Year of Release: 1928Country of Origin: UK
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Isabel Jeans, Franklin Dyall, Robin Irvine
Plot outline: A divorcée hides her scandalous past from her new husband and his family (IMDb).
An assortment of Hitchcock's greatest early movies are featured in a three-disc collection. In the early stages of his directing career, Alfred Hitchcock made
a number of hackneyed studio movies which barely resemble the works he would go on to direct. The society drama Easy Virtue is one of the nine silent movies Hitchcock directed. The movie opens with Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) posing for her portrait in an artist's studio. The behaviour of her boorish, philandering husband, Aubrey Filton (Franklin Dyall), drives her into the artist's arms where her husband discovers her. In the melee that follows, the artist shoots the husband, wounding but not killing him. Aubrey sues for divorce and Larita falls from grace in the courtroom while journalists feed the public a salaciously inflated account. Ruined, Larita flees to the south of France and meets John Whittaker (Robin Irvine), a young, upstanding British man. They fall in love, marry, and the happy couple returns to England to mummy. Mother Whittaker, a Victorian in the modern age, strenuously opposes the union and upbraids John for bringing scandal upon the family name. Neither John nor his father has the strength to withstand Mother Whittaker's onslaught, and the movie, and Larita, end miserably. Hitchcock does one of his wordless cameos in the movie. (NYT)My judgement: ** out of 4 stars
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