Gabriel Pascal - Collaborations With Shaw

Collaborations With Shaw

In time, however, Pascal's desire to make his mark on cinema returned and Pascal took a ship back to America penniless but undaunted. He landed in San Francisco where he spent some time deciding what to do next. Then it struck him to approach George Bernard Shaw, whom Pascal had met auspiciously many years earlier. During that earlier meeting Shaw, who had been impressed with the young Pascal's passion for art and cinema, had told him to pay him a visit when he was entirely penniless. Pascal was now exactly that. He then sought out Shaw, first by going to New York City hidden in the toilet of the train, then convincing a sea captain to give him a lift to England.

Somehow he did convince Shaw to give him the rights to his plays, beginning with Pygmalion (1938), which was an enormous international hit, both critically and financially. Pascal tried to convince Shaw to let Pygmalion be turned into a musical, but the outraged Shaw explicitly forbade it, having had a bad experience with the operetta The Chocolate Soldier (based on Shaw's Arms and the Man). He was though the only man to convince George Bernard Shaw to adjust his scripts to the new medium of cinema, gaining concessions from Shaw that no other man could. Pascal even invented the line for Pygmalion (later utilised by Lerner and Loewe in the musical version, My Fair Lady) "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" and Shaw, by now publicly referring to Pascal as a genius, wrote the line into the script. He was named in 1938 as one of the world's most famous men by Time magazine along with Adolf Hitler and the Pope.

Pascal followed Pygmalion with Major Barbara (1941) which he directed as well as produced. Major Barbara was filmed in London during aerial bombing by the Nazis. During air raids the crew and cast had to dodge into bomb shelters. Pascal never stopped the production and the film was completed on schedule. But Pascal became more and more extravagant, Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), the next Pascal film of a Shaw play, was the most expensive British movie ever at that time, and a big financial and critical flop. Pascal insisted on importing sand from Egypt to achieve the right cinematic colors for the film. Shaw had become more difficult to work with. After the success of Pygmalion, which was shortened in its transition from stage to screen, he increasingly refused to let his plays be cut.

Shaw's praise of him became ever more extravagant. He wrote in 1946:

Gabriel Pascal is one of those extraordinary men who turn up occasionally – say once in a century – and may be called godsends in the arts to which they are devoted. Pascal is doing for films what Diaghileff did for the Russian Ballet. . . He shocks me by his utter indifference to cost; but the result justifies him; and Hollywood, which always values a director in proportion to the money he throws away, is now at his feet: for he throws it away like water. The man is a genius: That is all I have to say about him.

Pascal managed to produce one more movie, Androcles and the Lion (1952), but by this time he was suffering from cancer. Pascal was the only producer ever to have major movie deals with seven separate countries on three continents: Hungary, Italy, Germany, China, India, England, and the USA.