"Bright Young Things" or "Bright Young People" was the name given to a set of hedonistic, fun-loving young aristocrats and bohemians in the London of the 1920s and 1930s and who featured prominently in the gossip columns of the day. When in 1930 Evelyn Waugh wrote a novel satirising the group he initially intended to call it "Bright Young Things", but rejected this because he felt it had become too much of a journalistic cliché. His eventual choice of title, however, "Vile Bodies", was not his happiest inspiration, so it is perhaps not surprising that writer-director Stephen Fry reverted to Waugh's original choice.
The novel contains some brilliant satirical writing and social commentary, but its plot is rather unsatisfactory. It is also notably uneven in tone, starting off relatively light-hearted but becoming progressively bitterer and gloomier; Waugh himself attributed this unevenness to the fact that it was while writing the novel that his marriage to his first wife (also named Evelyn) collapsed. Waugh's story ends with the outbreak of a catastrophic European war; writing three years before Hitler's rise to power, he was remarkably prophetic in this respect.
Fry rewrites Waugh's story somewhat, moving the action from the late twenties/early thirties to the late thirties; there are references to both Hitler and Wallis Simpson. The Prime Minister, however, is neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain but Waugh's fictitious James Brown. (In choosing this name he also proved unintentionally prophetic; Gordon Brown's full name was James Gordon Brown). The film ends during the actual, historical Second World War, not the hypothetical war of the novel. Fry is able to deal more explicitly with matters such as drug use and homosexuality, which in the moral climate of the early thirties Waugh could only hint at.
The plot is really too complex to summarise in any detail, but it revolves around the efforts of an aspiring young novelist named Adam Fenwick-Symes to find enough money to court his fiancée Nina Blount. When the manuscript of Adam's latest novel, also titled "Bright Young Things", is confiscated by Dover customs officers for allegedly being pornographic, even though they have never read it, he is forced to take a job as a gossip columnist on a newspaper, a job which brings him into frequent contact with London's smart set. Other important characters include Simon Balcairn, Adam's predecessor as "Mr Chatterbox", Ginger Littlejohn, Adam's rival for Nina's affections, and the Canadian-born newspaper proprietor Lord Monomark. (Monomark, like Lord Copper in Waugh's later novel "Scoop", is a satirical portrait of Lord Beaverbrook).
The film contains a large number of cameos by distinguished members of the British acting profession, among them John Mills in his last film before his death two years later. Among the notable contributions are those from Dan Aykroyd as the overbearing Monomark, Fenella Woolgar as the madcap socialite Agatha Runcible, Michael Sheen as the screamingly camp Miles Malpractice, Peter O'Toole as Nina's mad old father Colonel Blount and Simon Callow as the exiled King of Anatolia, forever bewailing the theft of a valuable fountain-pen, something which seems to distress him far more than the loss of his kingdom.
Fry keeps some of the serious incidents from the original novel; one character, for example, commits suicide and another ends up in a lunatic asylum, but he gives his film a much happier ending. This may prove controversial with purists, but in my view it was the right thing to do. Waugh's bleak ending served to underline his serious satirical purpose, but satire tends to lose its bite when directed against the mores and social institutions of several decades ago rather than against those of one's own day. "Bright Young Things" is less a social satire than a comedy-drama with a period setting, and, with some witty dialogue, amusing incidents and well-drawn characters it works very well as such. 7/10
The novel contains some brilliant satirical writing and social commentary, but its plot is rather unsatisfactory. It is also notably uneven in tone, starting off relatively light-hearted but becoming progressively bitterer and gloomier; Waugh himself attributed this unevenness to the fact that it was while writing the novel that his marriage to his first wife (also named Evelyn) collapsed. Waugh's story ends with the outbreak of a catastrophic European war; writing three years before Hitler's rise to power, he was remarkably prophetic in this respect.
Fry rewrites Waugh's story somewhat, moving the action from the late twenties/early thirties to the late thirties; there are references to both Hitler and Wallis Simpson. The Prime Minister, however, is neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain but Waugh's fictitious James Brown. (In choosing this name he also proved unintentionally prophetic; Gordon Brown's full name was James Gordon Brown). The film ends during the actual, historical Second World War, not the hypothetical war of the novel. Fry is able to deal more explicitly with matters such as drug use and homosexuality, which in the moral climate of the early thirties Waugh could only hint at.
The plot is really too complex to summarise in any detail, but it revolves around the efforts of an aspiring young novelist named Adam Fenwick-Symes to find enough money to court his fiancée Nina Blount. When the manuscript of Adam's latest novel, also titled "Bright Young Things", is confiscated by Dover customs officers for allegedly being pornographic, even though they have never read it, he is forced to take a job as a gossip columnist on a newspaper, a job which brings him into frequent contact with London's smart set. Other important characters include Simon Balcairn, Adam's predecessor as "Mr Chatterbox", Ginger Littlejohn, Adam's rival for Nina's affections, and the Canadian-born newspaper proprietor Lord Monomark. (Monomark, like Lord Copper in Waugh's later novel "Scoop", is a satirical portrait of Lord Beaverbrook).
The film contains a large number of cameos by distinguished members of the British acting profession, among them John Mills in his last film before his death two years later. Among the notable contributions are those from Dan Aykroyd as the overbearing Monomark, Fenella Woolgar as the madcap socialite Agatha Runcible, Michael Sheen as the screamingly camp Miles Malpractice, Peter O'Toole as Nina's mad old father Colonel Blount and Simon Callow as the exiled King of Anatolia, forever bewailing the theft of a valuable fountain-pen, something which seems to distress him far more than the loss of his kingdom.
Fry keeps some of the serious incidents from the original novel; one character, for example, commits suicide and another ends up in a lunatic asylum, but he gives his film a much happier ending. This may prove controversial with purists, but in my view it was the right thing to do. Waugh's bleak ending served to underline his serious satirical purpose, but satire tends to lose its bite when directed against the mores and social institutions of several decades ago rather than against those of one's own day. "Bright Young Things" is less a social satire than a comedy-drama with a period setting, and, with some witty dialogue, amusing incidents and well-drawn characters it works very well as such. 7/10