George Bernard Shaw on Film [Criterion Collection] [3 Discs] [DVD]

The hugely influential Nobel Prize-winning critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw was notoriously reluctant to allow his writing to be adapted for the cinema. Yet thanks to the persistence of Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, Shaw finally agreed to collaborate on a series of screen versions of his witty, social-minded plays, starting with the Oscar-winning Pygmalion. The three other films that resulted from this famed alliance, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion, long overshadowed by Pygmalion, are gathered here on DVD. These clever, handsomely mounted entertainments star such luminaries of the big screen as Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, Wendy Hiller, and Rex Harrison.

This 30th edition of the Criterion Collection's monthly Eclipse series - a no-frills, pared-down issue of themed volumes featuring world cinema classics - features three key works adapted from the writings of George Bernard Shaw. The 1941 Major Barbara (co-directed by David Lean, Harold French and Gabriel Pascal) stars Wendy Hiller of Pygmalion and Rex Harrison of My Fair Lady, in a movie version of the Shaw play excoriating the hypocrisy of some Christian charity organizations; the megabudgeted 1946 Caesar and Cleopatra stars Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains, in its period tale of the exotic romance between the two famous rulers; and the 1952 Androcles and the Lion features Shaw in parable mode, with a wryly comic fable about the triumph of benevolence, as a slightly befuddled Christian slave (Alan Young) gets thrown into a pit with a lion, and survives the experience.