Quartet (1948)
Directed by Ken Annakin, Arthur Crabtree

Film Review

In the 1940s, the anthology film was a comparatively new and untried phenomenon and it was largely down to the success of Quartet, a compendium of four short films based on stories by William Somerset Maugham, that this kind of film took off and became a popular entertainment in its own right in the 1950s.  There had been some notable earlier anthology films - Julien Duvivier's Un carnet de bal (1937) and Marc Allégret's Parade en sept nuits (1941) in France, Dead of Night (1945) in the UK - but it was Quartet which brought legitimacy to the genre and provided a bankable format that others were quick to emulate: three or four separate stories, usually linked by a common theme, each featuring its own cast with a few big name actors, each scripted and directed by a separate team.  Such was the popularity of Quartet that two other collections of Maugham stories swiftly followed: Trio (1950) and Encore (1951).

Somerset Maugham's punchy short stories lend themselves naturally to the anthology film.  Considering how many of Maugham's stories have been adapted for cinema you might almost suspect that the writer had this in mind when he wrote them.   Rain (1932), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor's Edge (1946) are just four of the many screen adaptations of Maugham's novels and short stories that have been successfully made into films, their popularity deriving as much from their author's gift for storytelling as his penchant for observation, to say nothing of his acid wit.  Going by Maugham's own words in the film's introduction, Quartet comprises four of his favourite short stories, and curiously what connects them is a theme that runs through most of his work - men portrayed as victims of the female sex.

In The Facts of life, the first and most unashamedly comical of the stories, a juvenile Jack Watling falls prey to scheming adventuress Mai Zetterling, and it is purely by chance that he comes out on top - by disregarding his father's helpful advice he enjoys a bout of spurious good fortune that will doubtless set him up for a lifetime of disillusionment at the hands of womankind.  George Cole's experience of women in The Kite, the third and most satisfying of the stories, is much grimmer - torn between a psychotically possessive mother (Hermione Baddeley at her most gratifyingly evil) and pathologically jealous wife, the only freedom he enjoys is flying a kite, an addiction that ultimately seals his fate as the little boy who will never be allowed to leave home.

The Alien Corn, the most pessimistic of the four stories, also depicts a young man seeking escape from his stifling milieu.  Dirk Bogarde's dream is to become a concern pianist, but Honor Blackman's kindly intervention ends with his dreams turning to ashes when a regal Françoise Rosay enters the fray and shows him up for the mediocrity he is.  The fate of Cecil Parker in The Colonel's Lady, the closing instalment in this quartet of misogynistic mirth, is no less scathing of female dominance over male inferiority.  For over twenty years the Blimp-like Colonel Parker has lived a happily dull and uneventful life with his dowdy wife and the discovery that she has just  published the most scandalous erotic novel since Lady Chatterley's Lover is the most shocking bit of news he has every had to contend with.  Struck by the novel's searing authenticity, Parker concludes that his wife must have had a secret lover, a scenario that he can barely comprehend.  What right-minded man could possibly be interested in such an inconsequential example of womanhood?

R. C. Sherriff, himself a well-regarded playwright and author, does an admirable job of adapting Maugham's stories, retaining much of the writer's original dialogue, but he commits the unpardonable sin of altering the ending of two of the stories.  To The Kite Sherriff tags on an unconvincing coda, presumably to make it more acceptable to a mainstream cinema audience, and The Colonel's Lady ends with a shock revelation that is scarcely credible.  These sentimental embellishments do nothing to enhance the stories and it is surprising that Maugham, no great sentimentalist, sanctioned them.  The cruel edge that gives Maugham's original stories their distinctive character is blunted through a cowardly misconception that cinema audiences would only accept a film with a tidy happy ending.

Quartet's main delight is the ensemble of acting talent that it gathers together for our amusement - an ensemble that includes not only some of Britain's best-loved character actors (Naunton Wayne, Mervyn Johns, Bernard Lee, Hermione Baddeley, Cecil Parker, Ernest Thesiger, Wilfrid Hyde-White) but an abundance of fresh-faced talent that would help to revitalise British cinema in the 1950s - Dirk Bogarde, Honor Blackman, Jack Watling, George Cole and James Robertson Justice.  It's probably unfair to single out one actor for particular praise, since every performer in this illustrious cast is on fine form, but French acting legend Françoise Rosay stands out and is at her most powerful in the scene in which she crushes Bogarde's hopes into dust, not through malice but through an almost saintly devotion to artistic integrity.  It is one of the most brutal scenes of any British film, but also one of the most poignant as you feel Rosay suffers more than Bogarde as she delivers her damning judgement.

Film Synopsis

The writer William Somerset Maugham introduces adaptations of four of his popular short stories.  In The Facts of Life, 19-year-old Nicky Garnet blithely ignores three pieces of advice given to him by his well-meaning father before he sets off for Monte Carlo to compete in a tennis tournament: never gamble, never lend money to anyone and never have anything to do with women.  After winning a small fortune at the roulette wheel, Nicky lends money to an attractive young woman, Jeanne, who later gains his confidence and lures him back to her apartment with the intention of robbing him of his winnings.  The scheme backfires and Nicky ends up richer than he started out.  In The Alien Corn, George Bland tells his parents on his 21st birthday that he intends becoming a concert pianist.  Naturally his family are appalled by this revelation - George was to have taken over the running of his father's large country estate.  George's cousin Paula persuades his parents to allow him to follow his dream for two years, on the understanding that he will give it up if a professional pianist judges he is not not good enough to make a success of his chosen career.  In The Kite, Herbert Sunbury marries Betty against the wishes of his wildly possessive mother.  The latter wins back her son by reawakening the passion for kite-flying that he has had since he was a small boy.  In The Colonel's Lady,  an ex-military man is astonished to learn that his humdrum wife has written a book of verse that has become not only a bestseller but the talk of the town.  Curious to find out more, the colonel probes his mistress on the subject and discovers that the book is an erotic romance recounting a passionate love affair that is so vivid it might almost be real...