Somerset Maugham and the Cinema by Robert Calder
Somerset Maugham was among the most popular playwrights and storywriters in the English-speaking world. A century ago, his name on lobby posters sold movie tickets. And nowadays, if he’s remembered at all, it’s because of the movies. Even so, those memories are confined largely to TCM fans. The last widely seen film based on Maugham was The Razor’s Edge (1984), starring Bill Murray. The final entry in the filmography from Robert Calder’s book, Somerset Maugham and the Cinema, is dated 2006, The Painted Veil.
The Maugham story most admired by classic film buffs, The Letter (1940), starred a superbly devious Bette Davis as a woman on trial in colonial Malaya for murdering her lover. Calder ranks Maugham’s original story “among the best written in English in the twentieth century” and cites its successful adaptation on London and New York stages. It had also been made into an early talking movie (1929), a pre-Code picture shot under relatively loose restrictions. When Warner Bros. planned to remake it as the familiar Bette Davis version, the producers ran a gauntlet of objections from Hollywood censors, the Production Code Administration whose director, Joseph Breen, pointed out that the earlier film had been banned throughout the British Commonwealth for its depiction of the seamy side of imperialism, including its racist presuppositions. Breed added that the story’s “sordid details of the illicit sex relationship and her lover” made a new film adaptation impossible.
However, screenwriter Robert Lord was convinced that “if we can follow the play very closely and manage to get by the censors, we will have one of the most powerful and different motion pictures ever made.” He was proven correct. One of the major plot twists, added to appease the censors, is that Davis’ murderess is murdered in the final scene. No crime was allowed to go unpunished in golden age Hollywood, even when Bette Davis was the perpetrator.
Calder acknowledges the steep drop in interest among filmmakers since the early ‘60s in adapting Maugham’s work. He tentatively advances explanations: Maugham produced no new fiction after 1948 and fell quiet before his death in the ‘50s, but acknowledges that other dead authors (Shakespeare, Jane Austen) continue to inspire new films. Calder references the academic theory crowd who denounce every micro-departure from political correctness but shows that Maugham (better than many of the classic movies he inspired) shared their aversion to racism, sexism and colonialism, and noted that the homoeroticism pervading his writings could find expression in the present century. But Maugham’s rediscovery hasn’t happened yet, leaving his enormous oeuvre as an unexploited silver mine with vast reserves for anyone with enough imagination to dig.
Somerset Maugham and the Cinema is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
Get Somerset Maugham and the Cinema on Amazon here.
Paid link
