O Fio da Navalha

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.

This has got to be one of my favorite films of all. It ranks in my books up there with PLACE IN THE SUN, REAP THE WILD WIND and THE HURRICANE.

Made in the 40s by 20th Century Fox and Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, it stars Tyrone Power as Larry Farrell, a man on a journey to find the values of life. This fascinating journey takes him all over the world until he reaches a summit in India and there he meets a Holy Man, superbly played by Cecil Humphreys, who helps him understand his questions and then sends him back to the real world where he must then take his place in life. Based on the 1943 book of the same name, by W. Somerset Maugham, it does the story justice with the help of Lamar Trotti in transferring it to the screen. I read the book before seeing the film and was not disappointed. Congratulations also goes to director, Edmound Goulding for bringing the truth of the book to life.

Other noteworthy performances were delivered by the lovely Gene Tierney, as Isabel, again in Cassini dresses, and yet another co-starring Tyrone Power film; John Payne, as Gray, in a different type of role as Miss Tierney's husband, Anne Baxter, as the doomed Sophie, in her Academy Award performance, and was she excellent, Clifton Webb as Elliott Templeton, another of Webb's limp-wristed performances and another Academy Award nomination. Herbert Marshall as Maugham himself. Did anyone get the "gay" relationship between he and Templeton? Then there's Lucile Watson, Frank Gilmore and the delightful Elsa Lanchester in supporting roles. I liked Fritz Kortner as Kosti, the de-frocked priest Larry meets at a bar when he is working the mines.

Ray Dorey along with Alfred Newman wrote the theme song "Mam'selle" for the film. This is the best of the times. You can't get better. Power was superb in this. He was an underrated actor because he was such a handsome man. Yet, his abilities as an actor were terrific. He brought the intelligence of Maugham's writing to focus. Miss Baxter showed you the stuff good performers are made of with her shaded performance in this film. Also watch Marshall's reactions. His eyes are fantastic. They way his looks go from actor to actor. And look for the gay undertones between he and Clifton Webb as the eccentric uncle who delves in the upper crust life. Even to the extreme of having a coat of arms embroidered on his underwear. In the final minutes of the film Marshall speaks to Isabel after Larry leaves her for good, saying, "Goodness is, after all, the greatest force in the world . . .and he's got it." This speaks for the film and it's greatness. I think Marshall should have been nominated for his underplayed performance. He is credited with many fine roles in his career. See this classic. It's on VHS. Not to be confused with the pale remake with Bill Murray.

Producer Darryl F. Zanuck fashioned a major production for Tyrone Power upon his return to 20th Century Fox after a stint in the military service. No expense was spared in terms of production values, and special care was taken to cast each role to "perfection."

With master story teller W. Somerset Maugham joining in writing the screenplay from his sprawling, multi-character novel, and Edmund Gouling doing the direction and Alfred Newman the score, it was a setup that couldn't miss.

The cast works at a thoroughly respectable level, and the film emerges likewise. Yet, it falls strangely short of the genuine masterpiece Zanuck obviously planned.

There is a rather cold center to "The Razor's Edge," which prevents one from being able to completely empathize with and feel for these characters and their respective plight. While they are interesting, the characters fail to ignite a deep emotional response in the viewer. One ends more observing this enactment, which has the feel of a somewhat slick presentation.

It also represents the best of what 20th Century Fox had to offer in the mid-forties. Power next went on to do "Nightmare Alley," for which he received some of the best notices of his lengthy film career.

To repeat, this film has everything going for it: top-notch cast, direction, no expense spared in production. It achieved an enthusiastic audience response when it came out. Why does it leave me dissatisfied?

First, it is hard to adapt a complex novel for the stage or screen. It's not impossible. Great authors, Charles Dickens for one, adapted their work for the stage. Some Dickens novels, "Great Expectations" and "Oliver Twist," at the very same time this film was being made, reached the screen magnificently in slimmed-down versions. Not this one. Apparently, Somerset Maugham prepared a screenplay. It was not used. Perhaps that was the mistake. The screenplay that was used follows the novel. But it fails to capture the essence.

Larry, the protagonist, is disillusioned with life, a reasonable reaction to WW I. He goes on his quest for spiritual enlightenment, as in the novel. He finds it, more or less. But what is it? We never know. The novel includes a long digression on that point. The movie omits it. We are left with a rather kitschy picture of a pleasant, peaceful fellow, who tells us he is well on the road to Truth, but never gives us a sign or even a signpost, neither in his speech nor in his behavior. Yet his spiritual search is presented as the key to the whole story. He seeks meaning in the quartiers populaires of Paris and in the coal mines of Picardy. Fine. I had a high school friend who disdained bourgeois life and went off to find fulfillment as a dockworker in Milwaukee. He found egotism. He came away with a happy sense of superiority that let him look down on parasitic rich people. Our Larry goes on to see the guru in the Himalayas. What profound wisdom does he imbibe? We are given no clue. He shuts himself up in a mountaintop retreat, after which he has seen It (capital I) - whatever It is. He can now face mankind. It's an old practice, not confined to Indian gymnosophists. St. Anthony and his fellows, the Desert Fathers, isolated themselves. But the aim was not to rejoin the world. It was to transcend it. Abba Macarius (or one of his fellow desert saints - I'm not sure which) was said to be so otherworldly that his disciples had to hold him down lest his body along with his spirit soar to the realm of God. Larry keeps his feet firmly planted. He returns to society. How is he changed? I can't see it. Tyrone Power plays the very same faintly vacuous character he was before. How does he use his great enlightenment? A little hypnotism to relieve John Payne of chronic migraines. He becomes a one-man AA to cure Sophie off the sauce. (Sophie, by the way, is the only skid-row alcoholic I have ever imagined who can be tracked down because she won't settle for anything less than hugely expensive liqueur.) Now I'm not calling for the movie to add a heavy explanation of transcendental spirituality. But since this is the crux of the story, we ought to get something - instead of nothing.

Anne Baxter richly deserved an Oscar. The rest of the cast makes little impression. Tyrone Power I love as an actor. He just didn't get into this character. Clifton Webb, as usual, is supremely supercilious. No one, except maybe Gladys Cooer, did superciliousness better. But that's it. Cecil Humphreys is a perfectly manicured, made-for-Hollywood yogi. They would have done far better with Sam Jaffe as he was in "Lost Horizon," a really mysterious and effective Wise Man. Gene Tierney - I hate to say it because she was marvelous in many roles - does nothing with this role. It demands much more bite. She is presented as materialistic, self-satisfied, a contrast to the ever-searching Larry. She needs to have, a touch at least, of a hard edge. Gene Tierney is sweetness all the way through, even as she commits one of the cruelest acts put on the screen. Who can sympathize with a person who deliberately inveigles a recovering alcoholic into a room, then plants her alone with a bottle of booze and a glass? The movie cries out for Claire Trevor.

Larry goes off to be a dockworker, or something. Everyone left alive resumes life as before. And we leave the movie theater, or our DVD, with ... what? The novel demands better than that.

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.