2014-2015学年高中英语 Unit 4 Pygmalion My Fair Lady2素材 新人教版选修8

My Fair Lady 2Audrey Hepburn is radiant and touching as the poor flower seller Eliza Doolittle who challenges her mentor's makeover powers, before eventually passing for a lady in London society... She is skillfully transformed into an elegant lady by a speech professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and taught to speak properly... From first frame to last, the film is slick, graceful, gorgeous to behold, with costumes and sets richly evoking the Edwardian era... 'My Fair Lady' begins in London, on a rainy evening outside Covent Garden, where a 'respectable girl' is selling bouquets of violets... Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetics and linguistics expert, confronts the 'deliciously low so horribly dirty' Eliza Doolittle for the first time... In the best tradition, their first songs reveal their characters: 'Wouldn't It Be Loverly?' expresses Eliza's own ideas of what she dreams, while in 'Why Can't the English Learn to Speak' Higgins sings his despair over the deterioration of the English language, and displays his hard, irritable, intolerant, and elegantly arrogant nature... Lerner and Loewe's songs are shear delight as the story moves from Higgins's wager with sympathetic Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he can change the street girl with a strong cockney accent into a different human being by teaching her 'to speak beautifully' and pass her off in an upper class lady within six months... Higgins and Pickering are both single men, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, has misgivings about the way in which they are proposing to amuse themselves without caring about the consequences for the "common ignorant girl." The songs are extraordinary in their ability to enrich our knowledge of the c...