Easy Virtue **** (2008, Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kris Marshall) – Classic Movie Review 3034

Co-writer/director Stephan Elliott’s delightful and highly amusing 2008 adaptation of gay playwright Noël Coward’s witty early play stars Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, who were reunited in 2009’s Dorian Gray. This time, they are father and son.

Barnes stars as Thirties young Englishman John Whittaker, who marries glamorous older American woman Larita (Jessica Biel), a car-racing widow from the Detroit, and brings her home to meet his surprised parents, Mr and Mrs Whittaker (Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas). Mrs Whittaker is dismayed by Larita, not liking her American ways and being ultra-protective of her son and heir to the Whittaker name and struggling estate.

Larita thinks she and John will just visit and then go to London, where he’ll work and she’ll race. But his matriarchal mother is a mistress of manipulation, and she starts a war with the new bride, with burnt-out Great War veteran Mr Whittaker taking a shine to Larita but is unable to battle his wife to help her much.

The film is flawlessly performed by the right cast and deftly directed with a felicitous light touch by a sympathetic Stephan Elliott, making lovely use of period music by Noël Coward and Cole Porter. Scott Thomas really has a field day, exuberantly relishing her bitchy role, but Biel, Barnes and Firth give as good as they get. And Kris Marshall gets a little look-in as Furber.

Alfred Hitchcock first filmed the Noël Coward play in 1928.

Stephan Elliott is also the director of Frauds (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Eye of the Beholder (1999) and A Few Best Men (2011).

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3034

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