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Despite being adapted from a play by Noël Coward, Easy Virtue is one of Hitchcock's less distinguished silent films, most interesting in retrospect for the way it shows an early version of one of his favourite themes - an innocent forced to become an outsider because of universally presumed guilt.
This theme is underlined by Eliot Stannard's adaptation, which removes references to Larita's morally dubious past (in the play, she has had multiple lovers), relocates her first encounter with John from a gambling table to a more wholesome tennis court, and dramatises the circumstances that led to her divorce (which the play only depicts verbally) in such a way as to establish her absolute innocence - the painter Robson is clearly the guilty party, but his suicide (dealt with somewhat ambiguously in existing prints: perhaps due to censorship) inconveniently throws the spotlight on her.
Larita is a somewhat unsatisfactory heroine - whereas Coward's heroine promoted herself as an independent woman with needs and desires of her own, the removal of most of this aspect of her character leaves her oddly passive: she makes virtually no attempt to defend herself against what is clearly injustice, and does little to state her case in most other respects.
Given all this, her final gesture, summed up in the title "Shoot! There's nothing left to kill" (which Hitchcock described to François Truffaut as the worst intertitle of his entire silent output) seems more defeatist than defiant, and ends the film on an uneasily ambivalent note. Critic Charles Barr believes that censorship and British social attitudes of the time may have been the primary reasons for this relatively timid adaptation of a play that had rather more to say about contemporary sexual politics.
Although not a patch on The Lodger (1926) or The Ring (1927), Easy Virtue does have a few imaginative touches that lift it above the routine. Although major set-pieces are handled in a disappointingly conventional way (bar Larita's dramatic appearance at the top of the stairs, which apparently provoked applause at early screenings), Larita's hesitant acceptance of John's proposal is wittily conveyed through the reactions of an eavesdropping telephone operator, while the not inconsiderable time it would have taken in the mid-1920s to journey from the South of France to England is shown with a puppy growing into a bulldog en route. Sadly, Larita's own personal journey is far less clearly defined.
Michael Brooke
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