The Razor's Edge (1946 film)

''The Razor's Edge'' is a 1946 American drama film based on W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel of the same name. It stars Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, and Herbert Marshall, with a supporting cast including Lucile Watson, Frank Latimore, and Elsa Lanchester. Marshall plays Somerset Maugham. The film was directed by Edmund Goulding.

''The Razor's Edge'' tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. The story begins through the eyes of Larry's friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the war. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune.

''The Razor's Edge'' was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture, with Anne Baxter winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Plot

In 1919, Elliott Templeton, an expatriate who has been living in France, has returned to the United States to visit, among other people, his niece Isabel. Isabel is engaged to marry Larry Darrell, recently returned from service as a pilot during the Great War. Larry, however, has no money and no interest in getting a job with a future to support Isabel properly.

Larry wants to "loaf" on his inheritance of $3,000 a year. He has been traumatized by the death of a comrade who sacrificed himself to save him and is driven to find out what meaning life has. Larry and Isabel agree to postpone their marriage for a year so that he can go to Paris to try to clear his head.

In Paris, Larry immerses himself in the life of a student. After a year, Isabel and her mother come to Paris. Larry asks Isabel to marry him, but she cannot bear to live in poverty and breaks their engagement. Isabel later marries millionaire Gray Maturin, thus gaining the elite social and family life she craves. Larry works in a coal mine in France, where a drunk defrocked priest, Kosti, urges him to travel to India to learn from a mystic. Larry studies at a monastery in the Himalayas under the tutelage of a holy man, experiencing a moment of enlightenment on a mountaintop. The holy man urges Larry to go back to his people but to not lose his awareness of the infinite beauty of the world and of God.

In Paris, Isabel and her family are living with Elliott after being financially ruined by the stock market crash of 1929. Elliott " sold short" before the crash and "made a killing" in the market. Writer W. Somerset Maugham arranges a lunch for Elliott and his household to meet Larry.

Later, while slumming at a disreputable bar in the Rue de Lappe, they encounter Larry's childhood friend Sophie Nelson, now a drunkard and drug user, and her abusive pimp. Isabel and Gray tell Larry that Sophie lost her husband Bob and daughter Linda in a car crash. Isabel says that they had to "drop" Sophie because of her bad behavior. Larry starts seeing Sophie and eventually tells Isabel that they are engaged. Not wanting to lose Larry, Isabel invites them all to lunch the next day at the Ritz.

There, the waiter convinces Elliott to drink Persovka, and Isabel asks for some to be sent to the apartment. She wants to give Sophie a wedding dress and arranges to meet her at the apartment the next afternoon. After the fitting, Isabel shows Sophie pictures of her children, which stirs memories of Linda, then leaves to get her daughter. The butler removes the drinks tray; Isabel stares at the bottle of Persovka and leaves. After a while, Sophie, who has not had alcohol since that night in the Rue de Lappe, takes multiple drinks.

Larry scours the bars and dives, following the trail of a woman demanding Persovka, until he tracks Sophie to an opium den. She runs away, screaming, and disappears. A year later, she is murdered in Toulon.

Maugham and Larry later visit Elliott on his deathbed in Nice purchased the film rights from Maugham in March 1945 for $50,000 plus 20% of the film's net profits. The contract stipulated that Maugham would receive an additional $50,000 if the film did not start shooting by February 2, 1946. In August 1945, producer Darryl F. Zanuck had the second unit begin shooting in the mountains around Denver, Colorado, which were to portray the Himalayas in the film. The stars had not yet been cast; Larry Darrell was played by a stand-in and was filmed in extreme long shot. Zanuck wanted Tyrone Power to star and delayed casting until Power finished his service in the Marines in January 1946.

Zanuck originally hired George Cukor to direct, but creative differences led to Cukor's removal. Although Maugham wanted his friend (whom he had in mind when he created the character) Gene Tierney for Isabel, Zanuck chose Maureen O'Hara but told her not to tell anyone. As O'Hara recounted in her autobiography, she shared the secret with Linda Darnell, but Zanuck found out, fired O'Hara, and hired Tierney. Betty Grable and Judy Garland were originally considered for the role of Sophie before Baxter was cast. Maugham wrote an early draft of the screenplay but not one word of his version was used in the final script, and as a result Maugham declined Zanuck's request to write a sequel, and never worked in Hollywood again.

Release

On November 19, 1946, the film had its New York premiere at the Roxy Theatre in Manhattan. ''Motion Picture Herald'' described it as New York's "largest and most star-studded motion picture premiere since the war" with crowds of onlookers causing a traffic-blocking jam on 50th Street and Seventh Avenue. The premiere was screened to a capacity audience of 5,886 featuring "screen, stage and radio stars, UN delegates, New York society, top-flight film executives and out of-fown film critics." The opening at Roxy grossed $165,000 in its first week, surpassing the previous Roxy record set by ''The Cock-Eyed World'' in 1929 which grossed $160,000. An extensive advertising campaign had been launched to promote the film's premiere, which ''Motion Picture Herald'' dubbed "impressive in scope, even for so blasé a city as New York." Twentieth Century Fox's advertising director Charles Schlaifer helmed the campaign, organizing expansive outdoor billboards, posters on transportation lines, window displays and electric signs — alongside a sweeping newspaper and radio campaign. The publication further noted: "One was continuously conscious of promotion over the airwaves every time the radio was turned on."

The film was released wide by Twentieth Century Fox on December 25, 1946, in 300 locations across the United States.

Reception

''New York Times'' film critic Bosley Crowther panned ''The Razor's Edge'', complaining of its inability to explain the protagonist's spiritual awakening, and of "glib but vacuous dialogue" that hamstrung the actors, shortcomings he blamed on the limitations of the underlying Maugham story, which, said Crowther, was "a vague and uncertain encroachment upon a mystical moral realm, more emotional than intellectual."

Awards and nominations

See also

* '' The Razor's Edge'', a 1984 adaptation with Bill Murray, Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, Denholm Elliott, and James Keach

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Razor's Edge (1946 film), The
1946 drama films
1946 films
20th Century Fox films
American drama films
American black-and-white films
1940s English-language films
Film noir
Films scored by Alfred Newman
Films based on British novels
Films based on works by W. Somerset Maugham
Films directed by Edmund Goulding
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe winning performance
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award–winning performance
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe–winning performance
Films shot in Colorado
Films produced by Darryl F. Zanuck
Films with screenplays by Lamar Trotti
1940s American films