Stiff Upper Lips and Sharpened Teeth

Time again for literature to remind us that perplexity is not exclusive to this age.

If ever a line were applicable today, for example, here it is: “It’s a strange, complicated life we live now.” Yet instead, it’s what Paul Montague says wistfully to Lady Carbury in public television’s latest nostalgic feast for old-school Anglophiles who like their 19th century Brits decadent and corrupt beneath cultured exteriors.

The source here is that prolific Victorian, Anthony Trollope, whose “The Way We Live Now,” as adapted delectably in four parts by screenwriter Andrew Davies, is this “Masterpiece Theatre” season’s creamy eclair, a delicious social satire populated largely by fops, fools and frauds.

More than any other recent production, this one evokes the golden age of “Masterpiece Theatre,” when that strikingly durable PBS series was dependably something to build a night around. Make that seven Sunday nights in late 1984, when PBS aired a BBC hybrid of Trollope’s “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers,” followed by the finest miniseries of its time, “The Jewel in the Crown.” Those were the days.

Heading the frauds tonight, but no icon of refinement, is Augustus Melmotte, a scheming financier with a ruthless heart played with dark, glowering, menacing, predatory gusto by David Suchet, U.K. television’s actor for all seasons, and best known to U.S. viewers as Agatha Christie’s fussy Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. No mincing steps from Suchet when dealing trouble as Trollope’s fast-talking scammer, who buys his way into society and even Parliament while plucking his victims like fresh blooms.

It’s Melmotte’s publicized arrival in London from central Europe--a shrewd, mysterious little gargoyle wrapping himself in pomp and palatial splendor--that has the attention of London’s stiff upper lips. “I’ve heard the man’s a Jew, a scoundrel and a swindler,” sniffs a moldy aristocrat.

Soon, however, he and other greedy gentry are blissfully sitting on the board of stuffed shirts that Melmotte chooses to rubber-stamp the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a phony enterprise that will sucker investors as well as Montague (Cillian Murphy), an earnest civil engineer who thinks he’s going to be building a railroad in America.

As in other British novels of the period, Trollope has money, either inherited or attained otherwise, determining how high his characters rise in stature.

So it is that the disgustingly affluent Melmotte, though reviled privately, is fawned over despite being so loutish and uncouth that he gestures with his dripping soup spoon while dining, and his cloddish French wife has to wipe his mouth after he stuffs it with pastry.

Nothing speaks louder to these Victorians than the almighty pound, however, their expectations coinciding with wealth in a setting where finishing “the season” in London is essential for young women desiring proper husbands of means, and where a misbehaving fellow can earn “a frightful ragging from the chaps at the club.”

“The Way We Live Now” uncovers an attic full of musty upper crusts and dandies along with incestuous tangles galore, starting with the once-prosperous family of Lady Carbury (Cheryl Campbell), now too poor even to pay the wine merchant.

No wonder this happily widowed matron, her ambition as plump as her breasts, is overjoyed that her worthless cad of a son, Felix (Matthew Macfadyen), hopes to restore the family fortune by marrying Melmotte’s daughter, Marie (Shirley Henderson), for her money. And no wonder she’s furious that her virtuous daughter, Hetta (Paloma Baeza), has rejected a marriage proposal from her rich cousin, Roger (Douglas Hodge), because she’s fallen for Montague.

You have to admire Lady Carbury for being candid about her intentions. While the drunken, lascivious Felix gambles away everything at cards, hers, at least, are on the table. “What a lovely couple they make,” she coos about Felix and that hotblooded little bundle, Marie, played to the glorious hilt by scene-stealing Henderson.

“The Way We Live Now” owes much to director David Yates, who has jolly magnificent fun with Trollope--in one instance having tall, handsome, elegant, haughty Felix step around a pile of horse manure en route to asking Melmotte for Marie’s hand, then blunder into it on his way out after being rejected and overmatched by the crude little tyrant he hoped to make his father-in-law. Melmotte’s choice for Marie is the rich nonentity Lord Nidderdale.

Coming near the end of Part 2, moreover, is a spectacular banquet that Melmotte throws for the emperor of China. Keep your eye not on the foreigners, though, but the snobs who smugly ridicule Melmotte behind his back, seen gorging themselves at the 40-foot table he has set out for them. In fact, they are the ones being devoured, by their host.

The story gets a bit choppy later when Felix’s secret girlfriend from the countryside (Maxine Peake) and Montague’s former flame from the U.S. (Miranda Otto) converge in London, and the melodrama thickens when fissures in Melmotte’s world widen to cracks.

Yet wry observations and biting satire surface even during moments that may appear serious, as when a rich Jewish banker withdraws the marriage proposal he made to a desperate-to-wed young woman after learning she’s as anti-Semitic as her snooty parents. Her incredulous summation: “Jilted by a ... Jew.”

It was a strange, complicated life then, as it is now.

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“The Way We Live Now” premieres tonight at 9 on KCET and continues the next three Mondays. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.