Pygmalion

Pygmalion (1938) is a British classic you can watch online on iFILM. It's the first screen version of Bernard Shaw's play and the distant ancestor of the musical My Fair Lady.

Phonetics professor Henry Higgins boasts that within six months he can pass off a Cockney flower girl as a duchess, and Colonel Pickering takes the bet. So Eliza Doolittle lands in Higgins's house, complete with a sharp accent, a sharper tongue, and pride of her own. The grueling lessons in speech and manners begin. Yet the closer Eliza gets to playing the lady, the clearer it becomes that she isn't the only one being remade. Leslie Howard plays Higgins as dry and self-absorbed, while Wendy Hiller gives Eliza a stubborn, fully alive presence the whole scheme depends on.

Shaw wrote the screenplay himself and took home an Oscar for it — making him the rare figure to hold both a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Academy Award. The title nods to the ancient myth of a sculptor who fell for his own creation. Witty and surprisingly modern, it's a story about language, class, and the power one person can hold over another's fate. Stream Pygmalion (1938) online on iFILM.