Lady Windermere's Fan

Ernst Lubitsch adapted the wittiest play in English and kept almost none of its lines. He did not need them. Everything Wilde put into epigrams, Lubitsch puts into who looks at whom, and when, and who sees them looking. Irene Rich is Mrs Erlynne, the scandal; May McAvoy the young wife who thinks the scandal is her husband's mistress; Ronald Colman the friend waiting for her mistake. Watch the day at the races, where a whole society follows Mrs Erlynne through field glasses and the gossip travels from lens to lens without a title card. It is a silent film about talk, and nothing is lost by the silence.