alr

Lady Windermere's Fan

Live Musical Accompaniment by Martin Marks
Screening on Film
Recently Restored
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Ronald Colman, Irene Rich, May McAvoy.
US, 1925, 35mm, black & white.
Print source: Library of Congress

Among the finest of Lubitsch’s American films of the silent era, Lady Windermere’s Fan is a sophisticated adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play that injects the Lubitsch touch into the classic comedy of manners. Set in the upper-crust world of London’s Mayfair, the story revolves around the pampered wife of a British lord who faces “a grave problem”: finalizing the seating chart for the guests at her dinner party. The world manages to intrude upon Lady Windermere in the form of a would-be suitor (a young, dashing Ronald Colman), a déclassé widow, and the gossip that such society seems to heap upon its own. In a pre-Academy Award era, Lubitsch had to content himself with the film’s emergence on the list of the “Top Ten Films of 1925.” It is also, notably, the first film to have screened at the HFA, in 1979. 

Part of film series

Read more

That Certain Feeling... The Touch of Ernst Lubitsch

Other film series with this film

Read more

Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive: J–M

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang