Robert Osborne got into a bit of a disagreement with Drew Barrymore who picked it as an "Essential" must see film. Osborne seemed to think that Audrey Hepburn ruined the movie because she was too elegant and not right for the role of the Cockney uncultured flower girl. He also lamented the fact she was not allowed to sing in her own voice, which was really not that bad. He did describe how otherwise Hepburn was movie royalty in her other film roles. He said he would have preferred to see Julie Andrews in the lead role who could have pulled off a better transition in his opinion but was not chosen because at the time she wasn't a major box office draw. I think he might have had a point about the credibility of Hepburn's transformation, but this is one of the greatest musicals ever filmed and Rex Harrison was great. I think I'd have to side with Barrymore about this being one of the necessary films to see for any classic movie fan.

sexist piece of crap. (Yeah, I know...the play isn't sexist, it's a play about a professor who is sexist...yadda yadda yadda...)

The music is good, though.

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1912.

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first presented in 1871. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)

of the British class system and a commentary on women's independence, in my opinion it failed.

Higgins's last line in the screen version blew any chance that I'd perceive the play as anything but classist and sexist.

Eliza, apparently having had second thoughts after declaring an end to their relationship, returns to him - giving him a wonderful opportunity to make amends and declare his true feelings for her. He does, but it isn't love he feels for her, which he demonstrates all too clearly when he reclines in his chair, tilts his hat down over his eyes, and says to her, "My slippers."