Rebecca

Based on a 1938 novel of the same name and Alfred Hitchcock’s first American production, Rebecca also won the famed Director his only Best Picture Oscar. A young woman (Joan Fontaine) meets an aristocratic widower (Laurence Olivier) in Monte Carlo and following a brief romance the two are wed. The woman returns to England and to her husband’s Cornish Estate where she discovers that the spectre of her husband’s late wife still looms large.

It took me a long time to get into Rebecca (that came out wrong). It took me a long time to get into the film (that’s better) and it wasn’t until the last half hour or so that it was able to hold my attention. I found that I had little interest in the plot which unravelled at a fairly measured pace. The final few scenes though were quite spectacular and helped me to forget the unfortunate boredom which I encountered during the first ninety minutes.

My Fair Lady

The winner of eight Academy Awards including the coveted Best Picture, My Fair Lady is based on the stage musical of the same name and tells the story of a young working class flower seller called Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) who is taken in by an arrogant phonetics Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) who bets that he can transform the young woman’s gutter mouth and slovenly demeanour into that of a lady who could pass for Aristocracy under close inspection in just six months. The film can rightly be called a classic and contains some of the most recognisable songs in all of musical cinema.

The film is lavishly designed and very well made, featuring some incredible sets which have such a realistic look that I wasn’t totally convinced they weren’t real, despite being more than familiar with some of the locations. The entire film was shot in California but creates a vision of London as real as I’ve seen in any American film. And not a single shot of Big Ben or a ‘London, England’ caption. Bliss. It is also a very well acted film on the whole with just one exception. Rex Harrison won a more than deserved Oscar for his performance and Stanley Holloway and Gladys Cooper were also recognised with deserved nominations but the actor who lets the film down is its lead, Audrey Hepburn.