One of Hitchcock's English silent films, based on a Noel Coward play, this demonstrates the difficulty of making a full-length complex-plotted film without dialogue. Sometimes it almost seems like a sequence of charades, with projections of character and scenery and reactions. Larita (Isabel Jeans), unhappily married to a smug brute, is having her portrait painted by a handsome artist, who falls for her, and though she doesn't succumb, the husband catches them in what appears to be a compromising position and threatens the artist who wounds him with a pistol. A divorce trial ensues in pantomime, with a woman on the jury taking notes, and the judgment goes against her. Larita escapes from scandal in the south of France, where she is courted by a young man who says he doesn't need to know about her past. She marries him and goes home to Moat House, Pevil, where her mother-in-law glares at her. After her past re-emerges, the husband takes it badly, and Larita leaves, allowing him to divorce her as she sits in the balcony in tears. Scandal bad. One piece of ingenious narrative takes place earlier when she talks to her husband-to-be about his marriage proposal on the hotel telephonethe operator (Benita Hume) sits at the console spellbound, surprise, apprehension, romantic tension, and delight succeeding each other on her pretty, expressive face. Unlike Hitchcock's later work, this is not a mystery but a melodrama, and must be judged according to standards of that genre. Beautiful photography, by the way.
Review of Easy Virtue
