THE first Noel Coward play to hit the big screen in more than 40 years, “Easy Virtue” is a crass, heavy- handed and — most unfor givably — largely laugh-free adaptation of The Master’s infrequently revived 1924 comic melodrama.
Which is odd, because director Stephan Elliott (“Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”) favors the comedy over the melodrama — the exact opposite approach that Alfred Hitchcock, no less, took with the last movie version, a 1928 silent.
Written when Coward was 24, “Easy Virtue” is essentially an attack on Victorian hypocrisy. It pits an uptight, middle-age aristocrat against her brand-new daughter-in-law, an American widow with a past, at the family’s moldering estate.
Kristin Scott Thomas, as the former, is more than up to Coward’s bon mots, which is not the case with Jessica Biel as her son’s wife. Biel looks ravishing in a succession of elaborate period costumes but is a poor fit for Coward’s brittle style.
For this “updated” version (still set in the 1920s), Biel’s character is now a race-car driver, and Scott Thomas’ shambling husband (Colin Firth) has to announce to Biel that he is a member of the “Lost Generation” who led all the town’s men to doom in World War I.
He does that while, for some inexplicable reason, Biel is tinkering with his old motorcycle while wearing a white silk blouse.
Other “improvements” include dodgy special effects and a score that mixes Coward and Cole Porter with period arrangements of “Sex Bomb” and “Car Wash.”
After a soporific, exposition-heavy first act — and a belabored gag involving an accidentally killed Chihuahua — things pick up, but only slightly. Elliott “opens up” the drawing-room action with a fox hunt, a dance and a charity show in which Biel performs the cancan.
Biel’s new husband (Ben Barnes, the narcoleptically pretty lead of “Prince Caspian”) is such a wimpish bore, there isn’t much at stake, and his horrid, gossipy sisters are even worse.
Aside from the valiant Scott Thomas — who improbably picks up a pool cue at one point strictly for the sake of a sight gag — the acting honors (such as they are) belong to Kris Marshall as the eyeball-rolling butler.
Overall, “Easy Virtue” is champagne gone flat.
EASY VIRTUE
Disappointing.
Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexuality). At the Lincoln Plaza, the Cinema 1, the Union Square.