How the phonetics professor Henry Higgins teaches an ambitious bet the "girl from the gutter" refinement and manners, and imposes upon her a second identity in a true act of training that sometimes bears elements of torture, without providing an emotional balance to the transformation, reveals to the amused observer all the more sharply the painful reality that while external changes may represent the necessary beginning for a more humane coexistence, they are by no means a guarantee of individual happiness.