There was a wonderful series from the BBC in the early seventies of some of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Wimsey, a monocle wearing, gentlemen, scholar, athlete, wit, bon-vivant charmer was defined on the screen by Ian Carmichael in a role that I’m sure will be associated with him in the same way as is Yul Brunner and the King of Siam, Robert Preston and Harold Hill or Marlon Brando and Stanley Kowalski. The series is great fun to read and engrossing to watch. The subjects include: advertising, bell ringing and medicine and give a terrific portrait of English life in the twenties and thirties. Of course there are caricatures and prejudices,(both racial and class) but the times are now so distant that the stories I’m sure are more charming than to their contemporary readers.
We rented the DVD of “Clouds of Witness” from Netflix. This tale involves a death in an English country house, the estate of the Duke of Denver who is Lord Peter Wimsey’s older and more conventional brother. The cast includes the dowager duchess, a threatening neighbor with the forbidding name of Grimthorpe, Peter’s butler(his former batman Bunter), a communist firebrand, Lady Mary Whimsy( Peter’s sister) and the victim who was an Englishman who spent most of his time in France and also cheated at cards. It was just as well he died is the unstated assumption but suspicion falls on the Duke of Denver and Peter must clear his brother.
In one side plot, Peter’s sister has been simultaneously engaged to the victim and to the communist firebrand. The red was kept secret from her family until Peter uncovers her secret love affair and communist sympathies He visits the “Soviet Club” where colorful characters indulge in cheap wine, oratory, exotic foods and even hint at unconventional sex. Sayers' attitude towards this flirtation at least as filtered through a film maker in the early seventies is one of bemusement. Communist leanings are considered no more than a transient and harmless infatuation, much like refusal to eat meat or an intense and obsessive interest in ornnithology.
I do not want to use modern standards to judge opinions formed in 1928, but what excuse is there for certain members of the intellectual and social elites to feel the same way now. No author or film writer now would think it safe or charming to have dallied with Nazism in the nineteen thirties. The double standard applies and seeing this work made me realize that it has been going on for eighty years with unfortunately no end in sight.
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