Rent Perfect Understanding (1933)

Free and Not So Easy - Perfect Understanding review by CH

The orthodox view is that Laurence Olivier, a notable stage actor, was slow to adapt to the screen (the late-Thirties Q-Planes was splendid) and that he ended in in a similar, Seventies slough of such things as The Boys from Brazil and other lumbering villains. That can be modified by Perfect Understanding, which appeared in 1933, its credits including the story and dialogue being by Miles Malleson and its editing the work of Thorold Dickinson - oh, and Oliver's co-star was Gloria Swanson, long familiar in silent movies (and living long enough to campaign against the adulteration of food with sugar and to support John Lennon's campaign to remain in America when Nixon tried to throw him out).

One's hopes for the film could, reasonably enough, falter in the opening fifteen minutes, when it looks as though we are in for a country-house comedy/drama so lumpen it appears to have emerged from the cook's pot - indeed the cook uses a kitchen implement to stab a maid whom she glimpses in the embrace of a previous lover.

So much for downstairs. Upstairs, well-heeled Olivier (with a neat moustache) and heiress Swanson meet, passion inspiring them to pledge marital vows that they will be adult and understanding in the face of the world's take on marital behaviour. And so ensues the best, middle part of the film. From low farce, we are now in pleasingly brittle comedy with more than a hint of Coward as the couple's honeymoon duly dissolves into his going to Cannes while she stays in London to supervise the decoration of their flat (there are some good shots of Piccadilly Circus by night).

And so it is that, in the bright day of Cannes, we find coastal vistas, art-deco interiors - and a parade of poolside women in one-piece bathing outfits redolent of those surviving scenes from the lost, Twenties incarnation of The Great Gatsby, their eyes fixed upon the trunks of well-chested men who dive from on high fearless of the waters which will greet them seconds later. The atmosphere, which includes a near-fatal, cocktail-driven speedboat race, is louche. There is no doubt that, off-screen, bathing costumes will be cast aside as soon as sundown permits, and, what's more, Olivier does not resist another's allure.

All this is stylishly filmed, with some sharp cutting from sea to shore and back again, as it is when Oliver returns to London and, inside that flat, he confesses all; with which Gloria Swanson, initially forgiving, has a fling - to his obsessive chagrin.

There is more to it than this, but the pace slackens when matters turn to the Courts, although there is some sport to be found in watching nineteenth-century stage veterans surface as bufferish barristers.

A curiosity, perhaps, but one which snuck past a Censor who grew stricter in the next year or so. Easy as it is to dismiss as a whole, as Olivier himself did, Perfect Understanding has quite a bit with which to reward those who resist the eject-button (the modern-day equivalent of a 1933 whisper in the dark, “shall we go and have a drink instead?”)