"Playing with words is fascinating to the writer and afterward to the reader, but on the screen it is quite impossible. Would much charm remain to long excerpts from Wilde's play if the audience had to ponder laboriously over the scintillating sentences on the screen?" And so Ernst Lubitsch justified his temerity (or chutzpah) in mounting a silent version of Lady Windermere's Fan, but without any of Wilde's celebrated dialogue, not even in the intertitles. What remains is a visually witty, closely observed, emotionally nuanced rendering of Wilde's basic plot, as filtered through Lubitsch's everyday eroticism. Irene Rich stars as Mrs. Erlynne, the long-absent mother of Lady Windermere (May McAvoy), whose return to the London scene coincides with her daughter's temptation to pursue a dalliance with Lord Darlington (Ronald Colman). Lady Windermere, who believes her mother is dead, begins to wonder why this older woman is intent on infiltrating her social circle. Perhaps Mrs. Erlynne plans to steal Lord Windermere — which might not be entirely inconvenient? Lady Windermere's Fan was met with near-unanimous praise upon its release, with Lubitsch's departures from the original text decidedly uncontroversial for moviegoers and their fan magazines. "The plot by Oscar Wilde was not so original," sniffed Photoplay. "With Wilde's epigrams it became literature. With Lubitsch's subtle translation it is delightful." -Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society

Preserved by the Museum of Modern Art with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.

35mm from the Museum of Modern Art