The Moon and Sixpence (1942)
Directed by Albert Lewin

Film Review

Albert Lewin began his short but distinguished career as an independent film director and producer with this faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, which was inspired by the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin.  Lewin started out in the script department at MGM in the 1920s and later became personal assistant to the great Irving Thalberg, helping to produce some of MGM's finest films of the 1930s, before moving to Paramount.   Lewin followed The Moon and Sixpence with his best known, and arguably greatest, film The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and completed his trilogy of literary adaptations with The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), based on a novella by Guy de Maupassant.  All three films star George Sanders, an English actor who found prominence in Hollywood playing the archetypal heartless cad.  Sanders' performances in Lewin's first three films are easily among his finest, and as the unsympathetic driven artist Charles Strickland he is at his caddish best.  "The more you beat women, the more they love you for it," he quips, before questioning whether women, like other dumb animals, have souls.  Cads definitely ain't what they used to be.

Overly reliant on flashback and voiceover narration, The Moon and Sixpence lacks the dramatic impact of Lewin's subsequent films, although it makes up for this with its atmospheric design and some inspired artistic flourishes.  Lewin did not have the resources to travel to the South Sea islands, and so the concluding sequences set in Tahita were filmed in the studio.  The staginess of these sequences is cunningly masked by Lewin's decision to give the film a lustrous sepia tint, which provides an effective transition from the drab Parisian scenes that came before and marks the change in Strickland's personality, from super cad to something approximating a human being.  Towards the end of the film, Lewin performs his masterstroke, with a short but stunning Technicolor sequence which offers the only glimpse of the central character's artistic creations.  Lewin employed the same stylistic device, just as effectively, in his subsequent two literary adaptations, exploiting the novelty of colour film for dramatic effect.

Whilst George Sanders outshines every other member of the cast with his charisma and arresting portrayal of a complex (and largely unfathomable) individual, there are some notable supporting contributions.  In the moody Paris sequences, Steven Geray monopolises our sympathies as the self-sacrificing artist who allows everything he has to be stolen by his ungrateful friend; when we arrive in Tahiti, Florence Bates steals the show with her warm portrayal of the matchmaking native who gives Strickland his wife and, with it, some measure of humanity.  Herbert Marshall's presence as the narrator is superfluous and jarring - you can't help wishing that Lewin had been a little more creative in his adaptation of Maugham's novel, excising a character whose sole purpose is to tell the story.  This however is the only defect in an otherwise faultless reinterpretation of a literary classic.  The Moon and Sixpence may not completely unveil the mysteries of the artist's tormented soul but it sheds some valuable insights, albeit through Somerset Maugham's decidely warped view of human nature.

Film Synopsis

London, in the late 19th century.  Geoffrey Wolfe, a writer of some renown, recalls the fantastic life of the painter Charles Strickland.  He first met Strickland, a mediocre stockbroker, at a dinner party, and his first impression was he was a man of no particular distinction.   A short while later, Wolfe is surprised to learn that Strickland has abandoned his wife and children and settled in Paris.  Suspecting that the stockbroker has eloped with another woman, Wolfe goes after him in an attempt to bring him to his senses.  He is incredulous when Stickland tells him that he intends to start a new life as an artist, even though he has never painted a picture before.  Stickland does not go out of his way to make friends but he receives moral support from another artist, Dirk Stroeve, who nurses him back to health when he falls dangerously ill.  Strickland repays Stroeve by stealing his wife, who later kills herself when the artist tells her he has no further use for her.  After Strickland's death, Wolfe journeys to the South Sea island of Tahiti to uncover the final chapter in the artist's remarkable life...