This 50-year-old screen adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest remains a masterpiece of intense style and concentrated wit. It is also a showcase for some of the finest seemingly casual, but totally perfect, acting ever to be committed to film.
The original play raged on stage in London in the late 19th Century, in the same year the British establishment began raging against its playwright, Oscar Wilde. His decline and fall was grievous, but through this play, and others such as Lady Windermere's Fan, he stays one of the most potent forces ever known in British writing. He belonged to the school of writers who were able to cloak often serious intent beneath superficial style - infiltrating the bourgeoisie with wit and charm.
That's not to say there's much serious intent in Earnest. If there is, it's amazingly disguised. This is just blissful pleasure from start to finish, for anyone who loves language, or fine acting, or sheer glorious comedy. This film has all three - satisfaction is assured.
Is there anyone over 15 years who does not know the story of Earnest? Two gay (in the old-fashioned sense of carefree and happy) young men around town each fall madly in love with two beautiful young women who love them back... but do they? Are these wonderful creatures really in love with the two young men, or have they fallen in love with their own delicious fantasies of who the two young men are?
And is it possible really that one of the young men's mothers was a handbag, and his other nearest relative a railway station? How could this be?
In an accompanying documentary, actor Stephen Fry describes his reaction on first seeing this movie when a young boy. "I had never heard language like that... I could not believe that people could use the same language that I did when I said I wanted to go to the lavatory - and that this same language could be used an an instrument of quite intense and exhilarating beauty".
Stephen Fry has summed up that aspect of the film (and of course, the play) perfectly. Enough to say that I have seen this movie perhaps a dozen times, and every time the language astonishes me again, and new delights are revealed.
That could not be possible without a good cast of actors. For this film the perfect cast was assembled. Michael Redgrave is Jack - or Earnest. Michael Dennison is Algy - or is he Earnest? Jack is in love with Gwendelon, played by the luscious, deep-voiced Joan Greenwood. Algy madly desires the virginal but wickedly enticing Cecily, played by the totally adorable Dorothy Tutin.
And there is more. Anyone who has not experienced Dame Edith Evans' performance as Gwendolen's mother Lady Bracknell has not lived. She is the consummate Dragon Lady. The matriarch of nightmares.
There is the delightfully dizzy, ineffable Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism. She is young Cecily's governess and she is also the secret key who will unlock the tangled plot. And there is Miles Malleson as the local vicar, who dreams of unlocking Miss Prism's long-guarded (almost 70 years!) heart.
Is that all? Well, there are cameos too from Richard Wattis and Aubrey Mather as Jack Worthing's city and country butlers - and their brief appearances tell us more about the English caste system than a dozen text books could convey.
The cast is evidently aware that they are giving flesh to a playwright's masterpiece. But director Anthony Asquith avoids any pomposity or preciousness - this is a souffle, not a suet pudding. The film starts with an audience watching a stage - the curtain rises on Michael Redgrave as Jack, esconced in his bath. And though the stage is quickly forgotten, Asquith does direct this as if it is a play rather than a film. And the locations, whether rooms or gardens, seem really just a succession of different stage sets. But that doesn't matter at all - the acting and the script sweep everything else aside, and a more naturalistic approach would simply not have worked.
This is a film for all ages. It is 50 years old this year, and will keep delighting audiences as long as the English language remains in use. It is a true classic, which will forever remind us of the utter Importance of being Earnest.
Roadshow Entertainment have brought out a clone of a Carlton region 2 release. Carlton have two separate versions in Britain, of quite different quality - Roadshow have opted for the better of the two.
This British technicolor film sparkles, and the colour is quite deep and luscious for the period. But while the transfer seems to have been made from a generally excellent print, there is quite a bit of grain evident, and variation in quality from scene to scene.
It is fine overall, but is not a definitive transfer of the sort Warner Brothers in region 1 is now seeking to make of their finest back-catalog Technicolor movies - as seen in their sensational transfers of Annie Get Your Gun and The Harvey Girls.
In the end, the quality of this region 2 release is always good enough to allow for viewing pleasure. It would be interesting though to see what the American connoisseur DVD company Criterion has managed to produce with their special edition, which was also released this year.
