The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama

The undergraduate Evelyn Waugh would no more have wanted to write a good film than he would have wanted to earn a good degree. His priority at Oxford was to avoid being mistaken for a worthy grammar-school striver, and to act casual and slapdash at every opportunity. As for who was meant to be impressed by this time-wasting snob-act, it was probably about a dozen other members of the Hypocrites' Club at most.

The resulting 44-minute effort - silent of course, and produced to rejection standards - would not normally have survived, as its content was blatantly contemptuous of church and monarchy, so it could only have been shown in private, and its cast and crew were all young unknowns anyway. But amazingly, here it is now online, free on the house, courtesy of the BFI.

Announcing itself as an 'ecclesiastical melodrama', it is all about a plot to return England to Roman Catholicism by methods that make no sense whatever, but provide opportunities for Waugh's student buddies to giggle at a comic Pope and cardinal trying to gain influence over a burlesque George the Fifth and Prince of Wales. As the only female, Elsa Lanchester puts on a good ham-act in her first-ever film appearance, though her impression of a cocaine-user is disturbingly realistic, and Waugh himself puts on a reasonable performance in two roles (before converting to Rome himself just a few years later). The Pope is played by a certain Guy Hemingway - not the commonest surname, so we wonder whether he might have been one of that certain clan. But as for why they chose the title The Scarlet Woman, the connection with Aleister Crowley's mythical harlot-goddess remains too obscure for this critic to make out.

A silent home movie made by Evelyn Waugh and friends including Elsa Lanchester! Waugh himself stars as the priapic Dean of Balliol who tries to debauch the Prince of Wales in furtherance of a diabolical plan by the Pope, and Lanchester is the fallen woman who tries to save England. He is hilarious and she is radiant. It can be seen at the BFI website.

A most informative review. One minor quibble: Waugh was at Hertford College, a slightly less glamorous college than Balliol.

FYI the British Film Institute has *The Scarlet Woman* in its Mediatheque archives, and it will apparently be available to view at the NFT from 14 March 2007.

Slightly absurdly, I cannot submit the above comment unless it runs to 10 lines of text. I cannot think of anything else to add, other than to recommend other dramatisations of Evelyn Waugh's work. The best is probably *A handful of dust*, which starred James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, and Alec Guinness. The most over-rated is the Granada TV production of *Brideshead revisited*, although it is much better after the first two episodes - basically long lingering shots of Oxford and a lot of mincing in silk shirts - and it settles down to the real themes of the novel.

Waugh looked back on the novel towards the end of his life with mild dissatisfaction, as, written during rationing in WWII, it reflected an unhealthy obsession with food and luxury. The Granada production falls headlong into this trap, wasting the best part of three hours attempting to evoke the styles and surfaces of the inter-war period.

Channel 4's recent (2001?) dramatisation of *The Sword of Honour trilogy* is best ignored. It unsuccessfully condenses three novels into three hours of screen time. (This is only slightly less absurd than fitting all 12 books of *A dance to the music of time* into eight hours.) And in interviews before broadcast, the main actors and screenwriter apparently thought the main message of the book was Guy's enduring love for Virginia - an absurd conclusion to anyone who devoted even half their attention to reading the words on the pages while looking at the book.