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 Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Plot
In the film, Herbert Marshall appears as W. Somerset Maugham, the story's narrator and an important character who drifts in and out of the lives of the other major players. The opening scene is at a party in the summer of 1919 at a Chicago country club. Elliott Templeton, an expatriate who has been living in France, has returned to the United States to visit his sister, Louisa Bradley, and his niece, Isabel. Isabel is engaged to marry Larry Darrell, recently returned from service as a pilot during the Great War. Elliott disapproves of Larry because he has no money and no interest in getting a job with a future so he can support Isabel properly. Among the party guests are Larry's childhood friend Sophie Nelson and her boyfriend, Bob MacDonald.

Larry refuses a job offer from the father of his friend Gray Maturin, a millionaire who is also in love with Isabel. He tells her that he wants to "loaf" on his small inheritance of $3,000 a year. Larry has been traumatized by the death of a comrade who sacrificed himself to save Larry 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 muddled thoughts.

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. At the reception after Isabel's marriage to Gray, which will provide her with the elite social and family life she craves, Sophie and Bob MacDonald are there. They have a baby named Linda. Meanwhile, Larry works in a coal mine in France, where a drunk, debauched defrocked priest, Kosti, urges him 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 elightenment 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. Meanwhile, in the States, Bob and the baby die in a car crash.

Back in Paris, Maugham meets Elliott by chance and learns that 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. Maugham arranges a lunch for Elliott and his household to meet an old friend, who turns out to be Larry.

Later, while slumming at a disreputable bar in the Rue de Lappe, they encounter Sophie, now a drunkard and drug user, and her abusive pimp. Larry, who did not know about the tragedy, asks what happened, and Isabel and Gray tell him. Isabel says they had to "drop" Sophie because of her bad behavior and insists there was always something wrong with her or she would not have been so weak. Larry starts seeing Sophie and tells Isabel that they are engaged. The news drives her wild, but she doesn’t want to lose Larry and invites them all to lunch the next day at the Ritz.

After lunch, they have coffee in the lobby. The waiter convinces Elliott that a little Persovka can do no harm, and Isabel asks for some to be sent to the apartment. She wants to give Sophie a wedding dress and arranges to meet at the apartment the next afternoon. After the fitting, Isabel and Sophie talk. Sophie has not had alcohol since that night in the Rue de Lappe and realizes that this is her last chance. 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 on the side table and walks out. After a while, Sophie 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, and her death reunites Larry and Maugham during the police investigation.

Maugham and Larry visit Elliott on his deathbed in Nice, where he tells Gray that he will now have enough money to pay his father's debts and rebuild the business. Immediately after Elliott's death, Isabel learns that Larry is leaving that night. He plans to work his way back to America aboard a tramp steamer. She tells him she loves him and knows he feels the same. Larry asks about Sophie, and Isabel admits to tempting her deliberately, claiming that she did it to save Larry and as a test of Sophie's strength. He says he has the feeling that Sophie is where she wanted to be, with her husband and child.

Isabel tells Maugham that she has lost Larry and still does not understand what he wants. Maugham tells her that Larry has found what most people want and never get. "I don't think anyone can fail to be better and nobler, kinder for knowing him. You see, my dear, goodness is after all the greatest force in the world, and he's got it." Larry, on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, hoists cargo in the rain.

Production history
20th Century Fox 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."