Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here.
This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed into a liaison by Lord Darlington, a cad and a bounder of the first water. Lord D wants Lady W but she doesn’t want him, but she’s driven in his direction when she starts to believe that her husband is having an illicit affair with the much-gossiped-about Mrs Erlynne, a fallen woman. What Lady W doesn’t know is that Mrs E is in fact her presumed-dead mother, and Lord W is visiting her to give her money to keep her afloat, to keep her quiet (the shame would be too much for Lady W) and because, at bottom, Lord W is a decent man who would like to engineer some sort of reconciliation between mother and daughter, though this is probably impossible.
Wilde’s play teases with the revelation of the identity of Mrs E (see also The Importance of Being Earnest), of the reconciliation of mother and daughter and of the recovery of Mrs E’s honour. Lubitsch tells us early on that Mrs E is Lady W’s mother – Wilde left it much later – to streamline things a bit and to focus more on the honour and its (ironic) loss and recovery.
Wilde plays with us and Lubitsch does too, and with the conventions of cinema. In a long early tracking shot of Mrs E leaving the racetrack followed by “the most eligible bachelor in London”, Lord Lorton, who clearly likes the cut of her jib, Lubitsch narrows the frame as Lord L gets closer and closer to Mrs E, leaving an increasing proportion of the right hand side of the screen black. In a later shot, he deliberately plays about with static framing, using a “badly framed” three-shot of society woman gossiping – each one pops mockingly into the frame as she says something wicked and spiteful.
There are plenty more examples of Lubitsch’s famous “touch” – Lord L’s first visit to Mrs E’s house, all nerves and adjustment of clothing before entering, versus a later shot when he knows her well, jauntily striding in. The way Lord Darlington, in a large room in the Windermere residence, swanks around like he owns the place when Lord W (who knows nothing of his friend’s subterfuge) is not there. A telltale cigar butt in Mrs E’s ashtray. The fan itself, a signifier of Lady W’s supposed infidelity, a Wildean invention that slots right into Lubitsch’s way of using small things to suggest big things.
It’s also handsomely mounted, another Lubitsch strength – the 1920s fashions, the cloche-hat hairstyles, the dark make up the movies themselves had made fashionable – people in elegant clothes swanning about in gorgeous mansions with hugely high ceilings.
How do you turn a play all about verbal jousting into a silent movie? The triumph of the film is that Lubitsch has found a visual analogue for Wilde’s verbal pyrotechnics, replacing Wilde’s fascination with the said and the unsaid with the seen and the unseen. It re-invents Wilde completely, transforming his stage play into a silent artefact that works on its own terms, and has plot grip and emotional payload.
Though May McAvoy (Lady W), Bert Lytell (Lord W) and Edward Martindel (Lord L) are all stout and stalwart presences, doing what’s necessary – Martindel is particularly good as Lord L at his most lovestruck with Mrs E – the bulk of the acting credit is not with them. Ronald Colman’s Lord Darlington is an irredeemably wicked man and yet we feel something for him, because Lord D is properly in love, he says, and because Colman plays him as a forlorn and lost soul. Irene Rich, in what she said was the role of a lifetime, is the star of this production, and gives a performance that plays through the major and minor keys of maternal hope and selfless love for a daughter who is not aware her mother even exists. It’s a brilliant performance and as Mrs E sails towards a conclusion that simultaneously damns and saves her, Rich gets every little nuance of it just right. Who needs words?
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
