Conclusions

This use of songs points to a first difference between the two musicals regarding the musical component. Both One Touch of Venus and My Fair Lady originated as stage musicals, but diverged in the transposition to the screen. My Fair Lady is a transposition/adaptation (Hutcheon 2006; Cartmell-Whelehan 1999) effected by the authors of the Broadway musical, while One Touch of Venus is an example of intersemiotic translation (Dusi 2003; Rutelli 2004) of the original. In My Fair Lady the dramatic struc­ture, comprising the evolution of the plot, rhythm, articulation and pauses of the text, is reproduced in the new screen version, whereas in One Touch of Venus the music is used in quite a different way with respect to the original, constituting in effect a new entity.

It is perhaps appropriate to call on new terms to define the different ap­proaches: My Fair Lady could be defined as a film musical, and One Touch of Venus as a musical film. However, since there is a consolidated literature that uses the existing terminology, a change could give rise to misunders­tandings. It is better to focus on the use of the music; the musical film relies on a musical formal conception, with the music going beyond the function of commentary; the film musical maintains the sequence of closed numbers, using transitions such as overture, entr’acte and exit music, and the plot de­velopment in three stages, exposition – vicissitudes – catastrophe (happy end) (Miceli 2009), all typical of the stage musical.

The film version of One Touch of Venus is an intersemiotic translation, that of My Fair Lady an adaptation; I adopt a similar classification with re­gard to the theatrical origins of both works. What determines the use of one or the other term is the function of the original music: in the first case the music has been used as a binding agent in the passage from the theatri­cal to the cinematographic language; and in the second, the stage musical has been taken over just as it is and adapted to the cinematographic lan­guage.

In the case of My Fair Lady it was possible to make an adaptation, since the work belongs in a well established tradition of film musicals (Leitch 2007; Naremore 2000), with a ‘classic’ dramaturgic and formal or­ganization. In fact Lerner and Loewe chose to base their work directly on Shaw’s Pygmalion, without diverging significantly from the literary ante­cedent. A different procedure was adopted for One Touch of Venus, in part because this was one of the first musicals to transfer from Broadway to Hollywood. In both musicals we find the appropriation of the source-text, but the outcomes are different. In intersemiotic translation the music plays a different role with respect to an adaptation; in One Touch of Venus the music fulfils an important role in the evolution of the narrative. My Fair Lady does not exploit the characteristics of the new medium (cinema): the processes of exploitation of the music are very similar to those deployed in the stage version. One Touch of Venus can actually be situated at the in­terface (Iser 2000) of two art forms: the respective languages are characte­rised by cohesion, rather than one prevailing over the other. Each has its own specific nature to contribute: neither the musical nor the theatrical dimension is predominant. This fosters an innovation of the musical forms, with the introduction of electronic music, and the organization of the musi­cal time corresponds to the audiovisual editing.