What Is In A Name-The Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance Of Being Earnest”(1952)-A Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Importance Of Being Earnest, starring Michael Redgrave, Michael Denison, Dame Edith Evans, directed by Anthony Asquith, 1952    

No question the great late 19^th century English playwright Oscar Wilde took a terrible beating from hypercritical late Victorian society for his little ‘vice’-“the act that dare not speak its name” to use the quant phrase used in polite society for homosexuality. (Victorian society hypercritical since as far as the upper crust and certainly in the literary and culture milieus there were plenty of closeted, and not so closeted in some places, homosexuals who were tolerated if not celebrated). Certainly today his activities would have drawn little attention in Western society anyway but then such exposure devastated his career.

Before Wilde’s fall, before he took his court room beating sending him to Reading Gaol and infamy he wrote and had produced the play upon which the film under review is based, The Importance Of Being Earnest. A play which was a humorous sent-up of all the hypocrisy, manners and tedium of upper-crust bourgeois society. There was not necessarily any great political message to the work but by virtue of the truly great use of dialogue Oscar was able to drive his spears in all the better. The film adaptation by Anthony Asquith is pretty fateful to the original play and the acting is of a high order so we get today a fairly decent sense of what was going on in some circles in those bygone days.             

Here’s the simple plotline on which the fast-paced dialogue rises and falls. A couple of free-wheeling gentleman, representing country and city, Jack and Algy having time on their hands and wicked senses of humor carry around some assumed names, Ernest for the former and Bunbury for the latter in order to brush off any untoward questions or people. They both have the same problem or aspects of the same problem. They long for female companionship, for proper marriages. Jack is in love with Algy’s cousin the aristocratic Gwendolyn and Algy is in love with Jack’s ward out in his country estate Cecily.Therein lies the dilemma. Jack is caught up in a bind because having under the assumed name Ernest he has caught Gwen’s attentions although she is fickle enough only to want to marry a man named Ernest. Cecily by a certain sleight of hand by Algy only wants to marry a man named Ernest as well.         

With that conundrum in mind the chase is on. Jack has to invent a younger brother Ernest whom he tries to kill off but who shows up at the country estate door but Algy posing as Jack’s supposedly late brother Ernest. Then Gwen, mother in tow shows up as well to find out whether Jack, who has willingly proposed to Gwen and she has accepted, has the correct lineage to betroth her daughter. Every social and cultural prejudice of the day gets a work-out as in the end love conquers all once Jack, who turned out to be a foundling, actually had been born with the name Ernest. Nice touch. A great sent-up and great fun if not a big time look at the foibles of late Victorian society.