From the Department of Lazy Film Criticism: “In the early stages of his directing career, Alfred Hitchcock made a number of hackneyed studio films which barely resemble the works he would go on to direct. The society drama Easy Virtue is one of the nine silent movies Hitchcock directed.” What Brian Whitener of the All Movie Guide is presumably saying here is that Hitchcock’s 1927 film is one of these “hackneyed studio films” that naturally have little to do with his non-hackneyed studio films.
Even the most cursory glance at Easy Virtue would demonstrate that this is not the case. To be sure, the film is no masterpiece, but it is far more interesting (and is far more Hitchcockian) than most of its assessors usually admit.
As a silent adaptation of a Noël Coward play, it is certainly a strange film, but Hitchcock’s work in adapting the play to the screen is fascinating and remains largely overlooked. The film’s first half is a masterful piece of visual narration, jumping forward and backward in time and between points of view in a manner that is still thrilling. And if the latter part of the film is less visually interesting, it still merits attention for its representation of the architecture of the family. Hitchcock changes the character of Larita from Coward’s defiant flapper into a prototype of Psycho’s Marion Crane, The Birds’ Melanie Daniels and the second Mrs. de Winter: a young woman whose threatening sexual presence is quashed by a dominant mother-figure.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm archival print
16 Oct 2005 8:04 PM | Submit Comment