7/14/2023 0 Comments Educating rita netflix![]() He’s almost always worth watching, and Frank is one of his best screen characters-a statement that says a lot and that I’ll stand by it. However, she’s unsure of herself initially and she plays it beautifully. She’s funny, takes no shit from anyone, and isn’t afraid to tell Frank her mind. Julie Walters is absolutely charming as Rita. In fact, Educating Rita might be the first time I really like both of the characters in the story. In Pretty Woman, I don’t like either of the principle characters very much. ![]() I like Rex Harrison’s Higgins in My Fair Lady, but not so much Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza. I like Wendy Hiller’s Eliza Doolittle in the 1936 version of Pygmalion, but not Leslie Howard’s Henry Higgins. One of the biggest issues with this story is that we have to like both people. ![]() These are people who genuinely care about each other but the relationship is never really fulfilled. There are definite sparks between Rita and Frank. What works here is not that the romance is an unrequited one but merely one that is unfulfilled. One of the things it does really well is build the romance between Frank and Rita slowly and carefully. Meanwhile, Frank’s live-in girlfriend Julia (Jeananne Crowley) is having an affair with Brian (Michael Williams), one of Frank’s colleagues.Įducating Rita does a lot of things well. Rita has decided that she doesn’t want to have children until she has “discovered herself,” something that leads to tension between them and eventually breaks up their marriage. Her husband Denny (Malcolm Douglas) wants her to give up her education and start making babies instead. Rita struggles with the idea of education, not because of the difficulty of the material but because she has no one in her life to support her. He realizes that if she goes through the university program, she’ll end up seeing the world like the rest of his students. He recognizes that Rita is bright if rough around the edges and that she has a unique perspective on things and on literature. He doesn’t want to take her on as a student because he sees certain things in her. His initial meeting with Rita is an interesting one. Frank is known to sometimes teach his classes from inside a whiskey bottle. Instead, he simply gave up writing altogether and threw himself not into his work but into the bottle. Leaving him would give him something new to write about. Rita’s assigned tutor is Frank Bryant (Michael Caine).įrank is divorced and claims that his wife left him because his output of poetry was merely the same thing over and over. The idea is the students would meet with a tutor once a week, do assignments on their own, and eventually test through their courses. Open University was doing distance learning before it was cool. ![]() She dubs herself “Rita” and decides to enroll in courses at Open University in the UK. She’s definitely blue collar and she and those around her have very low expectations of her, life, and the rest of the world. Susan White (Julie Walters in her big screen debut) is a hairdresser who, based on her accent, is from Liverpool. In the case of Educating Rita, we keep the professor, but the woman who is to be turned into something more is a much more willing recipient of her education. Hell, turn the man into a millionaire and the woman into a hooker and you’ve got Pretty Woman. Toss in music and you’ve got My Fair Lady. When George Bernard Shaw wrote the play of the same name, he had a character “make” a woman from the streets into a lady of society, with love blooming along the way. In the original story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who turns the heads of all the ladies makes a statue that is so perfect that he falls in love with it. ![]()
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