This year marks the centenary of the first production of Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, which remains to this day one of the funniest and most often performed plays in the English language (or any other). It is also one hundred years since Wilde's career was ruined by the infamous trials condemning his homosexuality. The scandal of Wilde's "indecent acts" forced the smash hit Earnest to close early in its run.

A brief refresher on the plot: Jack Worthing regularly flees his country home for London with the excuse of tending to his scandalous -- and nonexistent -- younger brother Ernest. When his best friend, Algernon, learns of this deception -- and Jack has a beautiful young ward named Cecily whom he keeps stashed away in the country -- he sets off to meat her pretending that he is Ernest.

Wilde wonderfully complicates matters by having Algernon's cousin, Gwendolyn, fall in love with Ernest (not knowing he is Jack) and setting off to the country for a surprise visit. This, of course, all occurs on the day Jack, determined to end the now-dangerous charade, arrives at his country home dressed in black to mourn Ernest's passing. And let us not forget the tyrannical Lady Bracknell, the impediment to all the lovers' happiness.

The play has been brought to the screen lovingly and meticulously by on of the great eccentrics of the British cinema, Anthony "Puffin" Asquith (1902-1968).

How many film directors can give as their earliest address 10 Downing Street, London? Puffin Asquith was the youngest son of Herbert Asquith (Britain's Prime Minister from 1908-1916), and his socialite wife Margot (of whom Dorothy Parker said, "The love affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith is a joy to behold"). A child of privilege, Puffin -- dubbed thus in infancy because of his hooked nose -- grew up in a rarefied atmosphere. At seventeen, he went to Hollywood and lived with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who gave him free run of their studio. He was also taken under the wing of their next-door neighbor, Charlie Chaplin, with whom Puffin had many precocious arguments about directorial style.

Returning to England, he plunged into the silent film industry and was already a seasoned veteran when, in 1938, he received international acclaim for his successful adaptation of Shaw's Pygmalion. Despite his aristocratic background, Puffin chose to dress like an electrician. For almost thirty years, his costume on the set was a boiler suit (actually his WWII British Home Guard uniform) with a leather belt around the waist, and a handkerchief which Mary Pickford gave him in 1919 sticking out of his pocket (he eventually stopped washing it for fear it would disintegrate).

In 1939, he directed the screen adaption of Sir Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears, and began the start of a screen association with the playwright that lasted thirty years, and included such classics as The Way to the Stars and The Browning Version.

In that powerful black and white 1950 film, Sir Michael Redgrave gives the performance of his career as the tormented cuckold Crocker-Harris. The following year, he and Asquith reunited for this frothy change of pace. Redgrave's Jack lights up the Technicolor screen in this rare comic performance.

And what a supporting cast! Joan Greenwood's plummy-voiced Gwendolyn is one of the great comic treasures of the cinema. So is the Cecily of the beauteous, and tragically underused, Dorothy Tutin, in her screen debut. And what can one say about Dame Margaret Rutherford -- a frequent Asquith player, who would win an Oscar under his direction a decade later for The V. I. P.'s -- and her shameless scene stealing Miss Prism?

But all their brilliance pales in the presence of the woman who was the century's definitive Lady Bracknell: Dame Edith Evans. Heralded by theater critics a few years earlier when she played the role on stage opposite Gielgud's Jack, Asquith has preserved her performance here in its full theatricality. Only Dame Edith could take the simple phrase "a handbag" and trumpet it into one of the most hilarious comic riffs of all time.

Where did the actress and her role go separate ways? Clearly they didn't. Asquith had considerable difficulties getting Dame Edith to hit her marks on the set. In her loftiest tones, she replied, "I don't know what it is, but I always feel the camera should come to me instead of me go to the camera."

And when the U. S. distributors said American audiences wouldn't know what a perambulator was, Puffin was forced to ask Dame Edith to loop "baby carriage" as a substitute. "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 carraige'?" she thundered with classic Bracknellian hauteur. "I positively decline to do it." (But she did.)

Now, four decades later and for the hundredth birthday of the original play, the Criterion Collection restores Dame Edith Evan's reading of "perambulator" as well as the film's full three-strip Technicolor beauty to all its glory.

--Charles Dennis

Charles Dennis is a playwright, filmmaker, and author of two books on Hollywood, Talent and The Dealmakers.

CAST

Ernest Worthing ... Michael Redgrave

Algernon Moncrieff ... Michael Denison

Lady Bracknell ... Dame Edith Evans

Gwendolyn Fairfax ... Joan Greenwood

Cecily Cardew ... Dorothy Tutin

Miss Prism ... Margaret Rutherford

CREDITS

Directed by Anthony Asquith

Produced by Teddy Baird

Director of photography Desmond Dickenson, B. S. C.

Art direction Carmen Dillon

Film editor John D. Guthridge

Production manager Roy Goddard

Costume designer Beatrice Dawson

Music composed and conducted by Benjamin Frankel

ABOUT THE TRANSFER

The Importance of Being Earnest is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The new digital transfer was created from a new 35mm composite print.

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