64/100
"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" asked the poster, and that's always more or less been my reaction to the very idea of a silent Lady Windermere's Fan. Not that I knew the play (only just read it now), but I knew that Oscar Wilde wrote it, and that was enough. Trying to imagine The Importance of Being Earnest or An Ideal Husband with intertitles is an exercise in absurdity...and, indeed, no cinematic adaptation of either was attempted until 1935. (Earnest didn't get a movie until 1952!) Was Lady Windermere's Fan, do forgive me, Wilde-ly atypical, its comedy devoid of arch witticisms? Or had Lubitsch ground things to a halt with interpolated text every 15 seconds? Both prospects seemed unlikely. And for the record, Lady Windermere's a Wilde play through and through, replete with lines like "If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism." This would almost have to be a film more read than watched.
THE PLAN: Throw out virtually all of Wilde's brilliant dialogue and turn what had been a light comedy into a harrowing melodrama.
It works surprisingly well. To be fair, the play likewise hinges on an act of poignant self-sacrifice—it's not as if no throat has ever developed a lump during stage productions, I'd wager. Still, Lubitsch and three credited writers (one for adaptation, two for titles) have ruthlessly whittled it down to a narrative spine that feels Victorian in a different, more socially agonizing way than Wilde (who's more proto-Edwardian) really intended. Very little of the tale unfolds in words (and what words there are mostly appear by way of correspondence—inserts of cards and letters and newspaper stories abound); Lubitsch instead demonstrates the power of a close-up, replacing lengthy droll speeches with a single intense look. Oddly, this involves disparate acting styles. As the title character, May McAvoy (who starred in The Jazz Singer but never truly made the transition into sound) relies heavily on wide eyes and tremulous body language; Bert Lytell, playing Lord Windermere, likewise works largely in broad pantomime. Irene Rich and (especially) Ronald Colman, on the other hand, do remarkably subtle facial work—a medium shot of Lord Darlington gradually realizing the import of what someone has else has told him sees Colman's expression rapidly change in several minute gradations that would be unreadable to all but the first few rows of a legit-theater audience. I'm only moderately well versed in silent cinema but it struck me as unusual for 1925. And then you've got Lubitsch's expert staging, which in this case features a perverse motif of characters being deliberately obscured and then popping into frame from below—the most striking of these places Lady Windermere and Lord Darlington behind an enormous hedge at a great distance and has one and/or the other keep disappearing by bending down for reasons unknown (one assumes something was dropped). It's a visual treat.
So this Lady Windermere's Fan works as a movie, against all odds. It does feel somewhat attenuated, though, because Wilde's play isn't exactly plot-heavy, which means that something like 70% of it has been jettisoned. Scenes have been added to provide more heft—we now see Mrs. Erlynne's initial contact with Lord Windermere, for example, whereas Wilde begins the play with her blackmail scheme already in progress—and I gotta say that it was never entirely clear to me, watching the film with no knowledge of the source as yet, whether Mrs. Erlynne genuinely was who she claimed to be or was merely claiming that as part of her scam. Which makes a big difference in how the conclusion plays. (Arguably it's more powerful if she was lying, which she was not. But I thought to the end that she might have been; that aspect gets muddled in this virtually dialogue-free form.) Impressive feat to transform a great verbose comedy into a solid silent melodrama, but that's still a downgrade, ultimately.