Get Me to the Church on Time.

 This one has been a movie legend since before I was born, a Dutch version of "Pygmalion" that so incensed George Bernard Shaw that he refused permission to film any of more his work, until Gabriel Pascal, once the third member of the Hungarian Alexander Korda, Michel Curtiz trio, sweet talked him into the deal that produced the Lesley Howard Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.

Well now the Nederlands film has bubbled up from obscurity on You Tube in the Eye film archive copy complete, with good integrated English sub-titles. This one’s a bit rough around the reel changes but by and large we get an excellent transfer. It’s curious and off putting to see the familiar material playing out not in Covent Garden and Mayfair but in Amsterdam and Haarlem, with characters speaking  Dutch and paying in Guilders.

We kick off with Lily Bouwmeester, made up grubby, selling her flowers in the pouring rain. In the crowd Johan De Meester’s Prof. Higgins is taking down her dialogue phonetically and the familiar plot develops. There are minor variations like an attempt to get laughs out of the “not bloody likely” routine by extending the scene as hip current speech for the socialites.  Freddy, now George, is a silly ass comic who is likely to get cut out when a distributor wants a shorter version. Matthieu van Eysden’s “Doeluttel” is similarly expendable. Lilly and her accordion get a few musical numbers - that must have gone down a treat with G.B.S. - and there is of course the “happy” ending which the author objected to, though it follows, here  pretty clumsily, a line used in most adaptations.

Pygmalion - De Meesters & Bouwmeester.

The Dutch unit’s production values are a try for polished with small, busily decorated studio decors, but the piece is non stop talk. The few attempts at cinematic material, working with the kids gang, the shopping expedition and particularly the ball, are chopped off before they get a chance to work up any steam. Of the cast only Higgins’ mother, one Emma Morel who made just one other movie, seems to be at ease in front of the camera. De Meesters’ bombastic Svengali character totally lacks the charm balancing his arrogance, which Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison traded in.

However Lily Bouwmeester, here in her initial sound film role, scored a hit. She jams in a few moments - her delayed reaction to the first experience of chocolate - and nearly makes us forget she was going forty when she made the film, which became a personal triumph for her repeating Eliza Doolittle in stage productions during the rest of her career.

Director Ludwig Berger, then interdicted by Josef Goebbels, moved in exalted circles, making Ein Walzertraum for Erich Pommer at UFA in 1925, directing Emil Jannings in Hollywood, reworking Max Linder’s Le Petit Café for Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, presenting the then stellar Pierre Fresnay - Yvonne Printemps duo in Trois valses and filming on The Thief of Bagdad for Korda. He became a musicals specialist. You would have expected him to be totally within his element here but he fails miserably to make the piece build to dramatic peaks or present the characters as sympathetic. His command of the Dutch language is suspect.

It would have been a better story if this one had turned out to be a suppressed masterwork but sadly what we get is a rather draggy oddity. Still, how many pre-Bert Haanstra  Dutch movies have you seen?

Barrie Pattison 2021