The Importance of Being Earnest
And Julio Gallo? No, the Wilde play, silly.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Grade: B
Gore Vidal called it a “perfect play about nothing and everything.” Shaw hated it. Oscar Wilde subtitled it “Trivial Comedy for Serious People.”
For some reason, I had this on cassette tape when I was a child. Well, scratch that. There was a good reason; I was prone to terrible nightmares. Because my dad was kind of a tyrant. (He never hit any of us, but he was often very cruel.)
My mom would make me tapes from the library to listen to when I was going to bed. I don’t remember what all of them were. I think there was some Sherlock Holmes in the mix; there was Doctor Doolittle; there were some old radio shows. I vividly remember listening to Orson Welles as “The Shadow,” and even Welles doing his War of the Worlds broadcast! Yep, I found his voice soothing enough that I enjoyed it introducing the end of the world, and that helped avoid nightmares! (Besides, the world doesn’t end in that one. Just almost.)
And The Importance of Being Earnest. I doubt I quite got what some of the play was about, but I loved the language. (My Mom was a big English lit fan; she loved quoting Austen.) And I loved the voices.
When we saw Kind Hearts and Coronets awhile back, I KNEW Joan Greenwood’s voice from somewhere! I just wasn’t able to place it for a bit. Fortunately, Wiki exists (for now), and that was able to tell me Greenwood was in this. I didn’t have a recording of the movie, though — I must have had a version of this 1956 recording. How’d a library in Beaverton, OR end up with THAT UK album? A donation, maybe.
The basic plot of Earnest is C.R.E.A.M. — as in, Class Rules Everything Around Me. We have a couple of whirlwind romances, temporarily frustrated by the characters’ respective social standings; as one says, “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.” It’s both a gentle mockery of upper-class pretentions, and a delight in them. Suiting Oscar Wilde, who was both an outsider and insider to English high society; he was Irish, not very highborn, and gay, among other apostasies.1
This version is little more than a filmed play — and there’s nothing wrong with that! The opening and closing credits are shown over a stage curtain. I haven’t seen the 2002 movie version (with a very talented cast), but looking at the trailer indicates much of it was shot outdoors, to make it more “cinematic.” Fiddlesticks. I’m happy with a play being a play, thank you very much! When scenes here are set outdoors, they are quite clearly on a studio soundstage, and that’s the way it should be.
Joan Greenwood doesn’t have quite the snap she did in those Ealing comedies, although her voice is amazing as ever; neither does Dorothy Tutin as her fellow pursuer/plotter in love. Director Anthony Asquith gets more bite out of the friendship/rivalry bewteen Michael Redgrave and Michael Denison. Literally, “bite” — they have an ongoing snit over one swiping the other’s munchies. (Denison has a little of the Richard E. Grant vibe from Can You Ever Forgive Me, if that character was always hungry rather than always hungover.)
Asquith has the most love for his older actors; Margaret Rutherford in a small plot-crucial part, and Edith Evans in a big plot-crucial part. Evans had performed this on stage in different productions over the course of seven years; this was her last time doing the character.
It’s going to be what everyone laughs at most when watching this, and what everyone remembers the most vividly. It only takes about 10 lines before everything Evans says is so pompous, it’s hilarious. As Redgrave gets to say, “Never met such a Gorgon … I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.”
The performance was so famous that none other than Ian McKellan called it one of those roles no future actor could ever really own. (In this 1975 essay; he’s got several more on the same website.) There was a 2011 Australian stage production with Geoffrey Rush in the part! I’d have liked to see that one.
Those who love Evans here will love the story told by author/actor/director Charles Dennis in the Criterion booklet essay. American distributors wanted Evans to dub one of her lines, to change a word Americans might not understand. When director Asquitch asked Evans about this, she responded: ‘“Do you expect me, a Dame of the Most Noble Order of the British Empire, to change…to alter our good English word ‘perambulator’ to ‘baby carriage’?” she thundered with classic Bracknellian hauteur. “I positively decline to do it.” (But she did.)”’
It’s funny… but maybe because of listening to those tapes as a kid, I always kind of assumed British actors were hoity-toity. Of course, that’s not necessarily true! Edith Evans was apprenticed to a hatmaker at age 15 (and liked it, although she wasn’t any good at it). So, sometimes when they’re playing these sort of snobbish roles, they’re people who wouldn’t necessarily like the snobs.
One you would think liked snobs a lot was director Anthony Asquith — his father was Prime Minister! But, according to one family friend, Asquith basically became involved in film BECAUSE it was seen as beneath someone of his family’s stature. He was a big backer of film technicians’ unions, and a member himself. He had a bad drinking problem (possibly being a closeted gay man might have contributed to this), and when he needed help drying out, became friends with a cafe owner who served primarily truck drivers. And worked as a server/dishwasher.
Asquith certainly was competent enough in delivering this movie, which I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying, at least a little bit. Critic Parker Tyler responded to those who considered the play merely fluff, cotton candy: “But in what other case has candy … tasted so much like iced champagne on a summer night?”
By the way, if you’re like me… first off, don’t be like me, it’s unadvisable. But if you’re like me, you will finish this movie with a real curiosity about cucumber sandwiches. What are they?
Well, per one site, “the cucumber sandwich is an afternoon tea regular for good reasons; it’s light, refreshing and crucially, not too filling, meaning you’ve got plenty of room left for the other savouries and cakes to follow. Also, what could be more British?” That site calls for cucumbers, salt, bread, and butter.
A Yank version, however, might have cucumbers, salt, bread, and cream cheese, with a little mayonnaise and dill/chives. That sounds a little tastier to me… although, methinks I should lay off the dill if I’m sharing at home. Not everybody likes the dill, you know.
Like his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” some of which I find yucky, some great. It’s certain that Wilde’s snobbier pals didn’t like my favorite passage: “At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man … Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man -- or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight … Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” That last sentence is my favorite thing Wilde ever wrote, and he wrote many great sentences.