Stephen Fry's made an accomplished career for himself as the favored footman of the English Society of the Funny W. Wilde, Wodehouse and now Waugh. The televised and cinematized class comedy has never had it so good than under Fry's witty guidance, and so it's a real pleasure that he chose for his directorial debut Evelyn Waugh's novel secondo, Vile Bodies. (The film's title, Bright Young Things, borrows the book's working title.)

Fry knows his source material thoroughly and, in a way, Waugh's book is the perfect fizzing quinine cocktail for the man who brought Jeeves and Oscar to life to throw back. It's as if everything Fry admires about the literary ethos of Wodehouse and Wilde -- the injunction to do some serious living by living as unseriously as one can -- has been carefully stitched into the hairshirts of notoriety that both writers were forced to bear in their careers. Wodehouse learned how war could effectively wipe the smile off someone's face when he danced to the music of Nazi time; and of course Wilde became the sexual martyr of two centuries when the release of his personal repression extracted the venom of repressiveness in a society that had recently celebrated him.

So too goes the party-stopping gravity in Waugh, who differs, however, from his contemporary and from his predecessor in one very crucial respect. Waugh discovered the killjoy from the moment he put pen to paper. His fiction was never without a moral tonic or saving grace to punctuate all the silliness and espieglerie, as Fry's superficially frothy but deeply solemn film illustrates in ways Waugh's book could not have done. One is reminded of just how unhappily this comic tale ends. The events which bring the gramophone to a screeching halt include the lunatic's death of Agatha Runcible, who was easily the heart and soul -- or, given the universal penchant for substance abuse, nostril and liver -- of the BYTs. In the book, Agatha's demise is mentioned en passant as part of a larger epilogic pastiche, but Fry, perhaps recalling his portrayal of Wilde's saturnine beginning-of-the-end stint as a hard laborer, has Agatha languish longer in the sanatorium before kicking the bucket. Played to the hilt by the wonderful newcomer Fenella Woolgar, Agatha's early pathos as a clueless madcap is given color and depth of humanity in these scenes without making her seem simpering in that Angel-of-Death-cometh way a lesser director might have indulged. And speaking of angels, there's good old Melrose Ape, a shrill banshee of American evangelism who heads up a touring group called the "Angels of the Glad New Day," downy young girls all dressed in white and all straight out of Lewis Carroll's wet dream.

Played by a hilariously marmish Stockard Channing, Mrs. Ape exists to bring a puritanical dudgeon to a hard boozing, coke snorting society party. Not realizing that her cute little entourage would turn out to be more minatory than darling, the hostess of this soiree cuts things short after hearing her guests decried as a bunch of Godless barbarians ("Bright young people is what they call you -- well! One out of three ain't bad, I guess!"). This is a sentiment Waugh, with his creeping Catholicism, can only have shared about his own characters, and herein lies his genius at not burdening his light stuff with moralization. He ventriloquizes rather than sermonizes his judgments through the vessel of this thundering beast of a woman -- an ape, all right. Though her gospel may be Waugh's, the bigger joke comes at the expense of a more loathsome species than the proselytizing zealot: the visiting foreigner with nasty things to say about one's countrymen. Waugh made the glorification of English tradition the counterpoise to his satire of that tradition, if not his whole raison d'ecrire. (And is there anything more traditionally English than trashing Americans?) Fry cleverly inserts a throwaway line in the same vein: the Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Monomark implores a "Mrs. Simpson" to return at once to the States. (It's another credit to the filmmaker that he does not underestimate his audience's grasp of pre-Camilla royal scandal, or try to "update" his movie with modern references.)

In contrast to the other Funny W's who also dabbled in the transatlantic special relationship, Waugh sensed early on that the flute-clinking frivolity that was the Anglo-American Jazz Age, with its shared syncopation and fondness of generational argot, came at too high a cultural price. This was a man who named his first book Decline and Fall, which might have convinced even the least teleologically-minded reader of its author's take on the fin de siecle and what that wheedling infant, the centenary nine, was about to do to God, King and Country. In case the point was missed there, it was surely hammered home in the sequel, where half the bon vivants were disgraced or killed off domestically, and the other half were sent overseas to die on the battlefield. (See also one of his best written books, Put Out More Flags.)

Published in 1930, Vile Bodies was set in a future nearer than Waugh himself knew was imminent. It ominously prefigured the onset of another world war and even more ominously spoke of it in tones redolent of the what-does-it-all-mean intellectual histories now being written about what was then unironically and myopically called the "Great War." Added to the notion of Fergusonian overstretch, of which World War I may have well been the culmination, are more metaphysical adjectives to give shape to the event that produced the machine gun, the tank and the chemical weapon, not to mention the gemini twins of nationalism and internationalism. "Hygenic." "Unifying." "Ethically maturing." Orwell, in his classic essay, "My Country, Right or Left," remembered admonitions by WWI veterans as a schoolboy: War was a "good thing," it "made you tough," "kept you fit." And as if not to let the charnal stench of a globe on fire appear the mere extension of epochal waste that preceded it, we're now told that millions marched into death in 1914 because kaisers and prime ministers needed some way of curing the incipient anomie and slackness of will depleting their empires. Neurosis as a casus belli -- was the twentieth the century of Freud or what?

Waugh was at once luridly attracted to and repulsed by this spiritual clearing-house rationalization for war, the Sword of Honor trilogy being his most obvious evocation of such. It defined his sadomasochistic relationship with modernism, and it surely -- and not unrelatedly -- stoked his fascination with fascism. The kitsch of that ideology could summarily be described as "Everything old is young again." But not quite the same, Waugh might have added, and did do: Bright Young Things is a wistful irony.

The "bodies" in question here might have started out as members of a self-indulgent metropolitan set, but they most likely wound up as something even more vile than that: corpses. Fry taps into this dead serious undercurrent of the text, which is not quite "under" enough to be labeled subtext and which at moments hazards into the realm of sentimentality. By film's end we see a tearful Miles Malpractice, once the gay belle of the ball, lamenting his criminalized homosexuality and fleeing England as a wanted man (not in the way he might have enjoyed, either.) Fry intelligently refuses to let his Edwardian wastrels get away with getting away with it all. Blithe, narcissistic and reckless, but in possession of absolutely no idea how the world will only let them down in the end; this encapsulates our heroes in the fugitive and bubbly Acts I and II of the film, which yield occasionally to foreshadowing of the morose and world-historical Act III. The characters remain developmentally arrested, the movie grows up.

In one memorable scene, a rustic cab driver lectures the protagonist Adam Symes (or Fenwick-Symes as he's actually called and would actually be called in a more "proper" era) on the excesses of the youth generation. What this country could really use is another war, says the gruff prole. Nothing like the "sound of guns and the smell of gas" to clean up the mess of decadence sweeping the land. "It all sounds so disgusting, dunn'it?" "Yes, the sound of gas and smell of gundpower does sound disgusting," replies Adam. In another context this would be a pitch-perfect Wildean riposte. If only this were Half Moon Street. If only Adam were being withering instead of just unaware of the real question -- a question he, and the zeitgeist for which he is spokesman, must perilously answer at a later date.