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The Noël Coward play is translated visually (Lubitsch's Lady Windermere's Fan is a model of composition), the tale is bracketed by looming close-ups of a squinting judge with a powdered wig like a slowly avalanching mountain. The high-society scandal is already underway at the onset, Alfred Hitchcock breezes through it—the camera dollies out from a cognac bottle to find the heroine (Isabel Jeans) posing for a portrait in an atelier, the fight between the painter (Eric Bransby Williams) and her husband (Franklin Dyall) lands everybody in court. Newly "dishonorable" in the wake of the verdict, the socialite moves to Mediterranean shores to escape British scorn but scrutiny follows anyway (the magistrate's magnifying monocle at the tribunal is rhymed with a suitor's tennis racket, both are like lenses projecting grids onto her). She marries the callow scion (Robin Irvine) and moves back to England to suffer under the watch of her imperious new mother-in-law (Violet Farebrother). The mansion is a den of cultured cruelty, it might be Dracula's castle but for the elongated, orthodox icons surrounding the dinner table. "In our world, we do not understand this code of easy virtue." "In your world, you understand very little of anything." An overlooked film despite its abundant cinematic invention: Dissolving profiles state the back-and-forth between defense and prosecution, a marriage proposal is reflected in the shifting face of an eavesdropping switchboard operator. The protagonist scores a Pyrrhic victory at the gala ball but finishes off alone before a paparazzi fusillade, Hitchcock variously revisits her situation in Rebecca and The Paradine Case and Under Capricorn. With Ian Hunter, Frank Elliott, and Dacia Deane. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |