Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, move over. In the reversal of sex roles, the female losing candidate in a congressional race attempts to make over a beer distributor who she has insulted on the night of her defeat. He needs her help for a major promotion and when the candidate who beat her, dies in a freak accident, she decides to promote him for Congress.

It's wonderful how he learns to speak well and knows how to work an audience. It's also wonderful seeing how he takes the high road by refusing to submit damaging evidence that he has against his opponent's wife.

Frances Fischer steals the scenes she is in by playing our male hero's common mother, very common that is. She is often hysterical to watch.

While they both share the common thread in being defeated, this is also a story of two people with different backgrounds falling in love.

A wonderful film. I was so sorry when it ended.

It's not marketed this way, but the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie The Makeover is actually a modern remake of Pygmalion. That makes the fourth modern remake of a classic Julia Stiles has made! This movie is actually very clever, bringing to life a new side of Henry Higgins: as a woman.

Julia stars as Hannah Higgins. Her partner in her consulting firm is Colleen Pickering (played by Camryn Manheim). Hannah is a failed Congressional candidate who, on the night of her concession, overhears the appalling low-class manner of speech uttered by a beer delivery man, Eliot Doolittle (played by David Walton). She insults his English and makes fun of him, telling him that if he improved his speech he could really make something of himself. The next morning, he shows up at her office and offers to pay her for elocution lessons. On a bet with Pickering as to who gets the corner office, Higgins takes Doolittle on. The first stop on the "makeover" is at a salon, where Higgins plucks off Doolittle's grungy baseball cap and orders the hairdresser to burn it. Isn't that cute?

Since I acted in Pygmalion, I'm intimately acquainted with the script. Those who don't know it (or My Fair Lady) very well might not grasp just how clever it is. Instead of Alfred Doolittle, the drunken, disreputable father, there's Allie Doolittle (played by Frances Fisher),a drunken, jailbird mother. From start to finish, there are cute and clever similarities that will make theatre fans smile. My favorite has to be the replacement of "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." Since the story takes place in Boston, Doolittle has a thick Boston accent. Higgins tries to teach him to say, "I parked my car on the far side of the yard." It's hilarious!

The Makeover is itself a remake of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and the musical version of that play, My Fair Lady, but with an interesting twist; the genders of the main characters in the film have been switched. Set in Boston, The Makeover takes much of its initial energy from the contrast between the varied dialects used by the upper and lower classes of that city's population.

The film is a fun romantic comedy that is reasonably well acted and photographed. It could have been improved by continuing the musical score through the fades between scenes instead of leaving them silent, but this probably was not considered practical with a made for TV movie.