The Italian Straw Hat (Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie)

STREAM DIGITAL EDITION René Clair’s sparkling comedy of manners is a witty, delicate, inspired satire on propriety and behavior in the bourgeois mind-set. Transposing the action of the perennial stage farce from 1851 to a summer wedding day in 1895 – the birth of cinema – Clair recalls detail, costume and design captured by the first movies. The Italian Straw Hat (Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie) triumphantly survives its 1927 journey from stage to screen; a dozen eccentric characters, superbly acted, try desperately to keep up appearances in the face of disaster, their attitudes, concerns and gestures exquisitely stylized under Clair’s deft orchestration. The sets and costumes, too, are a charming combination of the suffocating and the exact. A bridegroom is riding to his marriage when his horse eats a straw hat hanging on a branch while its owner, a married lady, enjoys a tryst behind the bush with her love, a fierce hussar. She cannot go home without her hat, so the groom interlaces