An Ideal Husband (1947)

My most recent DVR watching was the 1947 British production An Ideal Husband. Note that there were two movies in the 1990s based on the same Oscar Wilde play, and a TV movie called The Ideal Husband which has nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

Hugh Williams plays Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising star MP in the British House of Commons in the mid 1890s, so the end of the Victorian era. He and his wife, Lady Gertrude (Diana Wynyard) are hosting a party. Who should show up but Mrs. Laura Cheveley (Paulette Goddard; the name is pronounced "CHEEV-lee" and not "SHEV-a-lee" as if it were French), who has come all the way from Vienna. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley and Lady Chiltern knew each other when they went to the same finishing school decades ago, and Lady Chiltern doesn't like Cheveley.

Cheveley, however, isn't really here to see the lady of the house. No, she wants to speak to Lord Robert. Apparently, there's an engineering project about a canal in the Argentine, as they called Argentina back in those days. Looking at a map, you'd have to wonder where they'd build a canal, unless it was about shortening the trip around Cape Horn, although I don't know how far south the higher Andes extend. It's understandable that investing in such a canal would be a fool's errand, and Lord Robert plans to tell Parliament that Britain should not invest.

Mrs. Cheveley has apparently invested in the canal scheme, however, so she needs it to go ahead, and she's trying to impress upon Lord Robert to put forward a recommendation in favor of it. To make matters clear to Lord Robert, she point out that she knows a secret from his past. Apparently, he had insider information on the Suez Canal project, and he used that to make himself wealthy. It would be a huge scandal if that came out, and it would be bad for him too if Lady Gertrude found out.

So Lord Robert goes to his best friend Viscount Arthur (Michael Wilding) for advice. Arthur eventually comes up with a scheme involving a brooch that could double as a bracelet, but there's the matter of Arthur's relationship with Gertrude. And there's also Robert's much younger sister Mabel (Glynis Johns)....

An Ideal Husband is a movie that's very well-made from a technical point of view. The acting is more than adequate; the Technicolor photography is good although it looks like the print could use a restoration around the edges; the sets and costumes are superb. And yet as I was watching the movie, I was finding myself feeling emotionally distant.

It hit me that it was down to the Oscar Wilde source material. I've always found it difficult to get into the Ealing version of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest as well. And I realized that these plays are strongly in a category (for me at least), with all those drawing room comedies that were a thing in the early days of the talking picture when they didn't want to move the camera as much. I don't have a problem with early talkies, but those drawing room movies have always been less my thing. So it shouldn't surprise me that An Ideal Husband wasn't my cup of tea.

Still, as I said, it's clearly very well made. Anybody who likes Oscar Wilde will probably enjoy the movie very much. The TCM Shop lists the 1947 An Ideal Husband as available on DVD; Amazon only seems to have a Region 2 DVD of the movie. But they have one of the 1999 versions available via streaming, and list both 1999 versions as out-of-print on DVD (you can get DVDs but they're pricey).