MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

“What a glorious feeling…I’m happy again!â€쳌 These three all-time favorite musicals strike a glorious feeling indeed! This star-studded, Oscar®-heavy trio includes My Fair Lady (Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn. 1964/172 min.), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor. 1952/102 min.) and Gigi (Leslie Caron, Louis Jordan, Maurice Chevalier. 1958/119 min.). 3 DVDs. Color/G.

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 3
• Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround, Dolby Digital Mono
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: Spanish, English, French

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Actor - 1964 (Rex Harrison)
•     Won Best Adapted Score - 1964 (Andre Previn)
•     Won Best Color Art Direction - 1964 (George James Hopkins, Cecil Beaton, Gene Allen)
•     Won Best Color Cinematography - 1964 (Harry Stradling)
•     Won Best Color Costume Design - 1964 (Cecil Beaton)
•     Won Best Director - 1964 (George Cukor)
•     Won Best Picture - 1964 (Jack L. Warner)
•     Won Best Sound - 1964 (George Groves)
•     Won Best Adapted Screenplay - 1958 (Alan Jay Lerner)
•     Won Best Art Direction - 1958 (Keogh Gleason, William Horning, Henry W. Grace, Preston Ames)
•     Won Best Color Cinematography - 1958 (Joseph Ruttenberg)
•     Won Best Costume Design - 1958 (Cecil Beaton)
•     Won Best Director - 1958 (Vincente Minnelli)
•     Won Best Editing - 1958 (Adrienne Fazan)
•     Won Best Musical Score - 1958 (Andre Previn)
•     Won Best Picture - 1958 (Arthur Freed)
•     Won Best Song - 1958 (Frederick Loewe, Alan Jay Lerner)
•     Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay - 1964 (Alan Jay Lerner)
•     Nominated Best Editing - 1964 (William H. Ziegler)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actor - 1964 (Stanley Holloway)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actress - 1964 (Gladys Cooper)
•     Nominated Best Musical Score - 1952 (Lennie Hayton)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actress - 1952 (Jean Hagen)

• American Film Institute

•     Won 100 Greatest American Movies - 1998

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Won Best Film - Any Source - 1965 (George Cukor)
•     Nominated Best British Film - 1959 (Vincente Minnelli)
•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1952 (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

• Directors Guild of America

•     Won Best Director - 1964 (George Cukor)
•     Won Best Director - 1958 (Vincente Minnelli)
•     Nominated Best Director - 1952 (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Won Best Director - 1964 (George Cukor)
•     Won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comed - 1964 (Rex Harrison)
•     Won Best Picture - Musical or Comedy - 1964
•     Won Best Director - 1958 (Vincente Minnelli)
•     Won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pic - 1958 (Hermione Gingold)
•     Won Best Picture - Musical - 1958
•     Won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comed - 1952 (Donald O'Connor)
•     Nominated Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pictu - 1964 (Stanley Holloway)
•     Nominated Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Com - 1964 (Audrey Hepburn)
•     Nominated Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comed - 1958 (Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jordan)
•     Nominated Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Com - 1958 (Leslie Caron)
•     Nominated Best Picture - Musical or Comedy - 1952

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1990
•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1988

• National Board of Review

•     Nominated Best Picture - 1964
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1958
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1952

• New York Film Critics Circle

•     Won Best Actor - 1964 (Rex Harrison)
•     Won Best Picture - 1964

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2002

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  George Cukor, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli

• Producer:

  Jack L. Warner, Herman Levin, Arthur Freed

• Screenwriter:

  Alan Jay Lerner

• Play Author:

  George Bernard Shaw

• Screenwriter:

  Betty Comden, Adolph Green

• Screen Story:

  Betty Comden, Adolph Green

• Book Author:

  Colette

• Screenwriter:

  Frederick Loewe

• Play Author:

  Anita Loos

• Cinematographer:

  Harry Stradling, Harold Hal Rosson, Ray June, Joseph Ruttenberg

• Musical Arrangement:

  Alexander Courage

• Composer (Music Score):

  Frederick Loewe, Andre Previn

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Andre Previn

• Composer (Music Score):

  Nacio Herb Brown

• Songwriter:

  Betty Comden, Roger Edens

• Composer (Music Score):

  Arthur Freed

• Songwriter:

  Adolph Green

• Composer (Music Score):

  Lennie Hayton

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Lennie Hayton

• Songwriter:

  Fred Brown, Al Goodhart, Hoffman

• Composer (Music Score):

  Alan Jay Lerner

• Editor:

  William H. Ziegler, Adrienne Fazan

• Production Designer:

  Cecil Beaton, Gene Allen

• Art Director:

  Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons, Preston Ames, William Horning

• Set Designer:

  George James Hopkins, Edwin B. Willis, Jacque Mapes, Cecil Beaton, Henry W. Grace, F. Keogh Gleason

• Costume Designer:

  Cecil Beaton, David Berman, Walter Plunkett

• Makeup:

  Gordon Bau, William J. Tuttle, Charles Parker

• Special Effects:

  Linwood G. Dunn, Warren Newcombe, Irving G. Ries

• Choreography:

  Hermes Pan

• Lyricist:

  Alan Jay Lerner

• Book (Musical):

  Alan Jay Lerner

• Still Photographer:

  Bob Willoughby

• Lyricist:

  Arthur Freed

• Scenic Artist:

  Cecil Beaton

REVIEWS:

• My Fair Lady is one of the screen's joyous achievements, an elegant musical filled with adult characters who think before they speak. Exquisitely produced by Warner Bros, it represents the zenith of the movie musical as an art form and as popular entertainment. Rex Harrison leads an impeccable cast, and, yes, that's Marni Nixon singing for Audrey Hepburn, but Hepburn is perfectly cast otherwise. The major star of the film is perhaps set designer/costume designer Cecil Beaton, whose visual contributions immediately impacted European and U.S. fashion trends. One of the best-looking movies ever made, My Fair Lady took eight Oscars, including Best Picture. Hepburn failed to be nominated in the Best Actress category, which was won by Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins, in what many observers saw as backlash against Andrews' not being cast in the movie after originating the role of Eliza on stage. ~ Richard Gilliam, Rovi
• Vincente Minnelli's Gigi was arguably the last great movie of the director's career and the last great musical made at MGM. It was an improbable hit in its time, and it is often denigrated as a poor relation of My Fair Lady, which, like Gigi, was the work of composer-screenwriters Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. In 1958, it had been five years since Minnelli's last successful musical The Band Wagon, and the genre was believed to be running out of steam at the box office. This project, based on a Colette story about a young courtesan matched up with a wealthy man, seemed unlikely material in the supposedly staid 1950s. But Lerner and Loewe's script downplayed the morally equivocal nature of the adults and the title character (without totally losing it) and wrapped the story around a score that drew on the richest melodic influences of My Fair Lady, which was just going into previews at the time. Gigi even inherited one song dropped from the stage version of My Fair Lady, and the score gave it the feel of a 19th century operetta, with the sweeping, melodic elegance of the Viennese tradition and the sauciness of its Parisian counterpart. It was Minnelli's enviable task to make all of this look beautiful, shooting partly in Paris (a privilege he'd been denied on An American In Paris) with a dream cast. The result was a movie that pleased audiences; got away with presenting a tale of prostitution to a general audience in a decade when the screen supposedly didn't even acknowledge the existence of moral terpitude, much less allow its heroes and heroines to have engaged in it (see Detective Story); and introduced a brace of superb songs that still play to audiences. Gigi was the last great score and script that Minnelli ever got to work with, and it is the last MGM musical that is essential viewing even for non-fans of Minnelli and the movie musical. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain is usually lumped together with the other MGM "songbook" musicals of its era, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon. In contrast to those two outstanding works of music and motion, however, Singin' in the Rain had an additional layer of importance and appeal as one of Hollywood's relatively rare feature films about itself. The Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown songbook is on one level the center of the movie, but it's also a backdrop for a humorous and delightfully stylized look back at the crisis that engulfed the movie mecca and its inhabitants once synchronized sound came to films. The musical was made in 1952, only 25 years after the beginning of the series of events depicted and satirized in the script, so recent in time that there were still plenty of old studio hands (including sound department head Douglas Shearer) who had firsthand memories of the actual events. The fit was natural for the music, too, since Freed and Brown had been on hand (and even onscreen) for the arrival of sound to MGM in 1929. The film is full of delightful in-jokes about its subject and the people who lived through the era: Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont is a burlesque of silent-movie sex symbol Clara Bow, whose decidedly urban style of diction never really fit her image or what the public wanted, while Millard Mitchell's R.F. Simpson was a gently jocular satire of Freed himself, who could never quite visualize the elaborate musical numbers whose scripts and budgets he was approving as producer. Donald O'Connor's Cosmo Brown was an onscreen stand-in for men like Franz Waxman and dozens of other musicians, who moved from writing arrangements or conducting the major theater orchestras to heading the music departments of the studios. The resulting musical, in addition to offering a brace of memorable songs and performances (with a startlingly sultry featured spot for Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Melody" sequence, as a bonus), gave audiences a short-course pop-history lesson about how the movies learned to talk, sing, and dance. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi