BEFORE: Kristin Scott Thomas carries over from "Rebecca". I had to make a tough decision tonight, because this is another film that I stored in the "Romance" section, and sure, it would help me make my connection here to get to the new "Ant-Man" film this weekend, but what if I remove it from the romance list, and then I can't make the connections I want in February.
So, I searched for another film that would like "Rebecca" and tomorrow's fillm, and I did find one, it's called "The Exception", and it's ALSO on my romance list - so how to choose? Which one will put me in more linking jeopardy if it's removed from the list? The other film would have had Lily James carrying over from "Rebecca", and it's also set during World War II and has Nazis in it, so does tomorrow's film, so that was a strong argument toward replacing "Easy Virtue" with "The Exception".
However, that other film still links to a lot of other films on the docket for next February, and since I tried to fit "Easy Virtue" into the February 2023 chain and couldn't, all of its other links are to films I've already seen, it links to almost nothing still on the list - so that's a very good reason to dump it here. I'll lose a couple of connections, but not anything major. And thematically this seems to fit with "Rebecca", and it gives Kristin Scott Thomas her third appearance this year, so yeah, let's go with this one tonight and stay the course.
I was also fooling around last night with some chains that might come AFTER October, being aware that I'll only have 18 to 20 slots available for November and December. Could I get to a Christmas movie in that amount of time? Oh, you know I can, I found a way to get to THREE Thanksgiving movies, and then THREE Christmas movies. Yep, living the dream. There surely must be other ways to end this Movie Year, but I'm going to go with that one, I'll block it all out tomorrow, but also make note of which films I could drop in case something else comes up.
THE PLOT: A young Englishman marries a glamorous American woman. When he brings her home to meet the family, she arrives like a blast from the future - blowing their entrenched British stuffiness out the window.
AFTER: There, you see? The linking process knew what was right for me, by placing this film next to "Rebecca", the two films have a lot in common. Both films feature a young woman who impulsively marries an Englishman, then goes back to his country estate to fight with Kristin Scott Thomas. Plus, both films are remakes (sort of) of films by Alfred Hitchcock, though most people probably don't realize that before Hitchcock focused solely on suspense, he dabbled in a lot of different subjects, and an early silent film of his was based on this Noel Coward play, "Easy Virtue". And though the authors of the original works created two very different stories, I think both are set around the same place and time, namely the U.K. between World War I and World War II. (Coward's play was written in 1924, and Du Maurier's "Rebecca" came out in 1938, Hitchcock released "Easy Virtue" in 1928 and "Rebecca" in 1940.). Also, there's a prominent broken statue or figurine in both films.
That being said, the screenwriters here followed Coward's play very loosely, which does make sense, you wouldn't expect something written back in 1924 to reflect modern sensibilities, so of course they kept the characters but had to look on the story with modern eyes, and thus create new situations and new dialogue, and I bet a bunch of anachronisms at the same time. These are the elements of the play that remain - John Whitaker arrives at his family home with his new wife, Larita, and Larita has a number of encounters with the family members, which include Mrs, Whitaker, who is upset over the sudden marriage, and Colonel Whitaker, who can't wait to meet her, assuming that she must be an interesting person. There's also John's sister Marion, who's got a missing husband named Edgar, and Hilda, the younger daughter, who's got a crush on Philip, the brother of Sarah, who is John's ex-girlfriend (aka the one he didn't marry).
Larita shakes up the British family by being open about her (shock!) divorce, but then the family finds out from a newspaper clipping that she's not divorced, but instead her husband (more shocking!) committed suicide. Then there's a fancy ball and Larita slays by wearing a striking white gem-encrusted dress, but her husband John won't dance with her, instead she dances with Philip, and then when Sarah arrives, Larita announces she's leaving (both the dance and the relationship) and suggests that Sarah take John back. She packs and drives off, with the aid of the family butler.
Again, that's the play - and all of that is in the 2008 movie adaptation, too, but they added A LOT. There's a full month (or two) of events taking place at the Whitaker estate, including a fox hunt, a bird hunt, the Christmas ball of course, and a funeral for a dog. Tennis games, billiards, and Larita introduces everyone to American Thanksgiving dinner, plus there's always erotic material like "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to be read. They upped the ante on Colonel Jim and Veronica Whitaker's relationship, they're essentially divorced at this point, even if it's not official - he apparently lives somewhere else and only comes over for appearance's sake. We later learn that the Colonel lost ALL his troops during the war, and this affected him greatly - he didn't come home after the war and went on a sex tour of Europe, and Mrs. Whitaker had to track him down and drag him home. Can this relationship be saved? Probably not.
I'm glad now this didn't end up in the romance chain, because there's just not a lot of romance in it, I mean I guess you can count John and Larita as romantic, but with her dead ex-husband clouding everything, and questions over whether she assisted his suicide or not, well, she's got a lot of baggage. What the hell did Noel Coward know about love, anyway? He had female friends, but well, most of his partners were men, so his view of heterosexual relationships seems to have more to do with the political and social implications of marriage, rather than the day-to-day mechanics of it all. Look at the fact that all of the characters here are in dysfunctional relationships, which are either failing or completely theoretical. And as soon as Larita realizes that she doesn't fit in with the Whitaker family, she's out of there. Well, that was a quick marriage, I guess, if it's not 100% working, sure, burn it to the ground and move on, that's the modern thing to do.
And then everybody who is with someone would rather be with someone else - this is fairly normal for a "bedroom farce" except nobody really goes to bed with each other here, except for Larita and John (and they STILL couldn't make it work...). Well, it's understandable, most of these people are British so they'd rather be miserable and unfulfilled than happy, right? No, no, it's best not to overthink this because after all, we've got the big fox hunt coming up, and then the Christmas party, so there's just no time to work on our relationships. Tennis, anyone?
It's tough to say WHY exactly Larita leaves so suddenly - maybe it's because John got drew back so quickly into his old family life and the behavior patterns associated with that, whereas if he just left with Larita and started fresh somewhere else, they might have had a chance. But then again, he's also not willing to put enough time into the family estate to save it - farming is a difficult job, after all - so most of the land's probably going to be sold off, anyway, because nobody cared enough to take care of. (Also, Mrs. Whitaker just couldn't be bothered to tell her son that the land would be his, if only he came home and took charge of it - so now, nobody gets it?). Or maybe it's just because John wouldn't dance with his wife at the Christmas party - oh, THAT'S the deal breaker? Relationships take time and effort, and nobody here seems willing to put in either to make them work. How depressing.
I also don't care much for humor that comes at the expense of a dead dog. That's the other thing, nobody here can seem to be able to admit to their mistakes, either, and take any responsibility for things going wrong. Again, they're British, maybe this is right on the nose, I don't know, but it bears investigation as an explanation for everything that goes wrong here. So much fail in this movie, that it almost seems like a slapstick comedy, minus the comedy part.
Then there are the bits that just don't make any sense - Larita is seen winning a car race in Monte Carlo during the opening credits, and I guess in those days if a woman won a car race, she got to marry any man in the crowd that caught her eye? And the soundtrack features a number of famous jazz songs from the 1920's, like "Let's Misbehave", "You're the Top" and "You Do Something to Me", all written by Cole Porter, but then there are also faux jazz-sounding versions of modern songs like "Car Wash", "Sex Bomb" and "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going" (a Billy Ocean song that was written for the 1985 movie "The Jewel of the Nile". Now, that's just bizarre. I blame "Moulin Rouge" for starting the trend of putting modern pop songs into films that are set in the past.
NITPICK POINT: John's sister performs the "Can-Can" dance with Larita in the charity event for the war widows. She's easily convinced that the authentic way to perform the dance is without her knickers on, which is blatantly false, because the whole point of the dance is to see the dancers' underwear. Yeah, she's maybe a bit naive, and after doing the dance she is incredibly embarrassed - but I think there are probably only two kinds of women, ones that wouldn't mind flashing the audience, and ones that would be too shy to do that. Having a character willing to do it and then also ashamed by it afterwards is extremely unlikely.
Also starring Jessica Biel (last seen in "Cellular"), Ben Barnes (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson (last seen in "Radioactive"), Kris Marshall (last seen in "Iris"), Christian Brassington (last seen in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"), Charlotte Riley (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Jim McManus, Pip Torrens (last seen in "The Aftermath"), Jeremy Hooton, Joanna Bacon (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Maggie Hickey, Georgie Glen (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), David Longstaff, Mike Archer, Rebel Penfold-Russell, Stephan Elliott, Sheridan Jobbins, Laurence Richardson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 motorcycle parts
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