Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of My Fair Lady. In this musical, two old dudes make a bet that they can transform a poor girl off the streets, train her in the ways of upperclass society, and convince everyone in a ball that she’s a dutchess. Rex Harrison recruits flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn). Anyway, he kinda falls in love with her, though she is a little miffed that he doesn’t appreciate her. After a song about feeling lonely, Eliza shows up to which Harrison replies, “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?”

A fine ending… except it’s definitely one that playwright George Bernard Shaw (whose Pygmalion was adapted to My Fair Lady) did not agree with.

In a very, very long article, Shaw explains very Tumblr-like why he does not ship Higgins and Eliza:

Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any, even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist between them.

….

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

So yeah, the line “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” is exactly the opposite of what Shaw intended. Higgins and Eliza were never meant to be together, and the play wasn’t structured as such. However, even when Pygmalion was playing on the West End, audiences wanted the happy ending… and the producers obliged.

It might be because I had to read Pygmalion in high school, so I am familiar with how it was supposed to end. But the ending of My Fair Lady always felt tacked on to me.

Today’s bonus prompt: have you ever watched a film where the happy ending felt a little forced?