And this comparison, at least, Gigi wins falling down. Six years later, My Fair Lady was filmed at Warner Bros., and this, also, invites fairly direct and merciless comparison. In 1958, when Crowther wrote his review, and when producer Arthur Freed (of MGM's legendary musical A-picture production unit this wasn't the final Freed Unit musical, but it does feel like their valedictory effort) finally got the adaptation of Colette's 1944 novel and Anita Roos's 1951 play based on the novel that he'd been pushing Lerner to write for years, My Fair Lady existed solely as an unimpeachable stage masterpiece.
There is still room for Gigi to be good, even great, while being weaker than My Fair Lady - but it is almost impossible not to constantly draw the comparisons. The comparison, needless to say, does not flatter the movie: My Fair Lady has one of the finest collections of songs in the history of musical theater, and a unbreakable spine in its book, a barely-redressed version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Gigi absolutely lives in the shadow of My Fair Lady, with a list of original songs that have a virtually one-to-one correspondence, right down to giving not-Henry Higgins some speak-singing in not-"I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face". No reviewer of the 1958 MGM musical Gigi will ever come up with a better lede paragraph than the one Bosley Crowther wrote for his review in The New York Times, in which he affects modest shock at the astonishing list of coincidences between the film and a recent Broadway, before drily ending with the observation that "they've come up with a musical film that bears such a basic resemblance to My Fair Lady that may want to sue themselves." Crowther goes on to suggest that he doesn't really have a problem with this, and that Gigi still works in its own right, but the point, having been made, hangs there.