The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

 "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

Somehow, in twelve years of blogging, I've somehow contrived never to blog and adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play, something which must be remedied forthwith. Comedy, often though not always, tends to date as the decades pass. Not only to tastes in humour change but so so the social more on which the humour depends. Yes Oscar Wilde remains as funny in 2023 as in 1895, as shown by this, the last of the style of plays for which he is most known, before his sad, complex, undeserved and much misunderstood downfall. Wilde should have lived and written for many more decades.

We no longer live in a world defined by the Season and the obliquely shifting snobbish oddities of the aristocracy: indeed, most of us never did. Yet we do not feel alienated. There is no anger aimed at the upper classes here, mainly observation, yet the humour skewers this world with perfection. Interesting that this, the result of aestheticism, should come from an author who, wearing another hat, happened to be a socialist.

This film is, perhas, unambitious in its direction, being little more than a stage play with a camera pointed at it, which it cheerfully confesses by presenting itself in this way. Yet it is perfection. Oh, Michaels Redgrave and Denison are merely quite good as Jack and Algy. Joan Greenwood is better, the poshest woman who ever lived and born to play Gwendoline. Yet Dorothy Tutin excels as Cecily. Any version of this play, though, stands or falls by its Lady Bracknell. And Edith Evans is simply THE Lady Bracknell. All other performances of the part are but a shadow of hers. It is she who makes this production simply unsurpassable.

Cromwell (1970)

"An England without a king is unthinkable!"

I watched this film principally because I wanted to see two great actors- Richard Harris and Alec Guinness- play two iconic roles from history; Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. And they are, indeed, magnificent. Their performances- Harris as a principled sociopath slowly descending into a dictatorial sociopath and Guinness as a politely arrogant congenital liar- are superlative and alone enough to make the film worth watching. The film succeeds brilliantly if seen as a character piece based on its broadly valid idea of Cromwell- a man who can honestly give everything for the supremacy of Parliament and then simply dismiss it when it does not live up to his expectations. For this reason the film succeeds as drama in spite of being so incredibly rush and in spite of its ending so suddenly.

And yet... no film set in the past can be historically accurate in full. I accept this. Events must be compressed into a shorter period of time and simplified to fit the medium of cinema. And yet... here we have Cromwell as one of those MPs whom Charles tries to arrest in January 1642. We have Cromwell present at Edgehill. We have the Earls of Essex and Manchester making speeches in the Commons. We even have arch-republican Henry Ireton (a shockingly young Michael Jayson) trying to persuade Cromwell to take the crown, in spite of having died during the (glossed over) Irish campaign in 1651. All this is a little much to swallow; these are not small things.

I'm also uncertain about the dialogue; a film set in the mid-seventeenth century should either use modern dialogue or contrive to use contemporary speech but contrive to favour those sentence constructions and that vocabulary that would be understood today, preferably the second. Instead we get a bizarre mish-mash of speech which mixes archaisms such as "withal" with modern coinings such as "international". The effect is clumsy and distracting.

Still, it all looks magnificent and, in the final analysis, it's all about the acting. And, judged by this criterion, the film is superb.