Our Betters, based on a play by Somerset
Maugham, is set in post-WWI London. That the title is meant ironically
is made evident in the first 10 minutes when newlywed Pearl Saunders
(Joan Bennett), an American hardware heiress, inadvertently discovers
her husband of but a few hours, Lord George Grayston (Alan Mowbray),
consoling his mistress and assuring her that everything between them
will continue just as before. (Did you ever hear of such a thing? I
didn’t think so.)
Her innocence destroyed in record
time, Pearl, now Lady Grayston, calls on her native moxie and makes the
best of the bad situation. Soon, she is London’s hostess with the
mostest, with newspaper articles to prove it. Her dinners and parties
are the talk of the town and an invitation to a weekend at the Grayston
estate is much sought after.
Five years pass, as
Pearl does her best to smile through her tears. Enter sister Bessie
(Anita Louise) and Bessie’s American beau Fleming (Alan Starrett),
well-meaning naïfs who are thrust into a decadent milieu unlike anything
they saw back home. The tensions between Joan’s glittering life and her
aching heart become painfully evident, and over the course of a weekend
in the country, everyone’s life changes forever, as movie loglines love
to say. Actually, everybody gets shaken up for a while and by lunchtime
the next day it’s clear that things will go on much as before.
Maugham must have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
to write a play with an upper-class setting in which wealthy characters
spout witty, epigrammatic dialogue. In an obvious homage to Wilde, the
last character to appear is named Ernest, and he is astonishingly
effeminate even for the height of the Pansy Craze. He seems to be
wearing lipstick and eye shadow, and is a tango instructor. Played by
Tyrell Davis, he gets the last line and puts his gay seal on the
proceedings.
The nonstop wit gets a bit tiresome, and if the film of Our Betters doesn’t overcome its stage origins, the pre-Code frankness of the script is worthy of at least one star.
Fun Fact: George Cukor directed Our Betters, Dinner at Eight, and Little Women in 1933. That was some run of Hollywood Golden Age classics.
