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Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Powerful

A Masterpiece!

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

... and they did get ambitious here - an attempt to fit a very sprawling saga about one man's spiritual quest in an age of materialism into an almost three hour movie without boring the viewer. It works wonderfully.Larry Darryl (Tyrone Power) comes back from WWI to Chicago and to his fiancée, Isabel (Gene Tierney), who is madly in love with him, but not with his new focus on life. At the last minute on the last day of the war another man died saving his life, and it has gotten Larry thinking about the meaning of life. He just doesn't want to use his social connections, get a good position, and make money. He needs time to reflect to make the life that he has been given at another man's expense mean something. However, for all the time the movie takes and the opportunities that Larry surrenders, in the end, after mulling it over, you go "Wait a minute ! What exactly was that about, anyway? Maybe it wasn't as profound as I thought it was while I was watching it !"It's the only reason I give it 9 instead of 10 stars.What makes it work is that Larry's story is not the entire story. There are a host of interesting characters. Isabel is shamelessly material and in spite of how clever she thinks she is, she is very transparent. John Payne plays Gray, the guy Isabel eventually marries, and if he isn't clueless to her true nature, he does a great job hiding it. Clifton Webb plays Isabel's uncle and does what he always did so well at Fox - play someone who says exactly what he thinks regardless of the consequences.Then there is Ann Baxter as the tragic Sophie, a woman who is very much in love with her life and her husband and baby daughter until a crash with a drunk driver destroys all of that. Then comes the crash of 1929 and destroys some of the other characters in different ways. Herbert Marshall plays Maugham himself, and is likable as always, basically an observer in this story.Best scenes - Gene Tierney descends a staircase with the grace of an angel and delivers herself to the equally beautiful Tyrone Power; Power talks to a defrocked priest who is a wanted man and says he does not fear punishment he fears mercy; Power and Tierney have a final face off. Tierney finally says what has been written all over her face for the entire film, Power proves that he sees right through her; Power talks a good hearted personal secretary (Elsa Lancester) out of an invitation to a ball for a dying man who cannot attend but who wants the right to refuse more than anything in the little life he has left.Well acted by Fox's brightest stars, well directed, and beautifully photographed and scored, I'd highly recommend it. The time will fly by.

If anyone had doubts about where Gene Tierney should stand in the vast pantheon of cinema's lading ladies, this understated masterpiece should put them to rest. The chemistry between Tierney and Power is palpable, and makes compromises from Maugham's masterpiece superfluous. This is a movie in which the acting is everything, as far from De Caprio's sensationalism as can be. However, this is a literary adaptation, like Gwen Terasaki's memoir, Bridge to the Sun, or Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, where reading the book beforehand is highly recommended. Watching Tierney and Power here makes it obvious why the gentleman turned down the lead in The Great Gatsby when Tiernney was rejected as being too pretty (as much as I enjoyed Alan Ladd and Betty Field); Mrs. Tierney was a fine actress, by any standard.

Good thing we can still watch such memorable motion pictures on YouTube, not having been blocked as of yet; and does this blocking happen because of the "copyright", or because today's viewers, for some reason, aren't supposed to find out that much about the Golden Age? Next, was Somerset Maugham concerned at that time about how England's distant cousins at that time were propelling the United States to take over from Britain as the world's number one power, and so he staged his discomfort over this by placing his lead characters in his book in Chicago? So, New York wouldn't do for this, and we then even hear Clifton Webb making periodic, deprecating remarks against the midwestern United States (even though he was originally from Indianapolis, Indiana).The motion picture was then also quite faithful to the book when they showed Larry Darrell somehow finding his satisfying philosophy in such places as India and Tibet. This then reflects Maugham's own philosophical beliefs, in that he rejected the concept of an after-life, subject to a possible negative judgment, if one's character in this life is found to be lacking. Better, he alleged, to think Himalayan etc. thought, possibly with repeated cycles of memory erasing reincarnations, or whatever.A final comment would be that the musical score by Alfred Newman is marvelous, and many Hollywood musicians from that period should be recognized as classical music composers, although that hasn't happened yet.

Lamar Trotti adapted this handsomely-produced, well-dressed version of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, starring Tyrone Power as the American WWI flier who shuns the corporate progress of his country (and the hand of débutante Gene Tierney) by 'loafing' in Paris, hoping to find himself; traveling to India to study mysticism, he later attempts to treat his ailing society friends with the methods of self-awareness he has learned. What promised to be a rich dissection of the classes (aided by Clifton Webb's lively portrayal of an insufferable--and insufferably wealthy--snob) is eventually whittled down into an episodic and overly-familiar tale of love and jealousy: man's need for self-discovery and woman's need to pin a man down. Anne Baxter won the Supporting Actress Oscar (most probably for her hospital breakdown sequence), however her role as a young widow who didn't marry for money and became a lush is rather preposterous (and Baxter's third-act scenes are unevenly performed). Power is handsome yet wooden, with a furrowed brow; Herbert Marshall (playing a humorless Maugham) is left rudderless; but Tierney, perhaps channeling the poisonous vibes from her role in "Leave Her to Heaven" the year before, glints with decadent evil like a society spider; explaining the meaning of goodness to this woman is just wasted breath! She steers the movie in an entirely different direction, as a weeper. This is both pro and con. Remade in 1984 with Bill Murray in the lead. ** from ****