The Hitchcock 9 - 4


ISABEL JEANS AND ROBIN IRVINE IN EASY VIRTUE

Easy Virtue (Aug. 1927)

In Easy Virtue Hitchcock undertakes the tricky task of making a silent film out of a talky play by Noel Coward. But as the BFI blurb proclaims, "The camera's gaze gave the story a dimension unattainable on stage." Of course different angles -- and location shoots -- are possible to enhance the tale of a woman who, somewhat like Roddy in Hitchcock's previous film Downfall, is an innocent who runs into one trouble after another. But as a matter of fact the images of the film aren't as good as the others, because nothing but scratched prints could be found for the restoration. But that's not all bad, because the early sequences (after the opening courtroom scene) are of a woman getting her portrait painted, and the images of that are so blurry they look like paintings -- not an altogether bad effect. This becomes the story of an innocent's "downfall," much like Hitchcock's previous film, but with settings in a courtroom, in he South of France, and at a posh English country house very far from the humble London surroundings of the greengrocer's son, and deftly handled nonetheless.

In this version of the story, we begin with a courtroom trial with flashbacks showing that Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans, the Gainsborough Productions star who had played the greedy actress the naive Roddy marries in Downhill) has been involved in a scene between her husband (Franklin Dyall) and a painter doing her portrait (Eric Bransby Williams), who is in love with her. Her husband comes into the artist's studio and finds him kissing Larita. He attacks the artist with his cane and the artist shoots. Filton later divorces Larita, after the artist has committed suicide and left Larita all his money. The trial, granting divorce to Mr. Filton, determines that Larita was guilty of "misconduct." To forget all this unpleasantness she goes to a posh hotel on the French Riviera, where she meets a John Whittaker (Robin Irvine, who played the public school friend Tim for whom Roddy takes the paternity rap and gets expelled in Downfall), who falls in love with her. John proposes, they marry, and John takes Larita to his family in England. John hasn't asked any questions about Larita's past; of course his family is going to be curious. And there's not only a whole klatch of family members, but Sarah (Enid Stamp-Taylor), whom John was always expected to marry.

"Simple country living" at the Whittakers' huge house includes full-dress dinners and polo. The grim-faced Mrs. Whittaker, John's mother (Violet Farebrother), dislikes and is suspicious of Larita from the first, and as they remain there, John turns against Larita, whose unhappiness makes him further convinced "it was a mistake from the first." Of course it's only a matter of time before the malicious Mrs. Whittaker remembers where she saw Larita's face -- in newspaper stories about "the Filton divorce case." She rebukes Larita for not telling her and says "we do not understand this code of easy virtue." Mr. Whittaker is on Larita's side, but John wavers, while Sarah nobly supports them both. All the news comes out just as the Whittakers are having a big party. Mrs. Whittaker wants Larita to stay out of sight. Larita instead brazens it out, appearing in a bold dress with a spectacular ostrich fan. But she resolves to leave, and let John divorce her. As she leaves the divorce court, the press approach "the notorious Larita Filton" with their cameras and her last line is "Shoot! There's nothing left to kill."

Though it certainly has plenty of plot, and strong emotional atmosphere in the scenes at the Whittaker estate, the film is only 60 minutes long. It's presumed that a substantial part, perhaps as much as a third, is lost. However it makes perfect sense, though the story by modern standards seems cold and moralistic. While writers describe Downfall as extremely "dark," it actually has a happy ending; poor Larita doesn't get one. This was an era in which, even in the plays of a sophisticate like Noel Coward, women were much more harshly judged than men. Perhaps that has changed, a bit, anyway.

Besides the tricky early courtroom mirror shot in which the judge appears to be looking through his monocle and it reflects him and the defense counsel, people tend to comment on the charming and Hitchcockian scene in which Whittaker's proposing to Larita is depicted indirectly by showing the telephone operator eavesdropping and reacting to each line of -- unheard -- dialogue. The scenes in the south of France and at "The Moat," the Whittaker's unappetizingly named estate, both new milieux to Hitchcock, are deftly handled, the Riviera glamor a foreshadowing of equally glamorous spots, like the Riviera itself in To Catch a Thief, that Hitchcock would frequently visit in future films.

There is no added musical accompaniment on this one of the BFI Hitchcock 9 DVD's.

It was also tricky doing a restored print of Easy Virtue, the hardest, according to the BFI notes: it existed only "in a number of more or less identical 16mm projection prints, all in very poor quality and considerably abridged." The original running time was approximately 94 minutes; a mere 69 survive. This may mean either a major section is missing or "more likely" there are dozens, even hundreds, of small cuts.

Reviewed as part of the US premiere of The Hitchcock 9 BFI-restored silent films by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, shown at the Castro Theater June 14-16, 2013. Screener DVDs provided by Larsen Associates.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.