New Picture

The Razor's Edge (20th Century-Fox) dawdles away several million dollars trying to make a great philosopher out of W. Somerset Maugham and a great actress out of Gene Tierney. Result of all the costly, unsuccessful straining is an earnest, overlong, impressively glossy, frequently dull movie. Novelist Maugham remains an accomplished old storyteller who is not at his best as a camp-meeting evangelist. Miss Tierney is still a toothily pretty young woman who displays fancy clothes with far greater assurance than she displays simple emotions.

The movie tiptoes as respectfully close behind Maugham's 90-day wonder* as if it were stalking Holy Writ. Tyrone Power, back in Hollywood after 3 1/2 years as a marine, is the introspective young man who returns from World War I full of questions about the spiritual meaning of life. Rather than marry Miss Tierney and settle down to bond-selling in the fleshpots of Chicago, he runs off to Paris to examine his troubled soul. Miss Tierney, plainly a non-spiritual type, sullenly marries wealthy John Payne and has a couple of daughters, but still yearns for Tyrone.

In the sluggishly melodramatic Paris sequences, Clifton Webb is an amusing old expatriate snob, Herbert Marshall plays Mr. Maugham himself and Anne Baxter is a frantically unhappy girl who takes to drink in low Apache dives. Elsa Lanchester is refreshingly expert in a tiny comedy bit.

Dragging the audience along in his search for spiritual peace, Tyrone eventually goes on a pilgrimage to deepest India, where he picks up an interesting yoga trick that will cure headaches. Against an improbable Himalayan backdrop, he also receives from a holy man a number of fine platitudes, including the one that gives the story its title ("The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path of Salvation is hard").

Assigned the razor's-edge task of filming a story that was blatantly unsuitable for a big, star-spangled screen entertainment, Director Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, Claudia) did his thankless work with considerable taste and polish.

Pretentious thud that it is, The Razor's Edge nonetheless rates a round of applause for trying to be a movie with an Idea. The real trouble in this case: the movie technicians--including the director--are far too clever and too efficient for their material; it has become dangerous to let them kick an Idea around--unless it is a very, very robust Idea. By the time 4.000 competent craftsmen have focused their cold lights on Mr. Maugham's little sermon, pulled it through 89 dressy sets, photographed it tenderly from every possible angle and spiced it up with a thrilling musical background, it stands revealed as a rather small, shivering, indecently exposed banality. Hollywood's cameras, always rudely frank about a misshapen nose or an inept gesture, have everlastingly proved that they can be equally ruthless and revealing with a fuzzy idea.

-"The average age of a novel," said Maugham, "is 90 days."

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