Edmund Goulding (1946)
According to the BFI website, ‘This adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s novel is a searing exploration of upper-class American society in the aftermath of the First World War’. In fact, The Razor’s Edge is tosh – long-winded tosh – but it is quite entertaining. One unusual feature is that Somerset Maugham is a character in, and voiceover narrator of, the supposedly fictional story; it seems this device is also used in the novel[1]. In the film, it works for reasons both negative and positive: without it, there’d be no kind of centre to the convoluted narrative; and Herbert Marshall as Maugham gives the film’s best performance. With an air of restrained melancholy, he underplays naturally and acutely. Whenever Maugham’s on the screen, Marshall conveys the apt impression that he’s observing as much as participating in the action.
The Razor’s Edge begins in 1919, at a Chicago country club party where Maugham’s a guest and which introduces all the main characters. The host is wealthy expatriate Elliott Templeton (Clifton Webb), resident in France for some years but back in America for a visit to his widowed sister (Lucile Watson) and her daughter, Isabel (Gene Tierney), who’s engaged to be married to Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power). Elliott disapproves of Larry’s reluctance to work for a living but Larry has his reasons. He served as a pilot in the Great War. Moments before the Armistice was declared, another pilot saved Larry by sacrificing himself (the details aren’t explained). Larry’s survivor’s guilt takes the form of a restless desire to discover the meaning of life, which he’s sure isn’t to be found making money. Also at the gathering are Sophie Nelson (Anne Baxter), friends with Larry since childhood and now with his fiancée, too; and Gray Maturin (John Payne), also Larry’s friend but his polar opposite. A businessman from a wealthy family, Gray is in unrequited love with Isabel: as Elliott explains to Maugham, his niece has eyes only for Larry. That’s not quite right, though, because Isabel also adores affluence. The tension between her twin passions is sharpened when she learns from Larry that he has turned down the offer of a job from Gray’s millionaire father. They decide to postpone their marriage for a year, while Larry tries to get his thoughts straight.
He elects to do this in Paris, where he reads, goes ‘to lectures at the Sorbonne and so forth’ but fails to find peace of mind. Twelve months on, Isabel and her mother visit. Larry proposes marriage but Isabel can’t bear the prospect of a life without money and breaks off their engagement. Larry decides to work in a coal mine and is not the only metaphysically inclined member of the workforce there: his miner colleagues include a defrocked priest (Fritz Kortner) who encourages Larry to travel to India to gain spiritual enlightenment. Larry fetches up at a Himalayan lamasery, presided over by a Holy Man (Cecil Humphreys) who informs him that ‘As long as man sets his ideals on the wrong objects there can be no real happiness’, and so on. Maugham’s novel takes its title from the English translation of a verse in one of the Upanishads: ‘The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard’. Larry’s path to Salvation is pretty straightforward. He listens some more to the Holy Man’s solemn spiel, has a mountaintop epiphany (as dawn is breaking!) then obeys his mentor’s instruction to return to ‘your own people’, never forgetting that ‘There is in every one of us a spark of the infinite goodness’. Back in Chicago meanwhile, worldly Isabel weds dull Gray. Sophie has already married hospital doctor Bob MacDonald (Frank Latimore) and become a mother. Her materially modest but happy family life is destroyed when Bob and their child are killed in a traffic accident.
Whenever the action moves out of America the film goes bonkers. It’s par for the course for a big Hollywood melodrama of the period to depict abroad as emphatically exotic but The Razor’s Edge‘s funny-foreigner concoctions exceed expectations. On what will be their last evening as an engaged couple, Larry and Isabel dine in a Paris restaurant where they’re serenaded by Russian singers in ethnic outfits; they then move straight on to a club where a whirling dance number is performed by a couple without many clothes, to the accompaniment of frenetic drumming by a top-hatted man of colour without many teeth. It’s differently but no less bizarre in the Asian lamasery albeit the Holy Man, because we’re meant to take seriously what he says, has a complexion only lightly tanned and is played by a beautifully spoken English actor. From the point at which it leaps forward several years to the early 1930s the story is in France uninterruptedly and so almost continuously ridiculous.
It’s momentarily confusing when Maugham bumps into Elliott Templeton in Paris and learns that Isabel and her new family were ‘wiped out in the crash’. You think: that was Sophie’s family, surely – before realising he means the Wall Street Crash. Because Gray lost everything and had a nervous breakdown, whereas Elliott ‘sold short’ at just the right time, the latter has taken his niece, her husband and their two young daughters under his wing and into his home. Larry is in Paris too and Maugham arranges a reunion. On entering Elliott’s apartment, Larry meets Isabel’s children (this what-might-have-been moment out of the way, the little girls are virtually forgotten about, rather as films tend to ignore domestic pets once they’ve done their plot job). The grown-ups go out to dine then proceed to a sleazy bar in the Bastille Quarter, where Edmund Goulding’s exotic exaggeration is back in full swing, and the party encounters the most remarkable Chicago émigrée of all. Sophie, unable to cope with the loss of her loved ones, now lives in Paris – a drink-and-drugs-addled woman of easy virtue. Did she make the move because it suited her new appetite for self-abasement, French moral standards being known to fall far short of American Midwest ones; or has the old, decent, grieving Sophie been corrupted simply by breathing the noxious air of Paris? Either way, her plight in the city gives off a strong whiff of xenophobia.
When Larry first arrives chez Elliott, Gray is suffering from one of the terrible headaches that have plagued him since the onset of the/his Great Depression; with the help of hypnosis and an ancient coin which he puts in Gray’s hand, Larry gets rid of the headache. When he sees the state Sophie’s in, he cures her various dependencies (we’re not shown how exactly) and decides to make her his wife. His enlightenment then goes on ice for a while so as not to get in the way of the plot. Furious that Larry is to marry Sophie when he might have been hers, Isabel cunningly lures the bride-to-be back to the bottle; Sophie returns to the Parisian lower depths and Larry – now wearing a mac and a beret, presumably to pass as a local – goes in search of her. He finds her in an opium den that’s full of men with fezzes; the drunken Sophie is sprawled across one of them. When Larry tries physically to remove her, this swarthy customer performs what may be the only truly startling incident in the whole film, by jabbing a lighted reefer into Larry’s neck. The hero now resorts to using his fists, reasonably unable to see his assailant’s spark of the infinite goodness.
A year later, the show moves on to the South of France – Toulon and Nice. In Toulon, Sophie, having gone from bad to worse, is found murdered; Larry and Maugham try to help with the police investigation. In Nice, in another of his homes, Elliott lies on his deathbed, smarting from exclusion from the guest list for a grand society party being thrown by his sister, now remarried to a European aristocrat. Larry butters up the hostess’s secretary (Elsa Lanchester) in order to secure Elliott a party invitation; he receives it, RSVPs in the negative, and dies happy. Isabel tells Larry she’s always loved him. His spiritual insight finally makes a comeback to thwart her, as he tells Isabel he knows who’s really to blame for what happened to Sophie. Larry plans to work his way back to America on a tramp steamer. The film’s closing shot shows him on deck, hoisting cargo in the eye of a storm.
Just before this, when Isabel complains that she doesn’t understand what Larry wants, Maugham tells her Larry has already found what few people ever find – ‘You see, my dear, goodness is after all the greatest force in the world, and he’s got it’. Presumably the moral of the story, this is certainly the last in the succession of epigrams spouted wherever The Razor’s Edge happens to travel. I don’t know how many are lifted from Maugham’s novel, how many were the brainchild of Lamar Trotti, who has the dubious honour of sole credit for the screenplay (although Wikipedia reckons that producer Darryl F Zanuck also had a hand in it). Alfred Newman’s music does something analogous: it sounds just the same whether swooning to Isabel’s and Larry’s romantic interlude at the Chicago country club or gazing in wonder at the Himalayan-vista backcloth beyond the lamasery set.
Herbert Marshall’s work is all the more creditable given that his role is a bit of a thankless task compared with the juicy opportunities given to some of his co-stars. Not all those opportunities are seized. Gene Tierney is beautiful and accomplished but there’s shallowness in her acting as well as in the selfish bitch character that she’s playing. Clifton Webb, obvious casting as a camp socialite, has more than his fair share of the epigrams and some effective moments but his deliberate line readings aren’t greatly varied. Elsa Lanchester is entertaining in her relatively tiny part but the only player who really makes the most of a bigger one is Anne Baxter. Sophie’s ludicrous, roller-coaster transitions require Baxter to act her socks off over and over again. It’s no surprise she was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar – striking, though, that her finest acting comes not in the melodramatic highlights but during Sophie’s brief period of temperance in Paris. She seems anxiously adrift in the real world to which Larry has restored her, in which she’s aware once more of the happiness she has lost. Rather than falling off the wagon, Sophie is pushed but Baxter gets across her sense of weary relief as she raises the fateful glass to her lips. Larry isn’t among the humdinger roles and Tyrone Power, though he does a respectable job, hasn’t enough invention to liven it up. Goodness in a character is rarely the greatest force in the world of acting.
19 April 2024
[1] ‘Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players …‘ (Wikipedia)
