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.

Look Back in Anger (1959)

 "I learned at an early age what it was to be angry..."

I've never seen a John Osborne play before, and this film puts me in an awkward position. Firstly, I'm inevitably going to be talking about the play more than the excellently shot prduction and, secondly, this isn't the play itself; it's a screenplay adapted by Nigel Kneale who, while well-known for science fiction of the more intellectual and despairing kind, is a strangely appropriate person to adapt this very '50s howl of existentialist, post-imperial despair.

Because that's what it is. It's existentialist, with Jimmy wrestling with the very '50s angst of finding purpose in a purposeless world, with a certain kind of period ennui. It's about class, in a strangely apolitical way. It's realist, if you're comparing it (as people mainly did) to the likes of Terence Rattigan, although the dialogue is a bit too polished for it to be truly that. It feels vaguely left-wing without necessarily having any coherent political point. It's genuinely good, if simultaneously deep and empty. Yet, ultimately, it's far more dated in 2021 than Rattigan wil ever be. It's poetic, its characters are passionately real, bt ultimately it's not actually about anything.

We're supposed to like Jimmy, the "angry young man", the university graduate who works on a stall, slumming it, as what Douglas Couland would call a "slacker" a few decades later. Yet, good as Richard Burton is, Jimmy is a pretentious, misogynistic arsehole who physically abuses his wife with an iron and seems unmoved at the news he's to become a dad. Yet I have a feeling he's supposed to stand as a sympathetic symbol of university educated, working class young men who feel alienated at.... well, nothing in particular. It would be different if he'd been shown to be aspiring to greater things but struggling at the lack of social mobility, but there's no suggestion of any such thing. There's mention of the American age, of the end of empire, of death. Admittedly it's a rather dull time where people were waiting for the '60s to happen. But, to me, Jimmy is just an unpleasant wanker.

Ths is a good film based on what looks to be a good and thought-provoking play. But, social mores aside, this comes across as old-fashioned in 2021 in ways that Terence Rattigan doesn't.