Easy Virtue (1928 film)
- Isabel Jeans: Larita Filton
- Franklin Dyall: Mr. Filton
- Eric Bransby Williams: the correspondent
- Ian Hunter: the applicant's legal
- Robin Irvine: John Whittaker
- Violet Farebrother: his mother
- Frank Elliott: his father
- Dacia Deane: his older sister
- Dorothy Boyd: his younger sister Hilda Whittaker
- Enid Stamp Taylor: Sarah
Easy Virtue is a feature film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1928. It is based on a play by Noël Coward.
Action
Larita Filton, married to an alcoholic who falls in love with a young artist. After his suicide, she is divorced from her husband. She flees to France, where they John Whitaker, a man of good family, meets and marries him. John's mother is suspicious and research in Laritas past. She learns about the scandal and told everything to her son. Disappointed Larita leaves her husband.
Background
Easy Virtue was Hitchcock's last working for Michael Balcon and was a financial failure. Hitchcock themed once again his favorite motif of guilt and atonement and varied the history of his previous film Downhill, by exchanging the roles of man and woman, only this time without a happy ending.
Hitchcock used this film to try out crafts and tricky technical subtleties. He experimented with extreme camera angles, with screens and cuts to get along in this way with as few intertitles. He tinkered with meticulousness of visual tricks.
In a typical for the visual style they Hitchcock scene John Lorita phone makes a marriage proposal. We see neither she nor him and you can hear (or read ) a syllable. You only see the eavesdropping telephone operator and observed on their facial expressions the course and outcome of the interview. With such ideas Hitchcock broke through all that time in England established norms of film dramaturgy.
In Easy Virtue first appeared on the dominant mother in their destructive form, the essence of which is determined by taking possession, mistrust and manipulation. This figure will vary again and again over the decades Hitchcock.