Mad about the remake. But not in a good way.

Noel Coward wrote it, Alfred Hitchcock filmed it first and now Stephen Elliott ruined it.

The new version of Coward‘s 1924 play “Easy Virtue” shows what can happen to a play when a director doesn’t understand it. Although how anyone can fail to understand Noel Coward is beyond me.

Coward is elegance, sophistication, understatement. He is stiff-upper-lipped Brits clenching their jaws through the most hilarious dialogue.

But Elliott gives a fatally modern tone to this 85-year-old work, with distractingly flashy direction, pointlessly skewed camera angles, too-abrupt editing, sound effects, slide whistles and the like.

And even if he hadn’t filmed it so grossly improperly, Elliott and his co-conspirator Sheridan Jobbins ruined the movie by doing such a disastrous rewrite of the script.

On the one hand, you have Noel Coward, one of the most celebrated and distinctive British playwrights of the 20^th century. On the other hand, you have Stephen Elliott, whose last movie was the catastrophically awful “Eye of the Beholder.”

To his credit, Elliott did also make the deliciously fun “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” But that was 15 years ago.

Jessica Biel stars as Larita, the race-car-driving American new bride of John, the son of an upper class family whose fortunes are fading (in the original, she isn’t a racer, she isn’t American and she is more upper class than the family). The family takes an instant dislike to her, except the bitter and alienated father, played by Colin Firth.

Or at least I think he is bitter and alienated. It’s hard to hear half of what Firth says.

In this version, the family’s suspicions of Larita are confirmed when they discover she was suspected of murdering her terminally ill first husband. In Coward’s version, the family learns that she was divorced -- a sensational fact at the time, but still not on a par with murder. Because she was a divorcee, they assume she has had many lovers, hence the title. With the version shown on the screen, “Easy Virtue” means nothing.

The disapproving, controlling mother is played by Kristin Scott-Thomas in atypically overstated performance. But because her performance is so in keeping with the ill-advised broadness of the rest of the film -- when in doubt, cut to the annoying yappy dog for laughs -- we can assume she was merely responding to Elliott’s directions.

Obviously, she never saw “Eye of the Beholder.”

Elliott doesn’t seem to differentiate musically between Coward and Cole Porter, and at his very worst he sullies the soundtrack with a semi-hot jazz version of the 1977 disco hit “Car Wash.”

Coward would be too suave to turn in his grave. And that’s the fundamental difference between he and Elliott.