The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

I saw this a billion years ago on TV with a friend. We both enjoyed it. I was happy to see it released on Criterion, but it really doesn't hold up.It takes a very slight idea and converts it into polite fare. But one would have to value the dull, superficial, unexamined, boozhie lives these characters aspire to, to enjoy the movie. With characters willing to make lifelong commitments to someone they've known for less than a day, or reverse firmly-held convictions a few times in half an hour, Wilde is mocking every one of these conventional figures. I feel his contempt, and I find it legitimate. So it's hard to get worked up about plot resolution when I never valued A marrying B, or the like, even as a flimsy pretext to tease out a few jokes. The supposedly intricate plot barely reaches a mild muddle, before it's remedy is being engineered. You'll be taking mental note that we don't construct jokes like this anymore, as the characters spin their wheels to escape paper-thin conflicts.The Dorian Gray movie is a mixed bag but the George Sanders role is the single best embodiment of Wilde's mischievous wit. And 'An Ideal Husband' is a different genre but is more enjoyable.

This is, hands down, the definitive film version of Wilde's finest play rendering all others superfluous. Puffin Asquith made something of a specialty of adapting stage plays and his resume' includes Pygmalion, Quiet Wedding, Cottage To Let, French Without Tears, plus the definitive film version (the Albert Finney remake was a joke) of the finest One-Act play ever written, Terry Rattigan's The Browning Version, in which Asquith and Redgrave teamed up yet again. Michael Redgrave was the outstanding Stage actor of his generation despite strong competition from Ralph Richardson, Johhny Gielgud and the overrated Larry Olivier but for better or worse he was associated with 'weighty' roles, especially Shakespeare yet he possessed the lightest of touches when playing comedy as he demonstrates here where he leads a cast that would be difficult if not impossible to eclipse. From all accounts Edith Evans' Lady Bracknell was one or two notches below her stage version in the 'classic' John Gielgud version of the play some years earlier and if that is so then the stage performance may well have been out of this world. The other Michael in the cast (Dennison, as Algy) is not someone immediately linked with Wilde yet he brings it off exceptionally well which may be hardly surprising given it was his impetus that got the project off the ground. Miles Malleson and the 'amateur' (when Redgrave dared to praise her standout performance as Madame Arcati at an out-of-town preview of Blithe Spirit to the author, Noel Coward, he was taken aback when Coward seethed 'amateur' and changed the subject) Margaret Rutherford complement each other perfectly whilst Joan Greenford and newcomer (in her film debut) Dorothy Tutin round off a cast in which everyone has grasped the concept of speaking the Wildean epigrams with which it is studded as if they were the most banal clichés. Definitely one to savor.

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is basically an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde's play for the screen, in other words, a stagy film. Nothing wrong with that, many films succeeded quite well this way, but here the caricatural acting spoils the overall effect. This is a theatrical film with performances that could work well on the stage, aided by the complicity and laughter of an audience. The acting could be even exaggerated if the film were made differently. "The Importance of Being Earnest" should have used fully the possibilities allowed by the play - respectability, social conventions, cynicism, hypocrisy, joie de vivre .... all living together under the same roof. This could have been dynamite if it had been handled right.Unfortunately, the actors are quick in using voices, smiles, eyebrows... to enhance every comic situation - this was not necessary! Oscar Wilde's play needs no underlining. In the "Importance of Being Earnest" there's a crescendo that should be considered. It starts as a light comedy, growing up slowly (innuendos and double entendres contend with respectability) ending finally in an explosion of laughter bursting out of a cathedral of joy. When I read the play as a teenager I liked it a lot - so much, in fact, that I read it again some years ago and I was hoping to repeat the fun with this film. Well, this did not occur. The film is just slightly funny. The story should be treated with the daring and irreverence that were Oscar Wilde's qualities. What we see instead is a "classic" comedy more appropriate perhaps for a museum.

Dodgson's ChapelI've finally come around to this film of the famous play. The 2002 version wasn't done well and was the subject of one of my very first IMDb comments. The problem there was that the movie tried to be a movie instead of a play, and failed. This one tries only to be a non- distracting film of a play. In fact, I suppose the script is precisely that of the play with no muddling.It works marvelously and in the process becomes more of a workable movie than the later project which tried so hard.I think the reason is simple. The play had a coherent soul. (Oh, how I wonder how rare it is that we have someone that can do this, and what a tragedy that we torture them for being "deviant." Or whether certain types or art demand this on both sides.) That soul is placed in the heart of language, not situation. Its the words that matter, in fact it is the word/name "earnest," and the delicious notion that a baby can be mistaken for a book, in "moment of mental abstraction."Much of the humor or words reflected against contemporary society is based on oblivious extension of phrases and is directly influenced by Lewis Carroll, a somewhat older member of the Oxford community. Its rather wonderful seeing how this meme evolved on the stage, jumping from one clever writer to another until being extinguished by silent films. Its far more interesting than Uranian matters.But we have it here again, unsullied. The speech of Lady Bracknell has to be one of the funniest and sharpest sequence of words ever woven.I should mention a device. The play starts as a play. We see the audience, who looks much like the characters. The curtain goes up and the reality moves to the stage.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.