Terence Greenidge | The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

the fire of burning fanaticism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evelyn Waugh (intertitles), Terence Greenidge (director) The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

 

After having lived a life of wild carousing and extravagant expense for few years at Hertford College at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh earned only a Third Class Degree in History which, as Duncan McLaren writes, “his father thought wasn’t worth formally receiving by going back to Oxford to satisfy the university’s residency requirements.” His father, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh wanted him to get a job immediately in order, in part, to help pay back the bills he had racked up through his university years.

 

    In July of 1924, accordingly, Waugh was very much betwixt and between, having no likelihood of income and torn away from his friends, and yet having no money to keep living as he had grown accustomed to from his upper-crust acquaintances.

     Having returned to the family house at Underhill in Hampstead, close to Golders Green, a semi-rural area of dairy farms, market gardens, and woods at the time, he spent much of his now spare time with his current male lover, Alastair Graham—he’d previously had romantic affairs with Hugh Lygnon and Richard Pares—until Graham departed for Kenya. In the meantime, perhaps just to entertain themselves his friends Terence Greenidge and others each divvied up a small sum to produce a silent movie for which Waugh wrote the intertitles, the script evidently being extemporized as they moved along. Much of the film is shot at Underhill.

      Its impetus, in part came out of their youthful satirizing of their recent university days. Although Waugh had once been deeply involved in the Anglican Church, by the time of his days at Oxford he’d pretty much abandoned religion and, as a member of the Hypocrites’ Club with his friends such as Harold Acton and Brian Howard took up a life of heavy drinking and homosexual activity. Waugh and his Hypocrite friends took an active disliking to the Dean of Hertford, C. R. M. F. Cruttwel—particularly after he took Waugh aside to advise him to correct his ways—describing him as being sexually attracted to dogs, at nights barking, as McLaren notes, “seductively in the quadrangle below the Dean’s rooms.” As McLaren continues about the Dean of the nearby college Bailliol, who would become a central character in the film, Waugh and his group had no positive feelings since he closed down their Club and stole Waugh’s first boyfriend, Richard Pares from him.

       The film, The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, presents the Dean of Balliol as being “a leading Catholic layman of England” who is involved in a burgeoning homosexual relationship with the Prince of Wales. Dressed in a blonde mop of a wig, looking somewhat, as McLaren describes him, like Andy Warhol of later days, Waugh plays the role of the over-attentive lover who, missionary style, would love to convert the Prince to the Catholic position, literally a “hands-on” project which means that Waugh can hardly keep his paws off of the Prince (played by the director’s brother John Greenidge, also later a director and actor).

      The film begins, however, in Rome where the Pope Septimus Nixon (Guy Hemingway) decides to deploy the clever Cardinal Montefiasco (John Sutro) to England to begin a campaign to convert the Prince to Catholicism. Much is made of his relationship between the Pope and the Cardinal’s mother, Chiara Montefiasco (played by Evelyn’s elder brother Alec, who had been previously kicked out of his preparatory school for homosexual behavior and had gone into the military after). The major characteristic of Chiara is that she is a complete lush, drinking down bottles of wine as quickly as the Pope can provide them. Almost everyone, except the Dean and the Prince, drink profusely throughout.

       Reaching England, Montefiasco and the Dean plot the overthrow of the Anglican Church by first attempting to solidify the relationship between the Dean and the Prince, but also by stealing King George V’s (Derek Erskine) ring to help sustain their activities.

       They succeed in getting the ring off the dozing King’s finger, but the Prince seems increasingly bothered by the Dean of Balliol’s constant attentions and sends his “entertainment secretary” Lord Borrowington (also played by Waugh), to the noted Bohemian chanteuse Beatrice de Carolle (Elsa Lanchester). Asking her if she might be interested in a dinner engagement with the Prince. The two hit if off immediately, and after several evenings together the Prince no longer has any interest at all in the Dean and his homosexual past.

       Foiled at what he does best, the Dean sends his friend Father Murphy, S. J. (Terence Greenidge) to Beatrice’s hovel to award her with the King’s ring now hung upon a necklace. She is so stunned that she puts it on immediately for her date with the Prince that evening.

       Father Murphy, however, has fallen head-over-heels in love with Beatrice and cannot do without her.

       After dinner as the Prince and Beatrice drink their champagne in the restaurant garden, her date suddenly spots her necklace, recognizing it as it as his father’s stolen ring, and immediately rises from his seat casting her away from him forever (“Good God, my father’s ring! Leave me you thief!”)

 

     Distressed by his female companion, he now allows himself to be taken away by the Dean and the Cardinal for religious atonement and some much-needed libations. But it appears that he is none too excited about returning to the Dean and his homosexual advances.

        Beatrice is heartbroken and spends a troubled evening with the Cardinal lying at her doorstep, awaiting her exit so that he can describe his sudden love. She finally rises early, after the sleepless night, and calmly steps over his body as she moves off in a London park in despair. When he sees that she has left, he quickly attempts to follow her, the long chase serving as a highly comical routine as every time he tracks her down, he takes a few moments to drop to his knees and thank God for having found her, at the same moment, accordingly, losing her yet again.

        Even little boys taunt her, and finally, having lost all hope, she prepares to jump into the river. But glimpsing her from afar the Cardinal rushes toward her, telling her of his love, and saving her life. The poignant moment of his final rush to her as she stands on the ledge of the footbridge to save her is played all over again as in a rewind and repeat of the most significant moment of the film.

         The two, now charmed by one another, wander throughout the day together. But at one point, as they sit together, Father Murphy bemoans the fact that it is sad that she is a Protestant, perhaps among those who will soon die in the attack of the Roman Catholic faction who plan that night to kill major Protestants throughout the country.

         Shocked by the news, Beatrice rises and hurries off to the King with the news. The King’s aids, particularly the Earl of Kettering (William Lygon) plan to rid the country of the Catholic faction just as they have previously removed the Communists.

          In pretense of discussing the divisions between Protestants and Catholics, King George invites the Catholic delegation of the Dean, Montefiasco, and others to the palace where he secretly poisons their wine, all falling immediately dead.

          In the very last scene, we observe Father Murphy evidently now working with children, suggesting, perhaps, a pedophilic future for him.

          If what you might describe this “student-made film” is irreparably silly and amateurish, it is also quite funny at moments and charming over all, particularly in connection with the Pope and Chiara Montefiasco’s alcoholic relationship, the Dean’s desperate attempts to woo the young Prince of Wales, and most notably in the performance, her first film role, of Lanchester in her disappointing relationships with both the Prince and the Father, two men with which any such relationship was doomed in any event.

     Hardly anyone saw the film at the time—and even today, although it is streamed free to Britishers by the British Film Institute—is nearly impossible to view for Americans, both North and South, without VPN service—but must have provided a few entertaining weeks before those who made it were forced to face quite different futures, Waugh temporarily enrolling in Heatherley’s, the London art school in the autumn only to drop out and take a job as a teacher in a boy’s preparatory school in North Wales.

      The film is interesting also in terms of Waugh's own future, particularly since in 1927 he would marry Evelyn Gardner, "converting" evidently to heterosexuality, an issue that also troubles me as well in his Brideshead Revisited; I do not comprehend homosexuality as a "passing phase" resolved by marriage and children, although many an Englishman apparently underwent just such a shift in their lives. E. M. Foster's Maurice shows us another such situation. And in 1930 Waugh converted to Catholicism, despite that fact that his fictions were time and again described as blasphemous.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).