Somerset Maugham’s miserable movies 

Robert Calder’s Somerset Maugham and the Cinema (Wisconsin, 2024) reveals the surprising fact that in the 91 years between 1915 and 2006, no fewer than 90 of Maugham’s novels, stories and plays were made into feature films and television movies.   Only Rudyard Kipling and Georges Simenon beat this record.  Calder’s all-too-comprehensive study includes 11 silent films, 8 of them now lost.  It would have been much better to narrow the focus and begin with the first talkie in 1928.  (When I tried to write about Bogart’s early Broadway plays and found there was very little known about them, I solved the problem by ignoring them.)

In his study, Calder repeatedly describes 50 mostly terrible movies.  He hasn’t seen many of them and has been forced to rely on the worthless opinions of obscure critics.  In a tedious formulaic pattern, he notes the differences between the characters and plots in Maugham’s sophisticated works and those in the inferior films, often remakes of remakes, crippled and debased by hack writers.  Calder records that most of the movies were trite and bland, had conventional plots and hackneyed characters, lacked action and dramatic scenes, and received predictably negative reviews.  Isle of Fury (1936) beat out some hot rivals and got the Booby Academy Award for the worst film adaptation.  (I didn’t even mention this torture-to-see picture in my life of Bogart.)

Maugham confessed that screenwriting was “a knack that I do not possess”.  Though he tried his hand a few times, Calder notes that “he never succeeded in converting his own works into screenplays that were acceptable to studios”. His script for the wartime propaganda novel that he disliked, The Hour Before the Dawn, was condescendingly savaged at the time as “formless, maundering, illiterate rubbish.  It is so trite and dead; the characters are stock of the worst novelette type.  Maugham had better just tear this up and forget what must have been a bad dream.”

Oppressive censorship by the Hays Office and the Catholic Legion of Decency in America and by the Board of Film Censors in Britain also ruined a lot of movies.  The writers struggled to circumvent the restrictions, but were hog-tied by the Forbidden Ten Commandments: no profanity, nudity, drugs, sexual perversion, prostitution, miscegenation, venereal disease, children’s genitals, ridicule of clergy and “willful offense to any nation, race or creed.”  Even married couples had to have separate single beds, and movie fans were puzzled about how children were actually conceived.  Hollywood couldn’t even adapt Maugham’s chastely titled play, Caesar’s Wife, because Edwina Montbatten, the Viceroy of India’s wife, was having a scandalous affair with the future Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

This severe censorship did not leave much room for serious films, and the results recorded by Calder were inevitably poor.  Homosexuality, the most interesting theme in The Narrow Corner , remained closeted.  In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Secret Agent, botched from Maugham’s Ashenden , the Hairless Mexican, transformed by a growth tonic, became the Hairy Peter Lorre.  The complexity of the novel was reduced to insignificance, the point of the story was lost, and nothing was left of the wit and realism.  The exotic paintings in The Moon and Sixpence “looked little more than the work of a clumsy amateur and a far cry from the artistry of Paul Gauguin.”  The Hour Before the Dawn , with a new script, featured Franchot Tone’s lifeless and unconvincing performance, and Veronica Lake’s disastrous attempt to impersonate a saboteur with a German accent.  In Christmas Holiday Gene Kelly was miscast and unpersuasive, and the slightly grown-up child star Deanna Durbin was “ill-equipped both physically and emotionally.”  Maugham’s unpromising novel Up at the Villa had been eviscerated by the critic Morton Zabel, who called it “as unmitigated a specimen of fictional drivel as has appeared under respectable authorship within living memory.”  Sean Penn was badly miscast and the doomed picture was a flop.  Being Julia was well acted by Annette Bening.  But István Szabó—the Hungarian director of the masterful Mephisto and Colonel Redl —allowed the gawky Shaun Evans (Bening’s implausible young lover) to ruin this picture.  No fans, however fanatic, would be interested in ploughing through this cinematic slagheap of what Bogart called “shit”.

A few of the films are not eye-shattering.  In Maugham’s autobiographical Of Human Bondage the hero has a symbolic clubfoot, and is tormented and wounded in his sordid liaison with a low-born woman.  Bette Davis—not infected by syphilis—effectively moves “from the pretty and sexy young teashop waitress at the beginning through the degenerating and increasingly unattractive slattern to the dying wreck at the end.”  In the ruinous remake Paul Henreid was too old for the ludicrous part; Kim Novak, also miscast, had another hopeless accent.  

The Letter was based on an actual case in Kuala Lumpur of an Englishwoman accused of shooting a man who’d tried to rape her.  In a sensational murder trial she was sentenced to hang, but pardoned by the merciful Sultan of Selangor.  Enthusiastic for once, Maugham called Bette Davis “incredibly good.  She is exactly the woman I had in mind when I wrote the story.”  But she had to be punished for murder in the movie, which again destroyed the point of Maugham’s story.

Quartet and Trio were made from four and from three of Maugham’s stories, and were introduced by him.  Seated at his desk and fiddling with a letter opener, the 74-year-old spoke slowly and deliberately, with only a hint of a stammer.  Though feared for his sharp tongue, he was engagingly gentle and modest about his writing career.  But “The Kite” and “The Colonel’s Lady” were severely damaged by rewriting, and  Maugham later concluded, “I look back on my connection with the cinema world with horror mitigated only by [the lucrative pay].”

The Painted Veil (2006), by far the best film, was shot amid the most spectacular scenery in China, with the river cutting through the cone-shaped mountains of Guilin.  The  miserable marriage of Edward Norton and Naomi Watts was based on Maugham’s own bitter marital failure.  The acting is excellent; and Norton is convincing when he discovers Watts’ lover and—unlike her—realises that Liev Schreiber will never risk scandal, leave his wife and marry her.  Her change from alienation to redemption is persuasive.  The film portrays the realistic horrors of the cholera epidemic, as Norton attempts to improve conditions with safe burials and clean water, and prevent the spread of the fatal disease.  

Calder’s stylistic flaws and banal comments  exacerbate the difficulty of getting through his account of all the poor pictures.  He also misspells the names of Fredric March, Liev Schreiber, Nunnally Johnson, Fred Zinnemann, and the German word Künstlerroman .  He relies on clichés: “blockbuster” and “smash hit,” including three of them in one screen-mag sentence: “melodramatic cloak-and-dagger stories of daring and adventurous heroes thwarting enemy spymasters”—though modern spies used neither cloaks nor daggers.  All the embraces and affairs are “passionate.”  Some actors resemble a “tightly wound coil,” while others have a strong screen presence in atmospheric films about freedom.  Comparing Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with the popular Bridges of Madison County and The Godfather, Calder absurdly concludes that Visconti’s film, which has very little dialogue, is better than Mann’s novella, one of the greatest works of modern literature.  The university press editors have been sleeping at the switch.

By striking contrast, this book briefly comes to life when Calder quotes Graham Greene’s biting and brilliant film criticism.  Herbert Marshall’s “characteristic act is dumb suffering”; another forgotten actor can’t “do anything but glare with the dumbness and glassiness of an injured seal.”  In “Rain,” Maugham “has done more than anyone else to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination.”  Zeroing in on the characteristic faults of the overrated Hitchcock, Greene observes that in The Secret Agent, “very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.”  Maugham, following Joseph Conrad, belongs to the distinguished tradition that includes Graham Greene, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Somerset Maugham: A Life (Knopf, 2004).

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