Sorry, this movie sucks

A lot of fun.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is a fascinating movie, enhanced by luminous stars at the pinnacle of their careers. It was based on an intriguing novel by Somerset Maugham, but is a powerful work in its own right.Set mainly in America and France in the years just after World War 1, the story is seen through the eyes of Somerset Maugham, played by Herbert Marshall. While visiting his friend, Elliott Templeton, (Clifton Webb), he comes to know Elliott's family, his niece, Isabel Bradley (Gene Tierney) and her fiancée, Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power).Larry Darrell becomes the focus of the film and Maugham encounters him from time to time along with Elliott Templeton's family as their fortunes ebb and flow. Larry is a man who has had profound experiences in World War 1 and spends the rest of his life searching for something beyond the material world.Recently on Foxtel's "Golden Years of Hollywood", Bill Collins, Australia's legendary movie presenter, summed up perfectly what it is that Larry is searching for when he said, "He is a man in quest of making life worthwhile"."The Razor's Edge" has that slight detachment from reality that comes from being shot almost exclusively on the sound stage – albeit with fabulous sets and sumptuous costumes – giving the film a texture that it would not have if it had been shot on location. Obvious, painted mountain backdrops with rays of sunlight coming through the clouds may not be an effect that you could get away with today, but it all works in this movie.And what stars. Dazzling from the moment she appears, Gene Tierney had that amazing, exotic look, set off with cheekbones to die for. She was a visual feast in "Son of Fury" made a few years earlier with Tyrone Power, but here she is a little older; more mature, and even more stunning.Tyrone Power dominates the screen – he always did. He had that great ability to be still, and the camera just sought him out. As Larry Darrell, we believe he would climb a mountain to find the meaning of life.Anne Baxter's suffering as Sophie MacDonald won her an Academy Award, and although there was no award, John Payne suffers as Gray Maturin who Isabel marries on the rebound from Larry. But the most arresting characterisation is Clifton Webb's Elliott Templeton – cultivated, effete and pompous, it is an even wittier performance than the one he gave in "Laura".The dialogue sparkles. Whether it is the exchanges between Maugham and Isabel or the Holy Man revealing the secrets of the ages to Larry, the script is full of insights into human nature that make you think about the film long after it ends.The film is pushing 70 now, and the players have all departed the stage, but they still glow in a movie that shows how seductive films from that era of Hollywood could be.

I recently saw The Razor'as edge for the first time on TCM, and what surprised me was that though the film begins in 1919, there is no sense whatsoever that we are not in the late 1940's. Of course it is difficult for a movie to recreate an era only 15 years earlier, but there is no concession to fashion, hair styles, or anything that suggests the Roaring Twenties. In the first scene, the band is playing songs of the era, but with 1940's sound and arrangements. Sometimes lack of time sense doesn't matter, but here I think it does.I'm not sure why Eastern Wisdom has held such a fascination for intellectual writers of the era. I wish some seekers would go off looking for enlightenment within our own culture. The movie reminds me of Lost Horizon where the protagonist goes seeking enlightenment in a thoroughly bogus East.

If the movie is this good, I must read Somerset Maugham's works. I refuse to see the remake with Bill Murray. This is a Classic. There's even a Sydney Carton-ish event (does anyone else see "the marriage" in this way?). I saw this late late one night, and was frankly astonished that it was made in the 40s. A movie for all times and all ages (well, above 14 or so).Okay, so IMDb wants more from me: a war, a man, a choice: the traditional life of predictable events -or- a life lived one day at a time, asking questions, seeking answers, without regard to the opinion of others, seeking a foundation of meaning and integrity and compassion? This is not the redemptive journey of a broken man, but the journey of a self-respecting man who could have a secure, productive, prestigious, rewarding life, yet chooses instead to ask: Why? What? Who? He's not so much searching for himself, but for his right place in the world he does not yet comprehend.

The Razor's Edge (1946)A stately, dramatic, richly nuanced film about love, true love, and the love of life. It's about what matters, and what doesn't, in a high society world George Cukor could have filmed, but this is by director Edmund Goulding, coming off of a series of war films, and with the great Grand Hotel from 1932 in his trail. Some people will find this a touch stiff or slow, or rather too nuanced, but I think none of the above at all. It has the richness of the Somerset Maugham novel it is based on, and Goulding had just filmed (the same year) Of Human Bondage, another Maugham novel. In both cases, the writer contributed to the screenplay, and the combination of the two of them seems really perfect. Tyrone Power is an interesting lead man, as the idealistic and handsome Larry Darrell, and in some ways his restraint and almost studied dullness at times is maybe what the film needs for its rich, calm trajectory through the twenty years it covers. He's as stable and "good" as the wise, knowing figure of the author, who appears in the form of actor Herbert Marshall. Gene Tierney as Power's counterpart and eventually counterpoint plays the spoiled woman with cool, dramatic perfection. She's got energy and edge and beauty from every angle, and she maintains just that slightest duplicity in every scene, so you are kept on your toes.The only forced and almost laughable section is the one that demands we think profound thoughts...the guru in India being guru to our hero. Unfortunately, it lasts for fifteen minutes, and though there is a spiritual necessity to the experience he has there, this spiritual aspect is implied just as fully in the worldly scenes that follow. I can picture a far better movie without this insert, and I can picture the director picturing it, too. Someone knows why it got patched in, and for whom, but this is what we have. It has to be said the filming, as conservative as it is in many ways, is spot-on gorgeous. The brightly lit, ornamented, busy sets are actually inhabited by the camera, and the figures move together not only across the field, but front to back as well, in triangles and curves of visual activity, yet with fluidity--it's all contained and lyrically delicious. This is done without ostentatious mood, without sharp angles and bold lighting, but instead with spatial arrangements, always full, no emptiness, no great shadows, always something more to see. A great example, easy to find, is the very last scene, just before the shot on the boat when the end titles run. Watch how Marshall walks the long way around Tierney, and then she walks around him, and the camera keeps them framed side to side, front to back. It's nothing short of brilliant, and yet, in style, so different than say Toland doing Kane or, at another extreme, Ozu doing Tokyo Story. But no less spectacular.At one point, a minor character, a defrocked priest, says to Darrell in a working class bar, "You sound like a very religious man who does not believe in God." The movie is really about godliness, or what Maugham calls "goodness" in the end. And some people have it, and share it, and make the world better, God or no God.