Tonight, Turner Classic Movies was showing three films which in their way demonstrate how British films could be superior to their American counterparts. Anthology style movies were done in both countries, as in the American film TALES OF MANHATTAN a few years before the current film came out. But the script was based on nobody in particular as far as really popular writing was considered. The British films QUARTET, TRIO, and ENCORE, were based on short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, who was willing to do prologues and brief epilogues at the end of his films, somewhat discussing his technique as a writer. The selection were quite good, mingling comedy and pathos nicely in the tales themselves.
For example, THE ALIEN CORN is about a young, wealthy man (Dirk Bogard) who has the whole world ahead of him. He wants to be a concert pianist, and his dubious but loving parents let his practice and study. Finally they arrange to have a well known piano teacher and critic hear him. While listening as the young man plays his heart out, the critic notes the faces of his parents. As a result of this, we never know if her attitude and comment is a genuine one or made to help out the parents: she says his playing is good but is too undisciplined to ever be able to make in on the concert stage. Bogard hears this without a word. Subsequently he dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The foreman of the inquest jury (the always dependable James Hayter, here using his wonderful voice to express sorrow) says the jury finds it was accidental death, as the jurors can't imagine why Bogard would harm himself.
Irony pervades the Maugham literary world. The world's greatest painter (based on Paul Gaugin and Augustus Johns) is an absolutely selfish man who uses wife, family, friends, even enemies to get what he needs to paint in THE MOON AND SIXPENCE. Love is crazily blind as Philip Carey learns when he falls for a street drab who drains him emotionally and financially in OF HUMAN BONDAGE. The grand old man of English letter being enshrined by a mediocre writer of ambition and the second, opportunistic wife of the deceased genius, was actually a beer swilling flop whose first (and better wife) left him just as his books began to catch on in CAKES AND ALE. And ASHENDEN (the source of Hitchcock's THE SECRET AGENT) tells of Maugham's wartime activities in Switzerland, pursuing an enemy agent, and helping to arrange the murder of a nice, totally innocent bystander instead!.
So it pervades his short stories, and somewhat better effect as he can concentrate his writing on the stories. Like Joseph Conrad, who spoke Polish and French before English, Maugham could think like a French writer. So his model was frequently Guy De Maupesant. Many of his short stories end up having surprise endings, though nothing like his American opposite number William Sydney Porter (O'Henry) or like De Maupesant.
The stories are good at picking up portions of British life that we frequently overlook. THE KITE, for example, shows how the British like hobbies, and seem to find a release in them that is not always shared. The picture of lower middle class life is interesting in it's minutiae, such as how the wife of the hero wants to see a film, and suggests one with John Mills at the Majestic.
THE COLONEL'S LADY is a spoof on the "Col. Blimp" type that appeared in David Low's cartoons and the movie of 1943. Cecil Parker, who could never be outdone for being "blimpish" even when sympathetic, is an Army Colonel and wealthy landowner, who is on many committees and in many clubs. He reads the Times religiously, but little else. His wife, Mona Washburne, has just written a book - an 80 page book of poems that becomes a runaway best seller. Parker hears his friends, his fellow club members, even his mistress sing praises for the poetry. He even has to sit next to a prominent critic (Ernst Theisinger, of course) comparing the lyrics to those of Walter Savage Landor!
Parker can't believe it, but when he overhears that the book's poems are telling a story, and a sexy one, he can't stand it. He reads the poems, and asks a lawyer friend should he confront his wife, or should he try to use detectives to trace the lover she writes of. He's told to do nothing. He decides to do exactly that. But he admits one mystery to the lawyer-friend: He can't understand what the man saw in his wife!
That, by the way was the way the short story originally ended. Instead, Maugham tacked on a new conclusion - which I will leave with the reader to discover. It is touching in some ways.
QUARTET was the first of three wonderful films, before Maugham got tired of the process of anthologizing his short stories on film. Pity, for he could had continued for six or seven years, and still not exhaust his best work. Still, we should be grateful that in three films, ten of the stories did get made and very nicely.
For example, THE ALIEN CORN is about a young, wealthy man (Dirk Bogard) who has the whole world ahead of him. He wants to be a concert pianist, and his dubious but loving parents let his practice and study. Finally they arrange to have a well known piano teacher and critic hear him. While listening as the young man plays his heart out, the critic notes the faces of his parents. As a result of this, we never know if her attitude and comment is a genuine one or made to help out the parents: she says his playing is good but is too undisciplined to ever be able to make in on the concert stage. Bogard hears this without a word. Subsequently he dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The foreman of the inquest jury (the always dependable James Hayter, here using his wonderful voice to express sorrow) says the jury finds it was accidental death, as the jurors can't imagine why Bogard would harm himself.
Irony pervades the Maugham literary world. The world's greatest painter (based on Paul Gaugin and Augustus Johns) is an absolutely selfish man who uses wife, family, friends, even enemies to get what he needs to paint in THE MOON AND SIXPENCE. Love is crazily blind as Philip Carey learns when he falls for a street drab who drains him emotionally and financially in OF HUMAN BONDAGE. The grand old man of English letter being enshrined by a mediocre writer of ambition and the second, opportunistic wife of the deceased genius, was actually a beer swilling flop whose first (and better wife) left him just as his books began to catch on in CAKES AND ALE. And ASHENDEN (the source of Hitchcock's THE SECRET AGENT) tells of Maugham's wartime activities in Switzerland, pursuing an enemy agent, and helping to arrange the murder of a nice, totally innocent bystander instead!.
So it pervades his short stories, and somewhat better effect as he can concentrate his writing on the stories. Like Joseph Conrad, who spoke Polish and French before English, Maugham could think like a French writer. So his model was frequently Guy De Maupesant. Many of his short stories end up having surprise endings, though nothing like his American opposite number William Sydney Porter (O'Henry) or like De Maupesant.
The stories are good at picking up portions of British life that we frequently overlook. THE KITE, for example, shows how the British like hobbies, and seem to find a release in them that is not always shared. The picture of lower middle class life is interesting in it's minutiae, such as how the wife of the hero wants to see a film, and suggests one with John Mills at the Majestic.
THE COLONEL'S LADY is a spoof on the "Col. Blimp" type that appeared in David Low's cartoons and the movie of 1943. Cecil Parker, who could never be outdone for being "blimpish" even when sympathetic, is an Army Colonel and wealthy landowner, who is on many committees and in many clubs. He reads the Times religiously, but little else. His wife, Mona Washburne, has just written a book - an 80 page book of poems that becomes a runaway best seller. Parker hears his friends, his fellow club members, even his mistress sing praises for the poetry. He even has to sit next to a prominent critic (Ernst Theisinger, of course) comparing the lyrics to those of Walter Savage Landor!
Parker can't believe it, but when he overhears that the book's poems are telling a story, and a sexy one, he can't stand it. He reads the poems, and asks a lawyer friend should he confront his wife, or should he try to use detectives to trace the lover she writes of. He's told to do nothing. He decides to do exactly that. But he admits one mystery to the lawyer-friend: He can't understand what the man saw in his wife!
That, by the way was the way the short story originally ended. Instead, Maugham tacked on a new conclusion - which I will leave with the reader to discover. It is touching in some ways.
QUARTET was the first of three wonderful films, before Maugham got tired of the process of anthologizing his short stories on film. Pity, for he could had continued for six or seven years, and still not exhaust his best work. Still, we should be grateful that in three films, ten of the stories did get made and very nicely.