[lit-ideas] Easy Virtue

Easy Virtue, a film based on an early play by Noel Coward (1924) opens this 
 weekend. With Colin Firth, Scott-Thomas, an American actress, playing an  
American and a bright young thing. 

Scott's review in the NYT is not too  favourable. From the read of it, it 
looks like "Relative Values" all over again.  I do have the DVD for that: 
with Colin Firth _and_ Julie Andrews. 

Easy  Virtue, Scott analyses in more detail than any critic would have 
analysed it  when it opened as a play in London back in the 1920s. Scott wants 
to say that  Coward is being pro-American in the play in contrast with the 
pro-British,  pro-English thing he developed in the 1930s onwards.

The setting is the  typical stately-home. One good thing of the film, 
apparently, is the location,  complete with foxhunt. One wonders how the 
film-director managed to adapt the  thing so much: since I would not think that 
the 
foxhunt was originally in the  original play!

------  Scott-Thomas can be a subtle actress and I do  follow her career, 
but her Veronica Whittaker seems to be too much of a  caricature to be taken 
seriously. A light version of Emma Thomson in the  latter's recent 
adaptation of "Brideshead Revisited" for the big  screen.

The young Whittaker seems promising in that he keeps humming Noel  Coward 
tunes, which I know by heart, so we'll see.

Scott mentions that  the most 'poignant' scene (I never use that word, but 
tires me to read them in  reviews: such a personal notion -- and what's 
poignant for Scott is tacky,  cheap, or corny to me) is the old Whittaker 
(Colin 
Firth) recalling how his  whole platoon was massacred during the Great War.

There are references to  Monaco (which I'll enjoy and hope to see on 
location), etc.

It's amazing how Coward, a non-philosopher, uses in these two plays, titles 
 with philosophical relevance: 'virtue' is _the_ topic of Macyntire's new  
'naturalism' in ethics; and 'relative values', well, is Paul Carus 
revisited.  The Teddington son of the piano tuner _was_ educated.

----- J. L.  Speranza
Buenos Aires,  Argentina

The Land that England Lost
 
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