My Fair Lady
George Cukor (dir.) | film | 1964
Pretty Woman
Garry Marshall (dir.) | film | 1990
Photo courtesy of Everett
Photo courtesy of Everett
After months of tutelage by Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) charms London society with her beauty and grace in My Fair Lady. Higgins contends that accent rather than money determines one’s place in the world. While he’s ignorant about what scraping up a living has been like for Eliza, who sings about such simple desires as “a room somewhere / far away from the cold night air,” he’s right: once well-spoken, Eliza passes as a lady.
Prostitution, of course, is a lot more lucrative than selling flowers, and Vivian, the streetwalker heroine of Pretty Woman, thinks she’s struck it rich when she makes a $3,000-a-week deal. But she soon sees that a better long-term investment would be actually landing the rich guy. Though the film purports to promote love over money, in its most satisfying scene Vivian returns to a boutique to deliver a comeuppance to a salesperson who booted her out earlier because of her attire. Now impeccably dressed, she holds up her shopping bags and lets the snooty clerk know she’s lost out on a really big commission. That’s pretty damning in a film in which everything, even the heroine, has a price tag.
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