Easy Virtue (1928)

Film: Easy Virtue (1928)

Stars: Isabel Jeans, Robin Irvine, Franklin Dyall, Eric Bransby Williams, Enid Stamp Taylor

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We are back!  We have slowly, but steadily after my brief hiatus in early July been reintroducing all of our series, and we are back with our final missing series "Sunday Leftovers" today.  For those unfamiliar, I have been chronologically watching all of the Hitchcock films that I haven't seen before and that aren't part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  I have timed this well so that we have exactly enough Sundays left to match the number of Hitchcock films that I haven't seen, so we are going to be doing a late-night article today to make sure we stay on track.  Each Sunday for the rest of the year my plan is to get another missing Hitchcock film, so we'll end the year with his whole filmography completed.  Today, we're going to be back in the Silent Era with Eaty Virtue, based on a play by Noel Coward.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts in something of a strange manner, with a courtroom scene between two figures we don't yet know (I was confused at first, thinking that perhaps a scene was lost on my DVD, but this is how it was meant to be filmed).  We soon learn that Larita Filton (Jeans) is on trial for a divorce, as her jealous ex Aubrey (Dyall) shot a man named Claude (Williams) who had made a pass at her, and he gets away with this violence even though Larita had no intention of romancing Claude.  Larita leaves, disgraced, and moves to the French Riviera where she exists under an assumed name to avoid the press.  She meets a man named John Whittaker (Irvine), who falls for her, but when they impetuously marry, his family doesn't approve of Larita, and John doesn't know about Larita's secret past.  John's mother slowly poisons her son against Larita, and soon he openly is hoping for a divorce.  When they figure out the scandal, Larita says she has no need to apologize, but in the end grants John an uncontested divorce.  The film ends with Larita single again, but this time not fleeing from the photographers, proclaiming that she has nothing left for them to destroy.

We are still in the era where Hitchcock was making domestic dramas that didn't lean into his thriller tendencies that we know so well.  This isn't an era where he hadn't started doing them, mind you (his iconic The Lodger had already come out), but he was still making films that aren't in his obvious wheelhouse.  About the closest we get to a natural Hitchcock angle is Larita, a woman with a terrible secret who is being pursued by a clueless man (which is the background of a lot of his pictures).

But Hitchcock weirdly doesn't know how to handle this scandal.  It doesn't help that divorce, more than any other taboo from early cinema, isn't remotely forbidden today.  Though obviously a murder would get headlines in any era, the scandal of being divorced certainly wouldn't, and so Larita's sins play differently to a modern audience.  But it's also strange because it's not clear whether or not Hitchcock thinks Larita should be punished.  The story reads as a woman caught in a difficult scenario, inviting sympathy, but the ending also has her miserable & alone, starting over honestly but still without a man or the kindness she deserved.  The title of "easy virtue" doesn't really jive with this treatment of Larita, and as a result the movie feels disjointed.