A Film Canon

Having created the most nuanced, sophisticated conversational register to date with The Marriage Circle, Lubitsch takes the audacious step of translating Wildean repartee into silent cinema. As with the earlier film, intertitles tend to be restricted to fundamental details of the narrative, or deflected into diegetic writing - a nice move for a play whose critical moments frequently turn on letters, calling cards, birth certificates, marriage licenses, cheques and the rest of the economy of etiquette that it so delightfully satirises. Unfortunately, a predominance of deep, wide mise-en-scenes tends to preclude the actors' faces communicating the full nuances of the script, as if confusing the gravitas of Wilde's cultural authority with the essentially comic tone of the play. That said, these perspectives nicely place the audience in the semi-detached vantage position of the gossip, as if the correct way to view the film were through the binoculars that recur throughout the narrative - and it may be that Lubitsch's interest is more squarely directed at gossip than conversation, and, more specifically, in rendering it visible, in the form of a mild recourse to the hyperactive, eccentric tandem that characterised The Oyster Princess, with the critical difference that this movement is now condensed to the tongue, anticipating the verbal gymnastics of screwball, just as The Marriage Circle anticipates its cross-purposes, and creating a mild, but visible, bodily corollary; an ocean of bobbing top hats and shawls.