The Moon and Sixpence

Moviecut—The Moon and Sixpence

source: The Moon and Sixpence

The most extraordinary feature of this film is the incredible smoothness it adds to the story line; it's a masterpiece of great dialogue and incredible actors to deliver the story. Who has ever seen any better, and unobtrusive, acting than that of the likes of Saunders, Marshall and the relatively unknown but great actor Steven Gary (who plays Dirk Strouve) ? One will never see another film to exceed this one in these respects.

Somerset Maughn always seemed to have as his trademark the idea of bitter, mean people who don't care who they hurt. We saw this in Mildred, as the cocktail waitress, in "Of Human Bondage," and her male counterpart could be George Sanders in this film. Narrated by Herbert Marshall, who also co-stars, it details the life of a stockbroker who gives everything up to paint. After a while, his wife becomes indifferent after he leaves her and their children. Another theme of Maughan is played out here when again we see kindness paid by cruelty and ultimate tragedy. As a Tahitian matchmaker, Florence Bates looked absolutely ridiculous here. This is the ultimate story of an indifferent man finding ultimate happiness after causing misery to so many, then only to find tragedy ending that happiness.

*Spoiler/plot- The Moon and Sixpence, 1942. Possibly inspired from Paul Gauguin's life life living in Polynesia. The story of a fictitious 'Charles Strickland', a middle-aged stockbroker who abandons his middle-classed life, his family, his duties to start painting in Tahiti. He always wanted to paint and exile himself from society. He's personally a terrible to others in his doings, an awful human being. He learns to be devoted to his ideal: beauty while battling leprosy everyday. *Special Stars- George Sanders, Herbert Marshal, Doris Dudley, Albert Basserman, Florence Bates, Elena Verdugo. *Theme- Art can come from the knowledge of ugliness and pain. *Trivia/location/goofs- B & W. Made during ww2. B&W until art and art set burning in fired family hut. ending. *Emotion- A rich film of drama and painting. Interesting bit of historic storytelling with an interesting use of color inside a black and white film to highlight the Polynesian painting of Gauguin. *Based On- Loosely based on the life of Gauguin, the screenplay by Albert Lewin is based on the book by Somerset Maugham.

The print of this film (shown on TCM) suffers from the ravages of time. I wish I could say that the genius of the film shines through, but I cannot. It is an interesting film. Certainly a curiosity. The unusual use of different film stocks and the selective use of color make it a unique experience. The subject of the film, a misanthropic painter who offers little in the way of redeeming value, makes the film an interesting story with a hollow center. Charles Strickland (George Sanders) is a man who sacrifices everything in life to retire to Tahiti to paint. Based loosely on the life of Gaugin, the film has an interesting cast of characters that surround Strickland, notably Herbert Marshall as Geoffrey Wolfe and Steven Geray as Dirk Stroeve. One might feel compelled to watch the story of so unusual a protagonist, but he is not merely indifferent to others; he often goes out of his way to denigrate or insult them. When we finally see the artwork that has driven this man's obsession--if that's what it is--it is anticlimactic. This work of fiction could have made Strickland a hero, fighting for his artistic vision. Instead, he comes across as little more than a craftsman who does even value his own work. This is disappointing.

The man loves thoughts and breaths to indite every single last one no matter how terrible, treacherous, disturbing and finally morbid! This type of prose is always terribly difficult to bridge to the other side; the limited finite strictures of its kissing cousin film. I remember listening to the audio book, and I always say, there is no way no possible way to convey all of these thoughts for the characters say one thing but how they feel are couched in thoughts that are quite different. This is nearly impossible to transfer over... I remember they tried to do it with The Painted Veil' and when I got done with the novel I said , if there is an adaptation, no matter what year Hollywood or whomever is delusional enough to try will come out on the others side with a hollow perhaps gorgeous to see, but very empty and deficient film that will end up, Romanticizing this book; and of course that is all that one can do with the source material. But here, I think because the main character's misanthropic egregious thoughts matched the dialogue it was different, it was able to retain a few of the vital organs that were so instrumental to being true to the source material. In substance, this film, the story, the characters, the acting, the only thing I can say is that it was grand and sweeping and stretches far far beyond the paltry sum of a limited paged screenplay - it goes on forever its universal theme comprises everything that we so love and hate about our vexing human condition! Very nice...

The story alone is worth viewing. The very idea of a person abandoning their family in order to follow one's dream, is compelling enough. George Sander's performance as well as Herbert Marshall as Somerset Maughm are both fist rate. No one could have done a finer job at playing the tortured cad then Sanders. If they had another one of those silly top 100 lists, this one for best type casting in a film about cads, then Sanders would win in a trot. He was in real life it appears, the very cad that he played so convincingly on screen. A book was even written about him by an actor friend, Brian Ahearne. The title of the book is "A Dreadful Man". The actor Ronald Coleman would not even allow Sanders in his presence, as he found his disdain and pessimism to much to bear. At the age of 65 Sanders committed suicide in a Paris hotel room just as he had promised actor David Niven years earlier, claiming that by that time he would no longer have interest in women or anything else. (Consult Niven's book "Bring On The Empty Horses") I can understand one user's previous comment about this being Sanders only great role. But Mr. Sanders won an Oscar for playing another cad, the rascal theater critic in "All About Eve". One of my favorite lines in that movie is when he replies to a very beautiful young starlet(Marilyn Monroe) who he has accompanied to a dinner party saying "You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point none the less".

If what you are looking for is a standard film story about a painter, look elsewhere. This is a strange story and a strange movie. But don't take that as criticism. I found it very compelling. They say that the story was about Gauguin...and if so, then I can't say he was a very admirable fellow. Here "he's" Charles Strickland, a middle-aged businessman who abandons his wife and children so he can paint in Paris. His tale is told through the eyes of Herbert Marshall. Could there be a worse human being than George Sanders as Charles Strickland. Virtually no redeeming qualities...at least until he gets married to a girl in the South Pacific. Of course, life always pays one back, and Strickland declines into leprosy. The cast here is intriguing. This is one of the best -- though not likable -- performances given by George Sanders. Herbert Marshall is perfect as the eyes of the story (watch for scenes where he is walking...you can notice a limp due his real artificial leg). Elena Verdugo is interesting as the South Seas girl...you may remember her best from her recurring role in "Marcus Welby, M.D." Florence Bates (usually the nagging mother-in-law type) has, perhaps, the most unusual role of her career. Albert Bassermann, as the South Seas doctor, is interesting, though I'm not sure he was any great actor. But his career story is something worth looking up on Wikipedia. I guess we should thank the George Eastman House for restoring this film, although I'm not sure if the nitrate copies were so badly decomposed to explain the relatively poor quality of the print (as shown on TCM), or whether they just did a poor job of restoration. The images are not crisp, and the color scenes in Tahiti are terribly deteriorated. Nevertheless, this is a film to watch. It's unusual and intriguing.

There have been few other actors, before or since, who could play the part of a cad better than George Sanders, and he was at his best in this film. Nothing will ever alter the fact that he gave a very fine performance in a film which any movie-goer is likely to find rewarding, and I recommend it to any IMDb users who happen to have so far not seen it. It is based on a great fictional work by Somerset Maugham that is clearly and openly acknowledged to be a non-biographic fictional reconstruction of the life of the artist Paul Gauguin who walked out on his wife, family and friends in Paris to spend the last days of his life in a wild painting spree in Tahiti - so poor that many of his final works were painted on the walls of his hut because he could not afford to buy more canvasses. Similarly Maugham's artist, named Charles Strickland, was a well to do Englishman, and the book starts by picturing the build up of frustrations he found in his very conventional life there. He eventually walked out of it to spend many years of penurious and bohemian living as an artist in Paris before his culminating mad dash to the South Seas finally provided a sense of release and freedom through the copious colours and lifestyle changes he found in his final destination. It is a book I first read as a boy and have always loved, but it is a long time since I last read it so I should now download or purchase another copy. This said, my expectations exceeded what this film provided. The film of this book appeared during the war in 1943 - a time when many of us were experiencing symptoms of escapism. It can perhaps best be described as having achieved modest success. For many years I did not want to spoil my fading memories of Maugham's great book by watching another version presented on celluloid - many others may have felt the same. But I vividly remembered reading a review of it which described the tremendous visual impact it achieved when the black and white images associated with Strickland's drab life in Europe finally gave way to the riotous colours he found in Tahiti. I immediately felt that here was a perfect example of how monochrome and colour sequences could be integrated into the same film to increase its emotional impact. By then early home videos of this film had been released entirely in monochrome, this seemed to me to miss the whole point of filming the book so I never bought one. A DVD claiming to present the complete cinema version of the film as it had been originally screened, finally appeared in 2007. I bought it with great expectations and waited with breathless excitement to see the transition to colour when Strickland reached Tahihi. Unfortunatelty the report on which I based this expectation proved a little misleading - only the almost final sequence was in colour, and this showed only the paintings Strickland had completed on the walls of his hut before his death, not the third or so of the story which took place on the island. I still enjoyed the film and this relatively small difference should not affect any viewers coming to it with no prior expectations, but for me it was not the film I had been waiting to see for so many years. I believe a great opportunity was missed here for creating a visual impact that would perfectly compliment the emotional impact experienced by Strickland when he changed his lifestyle. Whilst I still have no hesitation in recommending this DVD to IMDb users who are interested in art, this has been one of the extremely few occasions where I felt that I would like to see a film remade. True today's directors would probably film the European sequences in muted colour with a heavy sepia over-wash rather than in black & white, but with enhanced colouring used for Tahiti the overall effect would be the same. Sadly such a future film could not star George Sanders, but maybe Michael Douglas would step in here.