Noel Coward’s early play was written in 1924 when he was 23 and isn’t an overly obvious candidate for a 21st-century film revival. Undeterred, the Australian Stephan Elliott, the director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has festooned it with able players, made it look splendidly in period and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out. Some of the casting is odd, Elliott’s screenplay doesn’t have much of Coward’s baleful and ironic wit and the film-making itself lacks the required precision.

Jessica Biel plays a beautiful American racing driver who marries into the Whittakers, an aristocratic British family, visits the ancestral pile with her new husband John (Ben Barnes) and finds his cash-strapped mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) unable to cope with her. Everyone else views her more favourably, including the older Mr Whittaker (Colin Firth) and the butler (Kris Marshall), who both seem to fancy her.

Easy Virtue purports to be about the fading aristo lifestyle after the First World War and the injection into it of American flash. It is certainly dressed to kill. But we’ve seen this so often before that it has to be done exceptionally well to take hold. While Biel is fine, Scott Thomas is largely wasted as the nasty but rather desperate old bird who commands the family, while Firth does a kind of downbeat Mr D’Arcy as her war veteran husband.

The play hardly seems the “psychological study of sexual repression, guilt and revenge as the old certainties crumble at the advance of the jazz age” that one critic appraised in a recent theatrical revival. In fact, it amounts to much ado about almost nothing. But that may be the result of Elliott’s attempt to make it entertaining rather than plausible.