Talk about your stiff upper lip…

Stupid me. Before seeing David Mamet's new film, the unbelievably G-rated, profanity-free The Winslow Boy, I'd never even heard of the Edwardian legal case which was so precedent-setting that it's now been made into a movie five times, and a play once. Geez, that's more than O.J., Amy Fisher, and Joey Bottafucco combined. It all starts shortly before World War I when a 13-year-old boy is drummed out of the Naval Academy (now I understand why English cops don't have to carry guns - if American eighth graders were all at West Point, our streets would be a quieter, too…), accused of stealing a paltry five-shilling postal money order. But, like Ward Cleaver in some bizarro obsessive/compulsive universe, his father (Oscar-nominated Nigel Hawthorne, from The Madness of King George) believes his son's plea of innocence, and nearly bankrupts their middle-class family to hire Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), a famous attorney known for handling high-profile, high-profit business and labor trials, to defend him.

Coming in the same week as Austin Powers, it was a treat to see something so dramatically understated. Scripted by Mamet from the play by Terrence Rattigan, it contains no action, not even much in the way of histrionics, but is still highly engaging. Everybody just stands around smoking unfiltered cigarettes while effectively conveying an event which helped establish in a still very authoritarian time and place the right of even the most apparently insignificant case to be heard in court. Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon (who appears in many of Mamet's films, and gave such a lump-in-the-throat performance in The Spanish Prisoner) in particular is excellent as daughter Catherine, a leftist suffragette whose fiancé can't cope with the her becoming a less-than-flattering household word, his in-laws daily fodder for political cartoons.

The cast puts on quite a clinic, and when it's done the thoughtful filmgoer may leave wondering why all movie stars can't act so well, or why any movie would ever need a six-figure effects budget. Of course, it may also have you pondering why Mamet, whose Glengarry Glen Ross rivaled Scarface for curses per minute, usually seems compelled to write with such vitriol, but that's another matter for Miss Manners. In the end, The Winslow Boy is as English as a Jaguar: fine, proper, and very well-executed, if still rather quirky, getting from A to B with great quiet elan. B

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