It’s by now common knowledge that writers cannot be trusted with their own work, not even—or perhaps especially—highly celebrated ones, but by the ’30s Shaw had already been awarded a Nobel prize, and with screenwriting still in its skittish infancy it seemed both logical and preferable to recruit the Irishman to helm scenario and dialog on his own films. Yet to watch Anthony Asquith’s sleeper hit Pygmalion—Pascal’s first essay at big-screen Shaw and Criterion spine number 85—as well as the three films collected in Eclipse Series 20, George Bernard Shaw on Film, is to in many ways observe paramount cinematic clumsiness, the work of a chained band of monstrous filmic talent buttressing a collection of incurably stagey ideas. Admittedly, Pygmalion, the most enduring and financially successful of all non-musical Shaw adaptations, benefits the most from its creator’s cluelessly procrustean tinkering, as the play’s third act was indelibly enhanced with a crucial embassy ball scene intricately unpacking the hypocrisy of upper-crust interaction. Elsewhere, however, Shaw’s input (or simply recalcitrant dedication to preserving the entirety of his own exchanges), along with Pascal’s aesthetic ignorance, reduces even ace cameramen Ronald Neame and Jack Cardiff to eye-level receptacles without intimacy or regard, like bored theater patrons.