Easy Virtue

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the Noël Coward play, made during his British silent period. A woman divorces her abusive husband, flees the scandal to the Riviera, and marries a younger man whose aristocratic family does not know her past and turns on her when they learn it. Hitchcock was not fond of the material and the film is largely a commission job, but it shows his early interest in the social trap: a woman judged by a code that does not apply to the men around her. Most of the Coward dialogue is conveyed through intertitles rather than spoken, since this was a silent film of a talkie play. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.