Taking Oscar Wilde at his word that ‘life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about,’ Ernst Lubitsch put a movie camera in Wilde’s place and let his pictures tell the story.
Lubitsch’s silent classic is a glib visual take on Wilde’s comedy of manners on the hypocritical morals of the great and good, featuring an ingénue and an openly sexual divorcée, hale and hearty fellows having too much fun and their disapproving shrews having too little.
Lady Windermere (May McAvoy), a young wife and paragon of virtue, is married to Lord Windermere (Bert Lytell) though flirtatiously pursued by Lord Darlington (Ronald Colman, ‘courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn’).
In the opening shot, Lady Windermere, facing ‘the grave problem of seating her dinner guests,’ the placard says, moons over whether to seat that darling naughty gadabout next to her.
Right away, Darlington ‘is announced’ and soon appears; he gives her hand a manly shake and holds on a beat too long. She looks at their clasped hands: the camera closes up on her fingers relaxing in his closed hand. He raises her relaxed fingers to his lips. She pulls them away, and looks away from him: he bends over and pecks the back of her left hand.
‘I presume you came to see my husband,’ the placard says.
‘Oh no, I came to see you,’ his lips—and eyes—reply.
She draws away from him, her chin in the air, and sits with her back to him on a couch, resting her arms on its arm—leaving him plenty of room to sit down beside her.
This pas de deux leads to the next room, where Lord Windermere quickly pockets a letter he was reading. The men shake hands. Windermere speaks to his wife. Darlington notices that Windermere is trying to reach and pocket an envelope on his desk that has a ‘notorious’ woman’s return address, and that Windermere seems anxious that his wife not see it. Darlington subtly slides the envelope within his reach; the two men exchange raised eyebrows.
Working within the limits of the technology at the time, the acting is mostly in mime—a lost art in cinema now, but an art nonetheless—and done here with great skill. (David Denby provides insight on this subject in The New Yorker with reference to the current success of last year’s ‘silent film’ in his recent piece The Artists, Feb. 27, 2012.)
The action and sets are closely observed; the shots are sequenced and built at a comfortable pace that holds the eye. The sets have palatial depths and high ceilings—so high that they may be operatic flats—and the light is soft and subdued.
It is best to watch this film entirely silent. The softly reverent piano music added to this DVD release patronizes this racy work with an unduly quaintified, ‘old-timey’ feel. Instrumental tunes by Cole Porter would make a better complement, but Lubitsch’s visual art stands on its own. If you must, pick your own soundtrack.
The most humorous and inventive scene takes place at a racetrack. The Windermere party sits together in an enclosure seeing and being seen by all and sundry, particularly the film’s femme fatale, Mrs. Erlynne (Irene Rich). Framed in a series of sideways ‘figure eights,’ Mrs. Erlynne, in her silk turban with feathers and her flapper style, is ‘observed’ through binoculars by silk-hatted society toffs in morning coats and striped trousers and their disapproving female company—observed, and basking in the attention.
‘Gossip, gossip, gossip,’ the placard says of the Duchess of Berwick (Mme. [Carrie] Daumey), Lady Plymdale (Billie Bennett—uncredited) and Mrs. Cowper-Cowper (Helen Dunbar), which they relish with malicious glee, while their men and Lord Augustus Lorton (Edward Martindel), ‘London’s most distinguished bachelor,’ gawk and make the appropriate responses—and ‘check out the babe’ on their own.
Lord Augustus follows Mrs. Erlynne when she leaves the track heading in the direction of a large ‘Exit’ sign showing a hand with a pointing finger. He quickens his pace to catch up with her and as he does, the frame narrows to the left.
The film, which takes place over a period of several months, elaborates upon the 24-hour period of Wilde’s play, but the plot, point and humor remain the same.
Lady Windermere, raised an orphan, believes that her parents died when she was an infant: her mother dishonored the family by running off with a lover ‘to the continent’; her father died of a broken heart. Mrs. Erlynne, Lady Windermere’s mother, returns to England from ‘abroad’ with a scheme to ‘get back into society’ by remarrying well.
She plans to accomplish this by ‘blackmailing’ Lord Windermere, who does not want his wife to find out that Mrs. Erlynne is her mother, into financing her visit and sponsoring her ‘reentry.’ Mrs. Erlynne plans to use his influence to leverage an introduction that will position her to catch a husband ‘of the right sort.’
The ‘fan’ of the title, one of Lord Windermere’s birthday gifts to his wife, links mother and daughter by giving Mrs. Erlynne a second chance: it enables her in the end to spare her daughter from making the same mistake that led to her ‘banishment’ from society.
This film can be found among many others in the series More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931; Program 3, reissued by the National Film Preservation Foundation. It was preserved by Museum of Modern Art, copied at its original 22 frames per second from a 35mm print.
Included on this DVD is a ten-minute series of trailers of films since lost, including In the Days of Daniel Boone, American Venus (including a shot of 19-year-old Louise Brooks in her first title role), The Great Gatsby and Lubitsch’s The Patriot.
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