Auf Messers Schneide

I discovered this movie only recently and have watched it three times in the last two months. It's the kind of movie that rewards repeated viewings. The story, as others have commented, is moving and inspiring and way ahead of its time, dealing as it does with topics (the philosophical/spiritual quest for meaning in life, alcoholism, psychic healing, class divisions, post-war trauma, greed vs. self sacrifice) that one would expect in a movie taking place in the nineteen sixties rather than one taking place immediately following World War I. It offers the pleasure of Hollywood glamour of a very high order with one spectacular set-piece after another. Over and over, one is amazed at the staging of scenes set at balls, restaurants, night-clubs, Paris streets, factories, etc. Many jaw-dropping, pre-steadycam long takes involve the choreography of dozens of elements, e.g. one long take outside a Paris railway station, or another crane shot in a Paris night club as the camera searches the crowd for the protagonists. Everyone involved with the film seems to be working at his or her peak, from director Goulding to composer Alfred Newman, to all the perfectly cast actors. The screenplay is filled with brilliant cinematic story-telling devices (ironic voice-overs, montage sequences, foreshadowings, symbolism (the use of water and the ocean in so many scenes)that keep a long and complex story moving so smoothly that the two-hour-plus running time is hardly noticed at all. The cinematography by someone named Arthur Miller is gorgeous with lighting effects and moving camerawork that rank in the pantheon of Hollywood's visual creations. This is a great film.

Darryl Zanuck gave in to Tyrone Power's request for some serious acting roles and not another costume part in his first post World War II film after returning from the Marines. The Razor's Edge is a bit overlong, but Tyrone Power and the rest of the cast is shown to best advantage.

The Razor's Edge is the story about a returning World War I veteran's quest for spiritual meaning in his life. Author W. Somerset Maugham wrote this during the 30s and his themes then found a good audience in 1946. He appears in the movie, played by Herbert Marshall, and it is his eyes through which we see the action unfold.

It starts at a party in the Midwest at the beginning of the Roaring 20s. All the principal characters are introduced there including Larry Darrell, played by Power, who wants to postpone his engagement to Gene Tierney. Power explains about his lack of spiritual fulfillment and his desire to do some global soul searching. Tierney's not happy, but she thinks all he wants to do is sow some wild oats and she reluctantly acquiesces.

A year later she's in Paris and she finds Ty living on the fringe and she realizes he was serious. Now Tierney is hopping mad so she marries steady and reliable John Payne. Now the plot unfolds.

As I've said in other reviews of his films Power was either the straight arrow hero or a hero/heel type. He's a straight arrow in this one as noble as you can get without crossing over into Dudley DooRightism.

Gene Tierney had essayed bitchiness in Leave Her to Heaven and she refines it to a high art here. Even though she's married to Payne, she still has a yen for Ty and her machinations are what drives the rest of the story.

John Payne, I have always been convinced was brought to 20th Century Fox as a singing Tyrone Power for musicals. So it is interesting to see them together. It is unfortunate that Payne wasn't given a better role because his part as Tierney's husband who loses his fortune in the Stock Market Crash wasn't better written. Payne proved on a lot of occasions he was a capable enough actor to handle more complex parts.

Clifton Webb plays fussy Uncle Elliott Templeton and got an Oscar Nomination, losing to Harold Russell in the Best Years of Our Lives. Webb was the closest thing for years to an out gay actor and a lot of his roles reflect that part of him, like this one. My favorite scene is after Ty Power goes to India and in that Shangri La like lamasery feels he has been made spiritually aware, with the symphonic crescendos rising, the action cuts away to a Paris tailor shop where Clifton Webb is complaining that the tassel on his robe doesn't sway, but that it bobbles.

Anne Baxter won a Best Supporting Actress Award for a playing a friend of Tierney's in the mid west. Baxter is a happy girl, marrying a young man she's deeply in love with. Her husband and baby are killed in an automobile crash. Baxter's study of physical and moral decline and degradation is some of her best work, maybe even better than Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

The story is a bit dated now, but it's still a fine film and one that shows Tyrone Power capable of far more than swashbuckling.

W Somerset Maugham's is a character in his own "The Razor's Edge". He's played by Herbert Marshall and he's given the hardest lines to deliver: "He looks extraordinarily happy, calm yet aloof" He's talking about Larry, Tyrone Power's character, after his enlightening trip to India. Power returns and reintroduces himself in the life of Isabel, played by the impossibly beautiful Gene Tirney. The world that Powers discovers in India will give this all consuming melodrama a spiritual tinge. Edmund Goulding choreographs the unfolding with surprising results. Tirney's beauty permeates the whole film and her character is as truthful as it is cruel although she doesn't mean to be neither truthful nor cruel. Anne Baxter as the tragic Sophie gets an Academy Award while Clifton Webb camps it out shamelessly. Loved the scene of the coin and John Payne's headache. Gene Tirney's reaction to Tyrone Power, as he works the "miracle", is the best acting of her entire career. Deserves to be seen.

The Razor's Edge (1946)

A stately, dramatic, richly nuanced film about love, true love, and the love of life. It's about what matters, and what doesn't, in a high society world George Cukor could have filmed, but this is by director Edmund Goulding, coming off of a series of war films, and with the great Grand Hotel from 1932 in his trail. Some people will find this a touch stiff or slow, or rather too nuanced, but I think none of the above at all. It has the richness of the Somerset Maugham novel it is based on, and Goulding had just filmed (the same year) Of Human Bondage, another Maugham novel. In both cases, the writer contributed to the screenplay, and the combination of the two of them seems really perfect.

Tyrone Power is an interesting lead man, as the idealistic and handsome Larry Darrell, and in some ways his restraint and almost studied dullness at times is maybe what the film needs for its rich, calm trajectory through the twenty years it covers. He's as stable and "good" as the wise, knowing figure of the author, who appears in the form of actor Herbert Marshall. Gene Tierney as Power's counterpart and eventually counterpoint plays the spoiled woman with cool, dramatic perfection. She's got energy and edge and beauty from every angle, and she maintains just that slightest duplicity in every scene, so you are kept on your toes.

The only forced and almost laughable section is the one that demands we think profound thoughts...the guru in India being guru to our hero. Unfortunately, it lasts for fifteen minutes, and though there is a spiritual necessity to the experience he has there, this spiritual aspect is implied just as fully in the worldly scenes that follow. I can picture a far better movie without this insert, and I can picture the director picturing it, too. Someone knows why it got patched in, and for whom, but this is what we have.

It has to be said the filming, as conservative as it is in many ways, is spot-on gorgeous. The brightly lit, ornamented, busy sets are actually inhabited by the camera, and the figures move together not only across the field, but front to back as well, in triangles and curves of visual activity, yet with fluidity--it's all contained and lyrically delicious. This is done without ostentatious mood, without sharp angles and bold lighting, but instead with spatial arrangements, always full, no emptiness, no great shadows, always something more to see. A great example, easy to find, is the very last scene, just before the shot on the boat when the end titles run. Watch how Marshall walks the long way around Tierney, and then she walks around him, and the camera keeps them framed side to side, front to back. It's nothing short of brilliant, and yet, in style, so different than say Toland doing Kane or, at another extreme, Ozu doing Tokyo Story. But no less spectacular.

At one point, a minor character, a defrocked priest, says to Darrell in a working class bar, "You sound like a very religious man who does not believe in God." The movie is really about godliness, or what Maugham calls "goodness" in the end. And some people have it, and share it, and make the world better, God or no God.

This film, and the book on which it is based, made strong impressions on me in my youth, but even more so now that I am past middle age. A magnificent cast - Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, John Payne, Herbert Marshall, help to tell the story of a man who walks "in another man's shoes" -- and totally to his own drummer -- after the first world war. In his quest for spirituality and goodness, he is at odds with the materialism and obsession around him. The different layers of "The Razor's Edge" demand attention: Larry's physical desire for Isabel, a woman it turns out he doesn't even know; Isabel's cold-heartedness and desire to possess Larry; and Larry's search for the meaning of life, while the people he loves disintegrate around him from lack of values or hope. These are all seen through the eyes of Somerset Maugham, played by Marshall. Larry's final confrontation scene with Isabel (Tierney) about Sophie (Baxter) is bone-chilling -- Power, who had a tendency to be sometimes stiff and a bit removed from his material, uses that flaw to excellent advantage as Larry Darrell. It's not a showy role, but he's wonderful, and he's reading of poetry in Sophie's room is unforgettable.

Highly recommended.