The Razor's Edge | Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney

The Razor's Edge | Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney | razers edge

DVDs:

The Razor's Edge

	The Razor's Edge Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney 20th Century Fox, 2005 average customer review:based on 64 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Narrated by on-screen observer Maugham (Herbert Marshall), this intriguing tale centers on a soul-searching World War I veteran (Tyrone Power) who finds he can not settle back into the world of the upper class. Shunning his planned marriage and career, he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and career, he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and causes his distraght fiancee (GeneTierney) to seek solace with another man (John Payne).

Beautiful movie

A mans journey searching for the truth, wherever that might take him and no matter what anyone else wants of him.

The original is so much better that the remake with Bill Murray

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razers edge

it's a wonderful movie.Plus the sevice I got from amazon was just as
wonderful.I got my dvd quickly and without a lot of hassel.Thanks
amazon.co.

kevin dee vicory

Searching for one's soul

What do you want from life? What does it all mean in the end? Why should one man die & another man live? Is it all just arbitrary?

Here's a sumptuous adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel about one man's search for answers to those questions. It's done in grand Hollywood style, with a fine cast, beautiful sets, and sharp dialogue. Granted, it takes some minor liberties with the source material, and the acting style isn't as naturalistic as modern viewers might expect. But I think those are quibbles, and don't interfere with the movie as a whole.

Tyrone Power has the most difficult part, in that he has to play the seeker Larry Darrell according to the stylized conventions of screen piety at the time. Even so, his slightly stiff & detached performance does convey the sense of someone not quite in synch with the everyday world, someone who's still looking for something solid & real. He never comes across as a prig or stuffed shirt -- rather than seeming above everyone else, he seems apart from everyone else. He's naive in some ways, but he's not stupid. And his empathy for & acceptance of his friends, just as they are, is obvious.

The rest of the cast is quite good as well. Gene Tierney's Isabel is stunningly beautiful, with just the right balance of coolness & yearning ... and as we see later, capable of vindictive cruelty. John Payne's millionaire could easily have been a stock villain, the Crass Rich Man, but instead he's simply a decent human being whose temperament lends itself to the business world. Anne Baxter may be a little bit over the top, but her character has earned that right. Certainly her self-destructiveness is all too familiar to many of us.

And then we come to the standout performances, to my mind: Clifton Webb's wonderfully waspish snob, Uncle Eliot, and Herbert Marshall's depiction of Somerset Maugham himself. Webb manages to make a vain, essentially shallow man somehow as endearing as he is annoying, while Marshall makes the presence of the author within his own story (as in the novel) totally convincing.

Again, modern audiences used to location shooting might wince at the studio sets of India, or the white actor playing an Indian spiritual teacher. Well, this was the custom at the time, and allowances should be made for it. And the guru of no fixed ethnic background works on an archetypal level: the Wise Old Man. Taken as a symbol, rather than as an individual, he's quite acceptable, not unlike Sam Jaffe's elderly monk in "Lost Horizon."

It's also fascinating to see how much adult material they managed to include, despite the restrictions of the Hays Code. Without being explicit, they make clear Isabel's intention to trap Larry by getting pregnant. And in Maugham's encounter with a worldly French police officer, the novelist's homosexuality is discreetly & sympathetically referenced. The grown-ups in the audience would understand it all immediately, while such material would simply go over the heads of any children.

Some may prefer Bill Murray's remake, which is certainly more authentic in its Indian scenes. But overall, it's not as strong as the original, and Bill hasn't quite found the balance of comedy & drama that worked so perfectly in "Groundhog Day." Sometimes a bit of artifice just winds up working better than authenticity.

For those who wonder if there's more to life than money & status, this is an indispensible film. Most highly recommended!

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Pretentious, glossy entertainment

The film version of W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Razor's Edge" must have been another of Darryl F. Zanuck's shameless bids for a best picture Oscar, an obsession with the producer from the moment his 1944 film "Wilson," a biography of the U.S. president, failed to win the gold. The Academy had demonstrated, as they continue to do, that "prestige" pictures, movies that aspire to more than entertainment, were favored over lighter fare, and Zanuck made it a point to have at least one such attraction made at 20th Century Fox each year until he got his hands on the top prize.

"The Razor's Edge" earned a best picture nomination, but failed to reach the finish line ("The Best Years of Our Lives" was named the year's best). Few films of the era were as "prestigious" as this one from Maugham's acclaimed philosophical novel, but its "importance" seems forced.

The studio's number one glamour boy, Tyrone Power, plays Larry Darrell, a man so disillusioned by his experiences in World War I that he now rejects society, as well as the love of his socialite fiancee (Gene Tierney), in favor of loafing in Paris and investigating spirituality in India.

It's an unlikely theme for a glossy studio film, but as noted earlier, Zanuck wanted that Oscar, the kind of worldly honor Larry Darrell finds so meaningless. It was Anne Baxter, as a woman who turns to the bottle and whom Darrell attempts to save after her family is killed in an automobile accident, who took home an Oscar. Others in the cast were equally deserving.

Clifton Webb is as wittily acerbic as Tierney's uncle as he was as her employer in "Laura" two years earlier. Webb was one of Hollywood's most uncloseted homosexuals in his day, and the veiled references to homosexuality are among the most intriguing aspects of "The Razor's Edge." Author Maugham was another homosexual who broke free of the closet years before mainstream society had heard of Gay Liberation, and he turns up in the film as narrator and a principal character. Played by Herbert Marshall, Maugham's sexuality is referred to in the kind of subtle manner characteristic of 40's cinema. "I always get the queerest feeling from Mr. Maugham," Tierney says, and when he's questioned about his involvement with a murdered woman, he is easily cleared of any suspicion that he was romantically involved with her. With an arch of an eyebrow, the policeman tells Maugham that, from all he has heard about the writer, it's obvious she was "not his type" (nudge, nudge).

For all its pretensions, "The Razor's Edge" is still a good show. All that gloss would normally make me retch, as would all that highbrow philosophy, but together they make an interesting combination.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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