was never re-issued so it never went through
a post-Hays Code review. At least not for release. It was vetted by the Hays
Code because Warners wanted to re-issue it in 1936 but because of the
cannibalism and horror Warners were discouraged from that. There were a couple
of sequences in the script that we know they filmed that never made it in the
final cut. One of them, I can’t quite place, but there are image stills of Fay
Wray walking into the library and discovering a body in a tall wingback chair. There’s
an arm dangling off the armrest – probably someone who has fallen asleep. Obviously,
it was shot since they made a still of it, but it’s not in the movie.
The other scene is with the character of Professor Haines
played by John Wray. His character is obsessed with sex and takes every
opportunity to put Joan into risqué situations. Within the re-enactment scene
Dr. Xavier is explaining the killer’s methods, and Haines interrupts him with
great gusto, asking, “Doctor, were any of the victims -- attacked?” And when
we first meet Haines, he’s reading a girlie underwear magazine, so we know that
his character is obsessive.
There’s a scene in the script where he encounters Joan in
the upper-hallway and holds forth a book, gushing, “I’d like to show you something
-- it’s a very old book of Japanese erotica. Some of the drawings are a little
naughty.” And he’s pushing it towards her and she’s protesting, and Xavier comes
in and says, “Doctor Haines I told you before about this behavior.” To which he
replies, “Oh Doctor, you still misunderstand my motives.” That was filmed but
cut. It doesn’t really add a lot except maybe some black comedy. Zanuck made
sure that these films moved like express trains. There wasn’t an ounce of fat
on his pictures even if it meant small sacrifices like this.
  |
| A still from the cut scene between Doctor Haines (John Wray) and Joanne (Fay Wray) |
For people who are
not familiar with the restoration process, can you go into some detail about
what takes place?
SM: You work on the picture and the sound separately. The
old dye-transfer prints tend to be fairly heavy and blocked in the shadows. The nitrate print would have been cleaned to
remove debris, oil and dirt, then scanned by Warner Bros. on their Director
scanner at 4k, which is 4096x3112 pixels. This ensures that you capture the
full dynamic range. The raw scans appear a little pale to the eye, as you’re
walking the tightrope right down the middle to capture everything. As long as
the information is there you can adjust it however you like. Warner provided those
scans to our vendor, Roundabout Entertainment, who performed the dirt clean up
with digital restoration techniques to remove scratches and tears. So, that’s
the first pass, with artists doing that. Then the image needed to be de-flickered
because there was a lot of fluctuation in the print. That had been true of Mystery of the Wax Museum as well.
We were able to smooth that out, then stabilize the jitters that caused the
film to weave at times. At the time, colorist Gregg Garvin did Mystery of the Wax Museum for us. I guided him through the look of
two-color. Two-color is an odd animal if you aren’t familiar with it, and Gregg
was uncertain how it should look. He pre-built it in one direction relying on
his own instincts. I said, “No, two-color has this kind of palate” and I
showed him examples as we worked together. Very quickly he understood and
dialed it in where it needed to be. The difficulty with Doctor X was
that we were all under COVID-19 lock-down. I was working from home; I could not
go to the archive nor to my vendors. Roundabout was on a skeleton crew with distancing
and masking. Roundabout were still working but I could not be with Gregg. I
already knew his talents and he understood what I wanted. He did the initial
grade and sent me QuickTime files which I reviewed on my computer at home. I
made my corrections and certain things that I knew were in the lighting scheme but
not apparent in the scan, such as certain cross lights were implemented. There’s
a plaque of Dr. Xavier’s Institute at night along a wall and Renahan had lit
the bottom of the plaque with a green-blue cross light. Gregg couldn’t be
certain of that because in the print he had it was faint. So, I asked him to
augment that with more saturation, so it matched the intention.
The audio also progressed separately at Audio Mechanics. I
could not be with engineer John Polito, but our working relationships spans 30
years and several hundred projects, so he and I are well-versed on antique film
sound. He also sent me sound files and I auditioned critically and made my
changes. Such as, where I wanted to lower the noise floor a few more decibels. You
must be careful, you don’t want “digital black”, where everything goes dead
silent. I like the sound to have an organic nest to sit in and optical sound
has that organic sound. I wanted to get rid of extraneous noise without
crossing that threshold. I found additional hums from the camera noise that
John had missed. They’re fairly common in old movies. The better the track, the
better you hear them and the more you clean the track the more you hear them. They
tend to be pure tones, multiples of 60 cycles electric motors. The Technicolor
camera always gave off a sound and can be present depending on how close it was
to the mic.
So, we got all those out but there was one mystery section
that I couldn’t figure out what was going on with it. The scene is where Fay
Wray gets up at night after the first murder and goes to look for her father
and she finds him in the laboratory where they put the dead bodies in a
makeshift morgue and Doctor Haines is already there and has a lame excuse for
why he’s already there. It’s meant to put suspicion on both Haines and Xavier as
being the killer because they find out the body has been chewed on since they
all went to bed. But while they’re standing, the sound gets extremely noisy and
to my ear it almost sounds like a Vitaphone disc. It has this swishing sound
and there’s more crackle, like an acoustical record. Warner Bros. stopped
recording disc masters in 1931 and this was shot in 1932, so it’s a real
puzzle. Doctor X’s recording was an electrical density optical through
and through. This section sounds for all the world like some wax Vitaphone
check disc for a quick playback. Perhaps that was done, and something happened
to that day’s optical sound in the lab and they lost it. Maybe it was a camera failure.
All I know is that we had to de-noise that section much more heavily, and even then
on set under the microphone, there were all these pops and clicks going on.
Now, frequently I will take things like that out, even if they are organic on
set, because they weren’t meant to be heard. Whatever was going on there was
happening live and I left it there.
How many people
worked on this restoration?
SM: I would say at least twenty people had their finger in
the pie. You had the sound engineer, the colorist, DRS artists, we had our film
prep people and our vault people to pull the prints for us. The people at
Warner Bros. did the scanning. There’s little old me but the major players
would have been the technicians at Roundabout which is about maybe four or five,
and our project supervisor Vincent Pirozzi.
During the lock-down, Martin Scorsese did an on-camera FaceTime
chat with the BFI and behind him on the wall was an original one-sheet for Doctor
X! His admiration for the film and his non-profit organization, The Film Foundation,
were instrumental in bringing Doctor X into the 21st century and
so we can all be grateful for that.
 |
In the age of COVID-19 John Polito at Audio Mechanics works in isolation in his sound suite, sharing proxies via the internet with Scott MacQueen.
 |
Similarly, Roundabout’s masked colorist Greg Garvin fine tunes the color correction in isolation, based on MacQueen’s proxy notes.
What would you like
people to know about the work that is being done at UCLA to preserve film?
SM: Our staff includes Jillian Borders and Miki Shannon, and
our activity runs the gamut from films noir like The Red House and Gun
Crazy, to the 1978 Arthur Bressan documentary Gay USA to Spencer
Williams’ Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. which is an all-black
retelling of Sadie Thompson, to perhaps the greatest Mexican film of the
classic era, Enamorda. We have the Hearst newsreels and our
preservationist Jeff Bickel has been working on civil rights episodes from the 1960s.
We preserved the wonderful, eccentric W.C. Fields musical comedy International
House and the wonderfully eccentric demonic possession film Supernatural
with Carol Lombard. Animation is represented by Betty Boop from the 1930s, the
George Pal Puppetoons from the 1940s, and the atomic war meditation [The
Way of Peace (1947). We recently preserved a brace of forgotten Fox thrillers,
William Cameron Menzies’ Almost Married from 1932 which is a pseudo-horror
movie, and Sleepers East, each of which had but one surviving print until
we preserved it. We save little pictures as well as important pictures, old and
new, like Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise from 1932 and John Sayles’ The
Secret of Roan Inish from 1994. We believe strongly in 35mm film-on-film
preservation but have strived mightily for the superior presentation and
flexible techniques of digital restoration and DCP presentation, aiming for an
amalgam of both. After all the digital massaging, the final step for Doctor
X was a new 35mm negative for long-term archiving.
Finally, are you able
to mention anything you are currently working on?
SM: We are currently working with The Film Foundation on
William Deiterle’s All That Money Can Buy (1941) from the best and most
complete elements, and Laurel and Hardy’s Pack Up Your Troubles.
Parajanov: The Last Spring, is a documentary about the iconoclast Armenian
film director Sergei Parajanov; the legendary Harold Lloyd-Preston
Sturges collaboration, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. I would say the
richness and diversity of our collections, and consequently our restorations,
is what we celebrate.
Before and After Pictures:
Doctor X Gallery: New Restored Stills & Rare Stills
A big thank you to Scott
MacQueen, The UCLA Film & Television Archive and Warner Bros. Entertainment
*Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation in association with Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Funding provided by the Hobson\Lucas Family Foundation.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. Look for DOCTOR X on Blu-ray disc and DVD – coming in Spring of 2021 from the Warner Archive Collection.
Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation (THE RED HOUSE and DIRTY GERTIE FROM HARLEM U.S.A) and the Material World Foundation (ENAMORADA).
Random Acts of Violence (2019) RLJ Entertainment
Directed By: Jay Baruchel
Starring: Jessie Williams, Jordana Brewster, Jay Baruchel, Simon Northwood
Comic book writer Todd (Jessie Williams) is finally putting to bed a infamous slasher character based on a real life serial killer. During a press tour he, his co-writer Ezra (Jay Baruchel) and Todd's girlfriend (who is also writing a book at the victims of the real life murders) murders start to happen, very much like those based on the Todd's comic. Now the creator must face his creation. Actor Jay Baruchel is probably best remembered for movies like Tropic Thunder (2008), This is the End (2013) and, the hugely popular How to Train Your Dragon series. Recently the actor has branched out into directing. Random Act of Violence based on the one-shot 2010 comic of the same name is his second feature as director.
Random Act of Violence is, like a lot of movies lately in that they have interesting concepts behind them but lack the polish to make them special. Baruchel plays with themes of serial-killer exploitations, fandom, and, more specifically fandom of slashers both real life and fictional. These are some highly effective and provoctative topics. What left me frustrated is these subjects are only lightly touched upon and never to a degree that's truly effective or challenging. Moreover, the narrative is a hodge-podge of horror troupes and a smattering of pretension via a finale narration. Not to mention the movie has some glaring plot holes that are hard to ignore. I can't mention them without spoiling it however. If you love splatter this movie delivers it in buckets full, yet, if you are looking for a timely and interesting take on fandom, comics, serial killer culture, this movie is utterly devoid of it. Sadly, Random isn't even just a fun mindless movie as the tone and story takes itself far too seriously for that.
Random Acts of Violence aims for something deep but only ends up coming off as a cold and shallow movie that isn't as smart as it thinks it is.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Kino Studio Classics 3/9/2021
Directed By: Sam Peckinpah
Starring: Warren Oats, Isela Vega, Gig Young, Robert Webber, Kris Kristofferson
Please Note: I have not seen nor reviewed the previous HD release of Alfredo Garcia from the label Twilight Time released in 2016 nor the Arrow Region B release. So, I wont be comparing the three in terms of sound/picture quality.
People like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Sam Peckinpah helped smash the doors down of Old Hollywood. Gone were the big lavish musicals and multi-million dollar biblical epics all of which were geared towards a older audience. With the guns a-blazing and bloody bodies of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde and the bullet ballet that was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and, of course the counter-culture biker odyssey Easy Rider (1969) Hollywood was seeing big changes. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia continues that tradition. A grizzled bar room pianist named Bennie (Warren Oats) along with his girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) go in search of a bounty on a man named Alfredo Garcia with the proviso that his head be brought back as proof. The search and reason for Garcia ending up in this spot leads to a blood-splattered insane journey in this '70's classic.
I admit that when I first saw Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (which was sometime in high school) I didn't get the film and its message and thus I dismissed it and moved on. However, when I got a little older and my taste in cinema matured I thankfully decided it was time to re-visit it. And, I'm glad I did because the movie really opened up for me having now seen it in a new light. Alfredo Garcia is a rough-tough nihilists movie which tends to be off-putting to a lot of people. It also further alienates its audience with unlikable characters and a very non-traditional story-arch. But, its for these reasons not to mention the films wickedly wonderful black humor that makes this movie very special.
Warren Oats has the right mixture of anti-hero world-weary and rogue charm that he is able to pull off a character that is maybe not likable but still engaging as hell. Oats its worth noting is doing his best Peckinpah impression, complete with sunglasses. As brilliant as Oats is I think its actor Isela Vega that truly offers the film its beating heart. And, its why I think the latter half of the movie has the impact that it does.
Its hard to describe this movie to newcomers only to say its a hot, sticky and smoke hazed road movie fueled solely on madness, murder and revenge. I can honestly say there is really nothing like it before or since. This movie is certainly not going to be for everybody but if you are adventurous and love to explore the early-counter-culture/western-noirs I implore you to give Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a ride.
Picture: The opening outdoor scenes of Alfredo Garcia in my opinion sum up this restoration. It's lush, vivid and retains a great deal of detail without feeling blocky or dull. The film has a rather dark at times color palate and I think that this has a nice up-tick in color and sharpness. The film has some minor artifacts present. Grain is not too heavy here and is consistent throughout. I also love how the movie retains this warmth in certain scenes, whereas in SD this would just look dark and muddy. Overall, a really good looking transfer.
Sound: Garcia has DTS 2.0 track. The soundtrack is front channel heavy but, in my opinion still offers a nice big sound. Dialogue comes through nicely with no drop-out or unwanted background noise.
Extras: Kino Studio Classics was able to port over two commentaries from Twilight Times release 1) Audio commentary with Co-Writer/Associate Producer Gordon Dawson, Moderated by Nick Redman 2) Audio commentary by Film historian Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, David Weddle and Nick Redman
New to this release is the Trailers from Hell trailer with Josh Olson. Rounding out the features is TV Spots, Trailer and Image Gallery.
The Don is Dead (1973) Kino Studio Classics 3/9/2021
Directed By: Richard Fleischer
Starring: Anthony Quinn, Frederic Forrest, Robert Forster, Al Lettieri
BELOVED WINNER OF EIGHT ACADEMY AWARDS® INCLUDING BEST PICTURE ARRIVES ON 4K ULTRA HD FOR THE FIRST TIME
Debuting May 25, 2021, 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray™ Combo Includes Over Two Hours of Bonus Content
Relive the romance, music, and comedic charms of the indelible classic MY FAIR LADY, debuting on 4K Ultra HD May 25, 2021 from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Winner of eight Academy Awards*, including Best Picture, MY FAIR LADY also won the Best Picture Golden Globe® and was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Adapted from the Broadway stage hit, the film stars Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, a role that earned him the Oscar® for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Audrey Hepburn as the unforgettable Eliza Doolittle.
The 4K Ultra HD release features stunning picture quality courtesy of a recent 8K film transfer, as well as English 7.1 Dolby TrueHD sound for the finest home presentation. The 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo also includes access to a digital copy of the film and more than two hours of previously released bonus content as detailed below:
4K Ultra HD Disc
· Feature film in 4K Ultra HD
Blu-ray Disc™
· More Loverly Than Ever: The Making of My Fair Lady Then & Now
· 1963 Production Kick-Off Dinner
· Los Angeles Premiere 10/28/1964
· British Premiere
· George Cukor Directs Baroness Bina Rothschild
· Rex Harrison Radio Interview
· Production Tests
o Lighting
o Wilfred Hyde White make-up
o Rain/set
o Covent Garden lighting test
o Alt. Higgins/Pickering screen test
· Alternate Audrey Hepburn Vocals
o Show Me
o Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?
· Galleries
· Comments on a Lady
o Andrew Lloyd Webber
o Martin Scorsese
· Theatrical Featurettes
· Story of a Lady
· Design for a Lady
· The Fairest Fair Lady
· Trailers
· Theatrical Reissue: Poster Illustration
· Theatrical Reissue: Poster Illustration Reserved Seats Trailer
· Theatrical Reissue: Poster Illustration Awards
· Theatrical Reissue
· Awards
o Rex Harrison BFI Honor
o Rex Harrison Golden Globe Acceptance Speech
o Academy Awards Ceremony Highlights 4/5/65
Synopsis
This beloved adaptation of the Broadway stage hit stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, a sassy, working-class London street vendor, and Rex Harrison as the elitist Professor Higgins, who attempts to turn Eliza into a sophisticated lady through proper tutoring. But, when the humble flower girl blossoms into the toast of London society, her teacher may have a lesson or two to learn himself.
