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Flowers For Algernon | Michael Denison and Michael Redgrave pause briefly between quips in The Importance of Being Earnest.

YE OLDE BRITISH COMEDY
Begins Mon, Apr 21 (8pm) with The Importance of Being Earnest. Continues most Mondays until June 16. Royal Alberta Museum (102 Ave & 128 St). 

What exactly is going on inside Joan Greenwood’s mouth that enables her to produce those wonderfully plummy vowel noises—the greatest voice in the history of motion pictures? Was she born with a double-jointed soft palate? Is she closing off air to her trachea in some way? Or is she swallowing her tongue with every line of dialogue? Or maybe all three at once? Whatever she’s doing to herself, she must be well-practiced at it, because in all of her scenes as Gwendolyn Fairfax in the 1952 British film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest she exhibits a preternatural poise and calm. So serene is she, so perfectly posed in her spring dresses and her flower-bedecked hats, so impossible to faze, even in the midst of the most nonsensical romantic entanglements imaginable, you would never guess that she was in danger of choking on her tongue with every syllable she utters.

On April 21, The Importance of Being Earnest launches the Edmonton Film Society’s spring screening series—this one devoted to British comedies of the ’40s and ’50s. In some ways, Earnest is the odd film out among these eight titles. It’s a period film, for one thing, with sumptuous Technicolor photography and costumes so expensive and immaculate you can practically visualize the designer’s sketches as you watch the movie. And it’s loaded down with prestige in a way that the rest of the more modestly budgeted films in the EFS series aren’t—Earnest even begins from the point of view of someone watching the curtain rise on a stage production of the play from a luxury box. 

Much like Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, the “play” quickly turns into a “film,” but (except for a clever dissolve from a close-up of Michael Redgrave’s dressing gown to the gardenia he wears in his lapel later that day), it never quite shakes off its stagebound trappings to turn into a fully cinematic experience. It’s a little stuffy and pleased with itself—it’s as if it knows it’s a classic already. 

However, it does contain Edith Evans’ definitive performance as Lady Bracknell, the terrifyingly imperious battleaxe whom Redgrave must win over if he hopes to marry Joan Greenwood. Lady Bracknell doesn’t really converse with anyone; she grabs them in her pincers like a housefly and slowly pulls their wings off. It’s sublimely funny; what other performer could find the music in a line like “Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture! It is most indecorous!” the way Evans does?

British comedy in this period is most closely associated with the lightly satirical films produced by Ealing Studios in West London, and three of their best-known titles are part of the EFS series, all of them from the banner year of 1949: Whisky Galore! (May 5), Passport to Pimlico (May 12), and Kind Hearts and Coronets (June 2). Kind Hearts is the one that probably holds up best, thanks to its blackly funny premise (a young man decides to become the Duke of Chalfont by systematically murdering the eight aristocrats standing between him and the title), but give Whisky Galore! a try too—its tale of a small Scottish island, wracked by wartime rationing, determined to keep the cargo of booze that’s just washed ashore for themselves, will resonate with any hoser who’s ever dreamed of finding an abandoned keg.

Two lesser-known relationship comedies are also in the series: 1953’s The Captain’s Paradise (April 28), a surprisingly sophisticated marital farce starring Alec Guinness as a cheerful bigamist, and On Approval (June 9), a dated 1944 comedy of manners redeemed by a rare screen appearance by Beatrice Lillie.

The Smallest Show on Earth (May 26) may have been a sentimental choice by the EFS programmers: this 1957 film is about a married couple trying to keep the run-down cinema they’ve inherited alive while showing nothing but dusty prints of old movies. 

And the series concludes on June 16 with I’m All Right, Jack, a 1960 satire on organized labour whose racy double entendres and use of nudist-camp footage to bookend the action signaled a new era of British comedy was on the horizon: broader, lewder, more interested in guffaws than in wry smiles. So long, Joan Greenwood and Oscar Wilde; hello, Kenneth Williams and Carry On Cleo. Nothing against the Carry On gang, but we miss Joan something fierce.