After I watched the 1964 movie, My Fair Lady, directed by George Cukor and based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 Pygmalion, I came to realize many reasons why Eliza (Audrey Hepburn) should have gotten away from Higgins (Rex Harrison). She was treated like dirt as if she were nobody. Higgins was very abusive verbally to her, and he treated her worse than he treated his other associates, friends and servants alike. Even though I thought he was a real jerk, Eliza, apparently, thought differently. It seemed that, the meaner he was to her, the more feelings she developed for him. I was completely amazed because I would have been to complete opposite. He was a jerk the first time they met, but she was determined to go to his home for lessons. Not only that, she was determined to fall for him even after she had seen his true self.
It was extremely hard to tell if Higgins had feelings for Eliza. To me, this was just another reason Eliza should have left him. In many love stories, the man starts out as a jerk; but, at the end, he is an innocent sweetheart. Higgins was the same throughout the entire movie. The most he ever said about Eliza was that he missed her presence. However, he never showed any romantic feelings or tender emotions toward her. To me, he implied that he just missed hanging out with her. The way Higgins played his role was different from the way in which similar roles are played in most other romance films, which was shocking. Usually, there is a change in emotion somewhere in a romance film but not in the movie My Fair Lady. Higgins was the same character all the way through the movie.
It is love stories that catch the eyes of many. My Fair Lady was a movie that many loved. I, on the other hand, was somewhat disturbed by the film. I wanted to shake some sense into Eliza from the beginning. I just could not relate to her character at all. She was very naïve, and I could not understand how she could have feelings for Higgins at all because of the way he treated her and never showed any strongly affectionate emotion.