[lit-ideas] Easy Virtue
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 08:47:53 EDT
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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