Here’s a fun fact about My Fair Lady: when it was made, it had a production budget of $17 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made to that point (adjusted for inflation, that comes out to about $146 million today, which still doesn’t touch the present's most expensive movies). But here’s the thing: it looks expensive. You take in these immaculate sets and amazing costumes and the money is up there on screen, not in VFX where we normally spend it, but on other departments that typically don’t create big CGI things. My Fair Lady is a good example of the lavish studio musical that reached its zenith in the 1960s before eventually falling away in the 1970s. But in My Fair Lady, we see the genre firing on all cylinders, and that becomes clear with its new 4K disc.

For those unfamiliar with the 1964 adaptation of the stage musical (based off the play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw), the film follows the tense relationship between Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) and Dr. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison). Eliza is a poor flower girl with a grating cockney accent, who dreams of being able to work at a flower shop but needs to refine her speech in order to do so. The arrogant Higgins, a doctor of phonetics, looks down on Eliza, but makes a bet with a friend that he can pass Eliza off as a lady after six months of training. The film’s twist is that although Higgins does succeed in correcting Eliza’s speech, he has to learn how to be kind (I’m not sure the story succeeds at this second point, but that’s another discussion).

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Image via Paramount

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While the story has obviously endured thanks to great numbers like “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where You Love” as well as the excellent performances from Hepburn and Harrison, as a Hollywood production, the 4K really brings out all the levels of immaculate detail in George Cukor’s film. It’s always a little jarring at first to even watch these kinds of restorations (credit here to Robert A. Harris) because it feels like you’re seeing the movie at a level of quality that those who made it didn’t even see. You’re about as close as to watching the movie through the camera’s viewfinder as you’re ever going to get, and it’s stunning to see the balance of a film that was clearly made in the 1960s and yet appears so pristine that it could have been released this year.

What the 4K really brings out (especially with HDR) is that even though this isn’t a movie that goes a lot of different places (you can always feel its stage roots), every element has been built into really perfecting those places. When you’re in Higgins’ study, which is where a large portion of the film takes place, you feel like you’re standing in a real room that stands a testament to the character’s bookishness, intelligence, and arrogance. It’s not a Hollywood set anymore; it belongs to a person, and the film benefits from having that level of detail and craft come alive thanks to the new transfer.

Musicals like My Fair Lady spared no expense in their production, and while some studio musicals are obviously better than others, this new 4K shows that there’s a whole genre and period waiting for better transfers. We’ll obviously continue to get a steady stream of action movies and favorites from the 80s and 90s in 4K, but My Fair Lady proves that some of the best productions to benefit from a 4K transfer are musicals. Cinephiles are both those most likely to appreciate these classical musicals and those most likely to keep buying physical media for their 4K needs. In the larger scheme, it may be a niche audience, but as long as studios intend to support 4K discs, they should put their best foot forward and put out new transfers of movies like My Fair Lady.

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