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US Mall 1 - Razor's Edge
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $19.77
Your Save: $ 0.21 ( 1% )
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Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb
Directed By: Edmund Goulding
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786303333076
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 6303333079
Label: 20th Century Fox
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: 1995-03-13
Running Time: 145
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Theatrical Release Date: 1946-12
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: razers edge
Comment: it's a wonderful movie.Plus the sevice I got from amazon was just as
wonderful.I got my dvd quickly and without a lot of hassel.Thanks
amazon.co.
kevin dee vicory
Customer Rating:
Summary: Darryl F. Zanuck wrestles with enlightened goodness in Somerset Maugham's novel. Zanuck wins
Comment: What if Somerset Maugham had written a novel about a coal miner who decided to search for transcendental enlightenment by trying to join a country club? If he had, he could have called it The Razor's Edge, since the Katha-Upanishad tells us, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." But Maugham decided to stick with the well-bred class, and so we have Darryl F. Zanuck's version of Larry Darrell, recently returned from WWI, carefully groomed, well connected in society and determined to find himself by becoming a coal miner.
Or, as Maugham tells us, "This is the young man of whom I write. He is not famous. It may be that when at last his life comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on this earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Yet it may be that the way of life he has chosen for himself may have an ever growing influence over his fellow men, so that, long after his death, perhaps, it will be realized that lived in this age a very remarkable creature."
The Razor's Edge has all of Zanuck's cultural taste that money could buy. It's so earnest, so sincere...so self-important. As Larry goes about his search for wisdom, working in mines, on merchant ships, climbing a Himalayan mountain to learn from an ancient wise man, we have his selfish girl friend, Isabel, played by Gene Tierney, his tragic childhood chum played by Anne Baxter, the girlfriend's snobbish and impeccably clad uncle played by Clifton Webb, and Willie Maugham himself, played by Herbert Marshall, taking notes. The movie is so insufferably smug about goodness that the only thing that perks it up a bit is Clifton Webb as Elliot Templeton. "If I live to be a hundred I shall never understand how any young man can come to Paris without evening clothes." Webb has some good lines, but we wind up appreciating Clifton Webb, not Elliot Templeton.
Zanuck wanted a prestige hit for Twentieth Century when he bought the rights to Maugham's novel. He waited a year until Tyrone Power was released from military service. He made sure there were well-dressed extras by the dozens, a score that sounds as if it were meant for a cathedral and he even wrote some of the scenes himself. The effort is as self-conscious as a fat man wearing a rented tux. Despite Hollywood's view of things in The Razor's Edge, I can tell you that for most people hard work doesn't bring enlightenment, just weariness and low pay.
After nearly two-and-a-half hours, we last see Larry carrying his duffle bag on board a tramp steamer in a gale. He's going to work his way back to America from Europe with a contented smile on his face. "My dear," Somerset Maugham says to Isabel at the same time in an elaborately decorated parlor, "Larry has found what we all want and what very few of us ever 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 and the audience both need a healthy dose of Dramamine.
Maugham, lest we forget, was a fine writer of plays, novels, essays and short stories. To see how the movies could do him justice, watch the way some of his short stories were brought to the screen in Encore - 3 Stories by W. Somerset Maugham [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Great Britain ], W. Somerset Maugham Trio and Quartet - 4 Stories by W. Somerset Maugham (The Facts of Life,The Kite,The Colonel's Lady, The Alien Corn) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Great Britain ]. And instead of wasting time with Larry Darrell, spend some time with Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet is a good read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Searching for one's soul
Comment: What do you want from life? What does it all mean in the end? Why should one man die & another man live? Is it all just arbitrary?
Here's a sumptuous adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel about one man's search for answers to those questions. It's done in grand Hollywood style, with a fine cast, beautiful sets, and sharp dialogue. Granted, it takes some minor liberties with the source material, and the acting style isn't as naturalistic as modern viewers might expect. But I think those are quibbles, and don't interfere with the movie as a whole.
Tyrone Power has the most difficult part, in that he has to play the seeker Larry Darrell according to the stylized conventions of screen piety at the time. Even so, his slightly stiff & detached performance does convey the sense of someone not quite in synch with the everyday world, someone who's still looking for something solid & real. He never comes across as a prig or stuffed shirt -- rather than seeming above everyone else, he seems apart from everyone else. He's naive in some ways, but he's not stupid. And his empathy for & acceptance of his friends, just as they are, is obvious.
The rest of the cast is quite good as well. Gene Tierney's Isabel is stunningly beautiful, with just the right balance of coolness & yearning ... and as we see later, capable of vindictive cruelty. John Payne's millionaire could easily have been a stock villain, the Crass Rich Man, but instead he's simply a decent human being whose temperament lends itself to the business world. Anne Baxter may be a little bit over the top, but her character has earned that right. Certainly her self-destructiveness is all too familiar to many of us.
And then we come to the standout performances, to my mind: Clifton Webb's wonderfully waspish snob, Uncle Eliot, and Herbert Marshall's depiction of Somerset Maugham himself. Webb manages to make a vain, essentially shallow man somehow as endearing as he is annoying, while Marshall makes the presence of the author within his own story (as in the novel) totally convincing.
Again, modern audiences used to location shooting might wince at the studio sets of India, or the white actor playing an Indian spiritual teacher. Well, this was the custom at the time, and allowances should be made for it. And the guru of no fixed ethnic background works on an archetypal level: the Wise Old Man. Taken as a symbol, rather than as an individual, he's quite acceptable, not unlike Sam Jaffe's elderly monk in "Lost Horizon."
It's also fascinating to see how much adult material they managed to include, despite the restrictions of the Hays Code. Without being explicit, they make clear Isabel's intention to trap Larry by getting pregnant. And in Maugham's encounter with a worldly French police officer, the novelist's homosexuality is discreetly & sympathetically referenced. The grown-ups in the audience would understand it all immediately, while such material would simply go over the heads of any children.
Some may prefer Bill Murray's remake, which is certainly more authentic in its Indian scenes. But overall, it's not as strong as the original, and Bill hasn't quite found the balance of comedy & drama that worked so perfectly in "Groundhog Day." Sometimes a bit of artifice just winds up working better than authenticity.
For those who wonder if there's more to life than money & status, this is an indispensible film. Most highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, glossy entertainment
Comment: The film version of W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Razor's Edge" must have been another of Darryl F. Zanuck's shameless bids for a best picture Oscar, an obsession with the producer from the moment his 1944 film "Wilson," a biography of the U.S. president, failed to win the gold. The Academy had demonstrated, as they continue to do, that "prestige" pictures, movies that aspire to more than entertainment, were favored over lighter fare, and Zanuck made it a point to have at least one such attraction made at 20th Century Fox each year until he got his hands on the top prize.
"The Razor's Edge" earned a best picture nomination, but failed to reach the finish line ("The Best Years of Our Lives" was named the year's best). Few films of the era were as "prestigious" as this one from Maugham's acclaimed philosophical novel, but its "importance" seems forced.
The studio's number one glamour boy, Tyrone Power, plays Larry Darrell, a man so disillusioned by his experiences in World War I that he now rejects society, as well as the love of his socialite fiancee (Gene Tierney), in favor of loafing in Paris and investigating spirituality in India.
It's an unlikely theme for a glossy studio film, but as noted earlier, Zanuck wanted that Oscar, the kind of worldly honor Larry Darrell finds so meaningless. It was Anne Baxter, as a woman who turns to the bottle and whom Darrell attempts to save after her family is killed in an automobile accident, who took home an Oscar. Others in the cast were equally deserving.
Clifton Webb is as wittily acerbic as Tierney's uncle as he was as her employer in "Laura" two years earlier. Webb was one of Hollywood's most uncloseted homosexuals in his day, and the veiled references to homosexuality are among the most intriguing aspects of "The Razor's Edge." Author Maugham was another homosexual who broke free of the closet years before mainstream society had heard of Gay Liberation, and he turns up in the film as narrator and a principal character. Played by Herbert Marshall, Maugham's sexuality is referred to in the kind of subtle manner characteristic of 40's cinema. "I always get the queerest feeling from Mr. Maugham," Tierney says, and when he's questioned about his involvement with a murdered woman, he is easily cleared of any suspicion that he was romantically involved with her. With an arch of an eyebrow, the policeman tells Maugham that, from all he has heard about the writer, it's obvious she was "not his type" (nudge, nudge).
For all its pretensions, "The Razor's Edge" is still a good show. All that gloss would normally make me retch, as would all that highbrow philosophy, but together they make an interesting combination.
Brian W. Fairbanks
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful movie
Comment: A mans journey searching for the truth, wherever that might take him and no matter what anyone else wants of him.
The original is so much better that the remake with Bill Murray
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: razers edge
Comment: it's a wonderful movie.Plus the sevice I got from amazon was just as
wonderful.I got my dvd quickly and without a lot of hassel.Thanks
amazon.co.
kevin dee vicory
Customer Rating:
Summary: Darryl F. Zanuck wrestles with enlightened goodness in Somerset Maugham's novel. Zanuck wins
Comment: What if Somerset Maugham had written a novel about a coal miner who decided to search for transcendental enlightenment by trying to join a country club? If he had, he could have called it The Razor's Edge, since the Katha-Upanishad tells us, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." But Maugham decided to stick with the well-bred class, and so we have Darryl F. Zanuck's version of Larry Darrell, recently returned from WWI, carefully groomed, well connected in society and determined to find himself by becoming a coal miner.
Or, as Maugham tells us, "This is the young man of whom I write. He is not famous. It may be that when at last his life comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on this earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Yet it may be that the way of life he has chosen for himself may have an ever growing influence over his fellow men, so that, long after his death, perhaps, it will be realized that lived in this age a very remarkable creature."
The Razor's Edge has all of Zanuck's cultural taste that money could buy. It's so earnest, so sincere...so self-important. As Larry goes about his search for wisdom, working in mines, on merchant ships, climbing a Himalayan mountain to learn from an ancient wise man, we have his selfish girl friend, Isabel, played by Gene Tierney, his tragic childhood chum played by Anne Baxter, the girlfriend's snobbish and impeccably clad uncle played by Clifton Webb, and Willie Maugham himself, played by Herbert Marshall, taking notes. The movie is so insufferably smug about goodness that the only thing that perks it up a bit is Clifton Webb as Elliot Templeton. "If I live to be a hundred I shall never understand how any young man can come to Paris without evening clothes." Webb has some good lines, but we wind up appreciating Clifton Webb, not Elliot Templeton.
Zanuck wanted a prestige hit for Twentieth Century when he bought the rights to Maugham's novel. He waited a year until Tyrone Power was released from military service. He made sure there were well-dressed extras by the dozens, a score that sounds as if it were meant for a cathedral and he even wrote some of the scenes himself. The effort is as self-conscious as a fat man wearing a rented tux. Despite Hollywood's view of things in The Razor's Edge, I can tell you that for most people hard work doesn't bring enlightenment, just weariness and low pay.
After nearly two-and-a-half hours, we last see Larry carrying his duffle bag on board a tramp steamer in a gale. He's going to work his way back to America from Europe with a contented smile on his face. "My dear," Somerset Maugham says to Isabel at the same time in an elaborately decorated parlor, "Larry has found what we all want and what very few of us ever 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 and the audience both need a healthy dose of Dramamine.
Maugham, lest we forget, was a fine writer of plays, novels, essays and short stories. To see how the movies could do him justice, watch the way some of his short stories were brought to the screen in Encore - 3 Stories by W. Somerset Maugham [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Great Britain ], W. Somerset Maugham Trio and Quartet - 4 Stories by W. Somerset Maugham (The Facts of Life,The Kite,The Colonel's Lady, The Alien Corn) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Great Britain ]. And instead of wasting time with Larry Darrell, spend some time with Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet is a good read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Searching for one's soul
Comment: What do you want from life? What does it all mean in the end? Why should one man die & another man live? Is it all just arbitrary?
Here's a sumptuous adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel about one man's search for answers to those questions. It's done in grand Hollywood style, with a fine cast, beautiful sets, and sharp dialogue. Granted, it takes some minor liberties with the source material, and the acting style isn't as naturalistic as modern viewers might expect. But I think those are quibbles, and don't interfere with the movie as a whole.
Tyrone Power has the most difficult part, in that he has to play the seeker Larry Darrell according to the stylized conventions of screen piety at the time. Even so, his slightly stiff & detached performance does convey the sense of someone not quite in synch with the everyday world, someone who's still looking for something solid & real. He never comes across as a prig or stuffed shirt -- rather than seeming above everyone else, he seems apart from everyone else. He's naive in some ways, but he's not stupid. And his empathy for & acceptance of his friends, just as they are, is obvious.
The rest of the cast is quite good as well. Gene Tierney's Isabel is stunningly beautiful, with just the right balance of coolness & yearning ... and as we see later, capable of vindictive cruelty. John Payne's millionaire could easily have been a stock villain, the Crass Rich Man, but instead he's simply a decent human being whose temperament lends itself to the business world. Anne Baxter may be a little bit over the top, but her character has earned that right. Certainly her self-destructiveness is all too familiar to many of us.
And then we come to the standout performances, to my mind: Clifton Webb's wonderfully waspish snob, Uncle Eliot, and Herbert Marshall's depiction of Somerset Maugham himself. Webb manages to make a vain, essentially shallow man somehow as endearing as he is annoying, while Marshall makes the presence of the author within his own story (as in the novel) totally convincing.
Again, modern audiences used to location shooting might wince at the studio sets of India, or the white actor playing an Indian spiritual teacher. Well, this was the custom at the time, and allowances should be made for it. And the guru of no fixed ethnic background works on an archetypal level: the Wise Old Man. Taken as a symbol, rather than as an individual, he's quite acceptable, not unlike Sam Jaffe's elderly monk in "Lost Horizon."
It's also fascinating to see how much adult material they managed to include, despite the restrictions of the Hays Code. Without being explicit, they make clear Isabel's intention to trap Larry by getting pregnant. And in Maugham's encounter with a worldly French police officer, the novelist's homosexuality is discreetly & sympathetically referenced. The grown-ups in the audience would understand it all immediately, while such material would simply go over the heads of any children.
Some may prefer Bill Murray's remake, which is certainly more authentic in its Indian scenes. But overall, it's not as strong as the original, and Bill hasn't quite found the balance of comedy & drama that worked so perfectly in "Groundhog Day." Sometimes a bit of artifice just winds up working better than authenticity.
For those who wonder if there's more to life than money & status, this is an indispensible film. Most highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, glossy entertainment
Comment: The film version of W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Razor's Edge" must have been another of Darryl F. Zanuck's shameless bids for a best picture Oscar, an obsession with the producer from the moment his 1944 film "Wilson," a biography of the U.S. president, failed to win the gold. The Academy had demonstrated, as they continue to do, that "prestige" pictures, movies that aspire to more than entertainment, were favored over lighter fare, and Zanuck made it a point to have at least one such attraction made at 20th Century Fox each year until he got his hands on the top prize.
"The Razor's Edge" earned a best picture nomination, but failed to reach the finish line ("The Best Years of Our Lives" was named the year's best). Few films of the era were as "prestigious" as this one from Maugham's acclaimed philosophical novel, but its "importance" seems forced.
The studio's number one glamour boy, Tyrone Power, plays Larry Darrell, a man so disillusioned by his experiences in World War I that he now rejects society, as well as the love of his socialite fiancee (Gene Tierney), in favor of loafing in Paris and investigating spirituality in India.
It's an unlikely theme for a glossy studio film, but as noted earlier, Zanuck wanted that Oscar, the kind of worldly honor Larry Darrell finds so meaningless. It was Anne Baxter, as a woman who turns to the bottle and whom Darrell attempts to save after her family is killed in an automobile accident, who took home an Oscar. Others in the cast were equally deserving.
Clifton Webb is as wittily acerbic as Tierney's uncle as he was as her employer in "Laura" two years earlier. Webb was one of Hollywood's most uncloseted homosexuals in his day, and the veiled references to homosexuality are among the most intriguing aspects of "The Razor's Edge." Author Maugham was another homosexual who broke free of the closet years before mainstream society had heard of Gay Liberation, and he turns up in the film as narrator and a principal character. Played by Herbert Marshall, Maugham's sexuality is referred to in the kind of subtle manner characteristic of 40's cinema. "I always get the queerest feeling from Mr. Maugham," Tierney says, and when he's questioned about his involvement with a murdered woman, he is easily cleared of any suspicion that he was romantically involved with her. With an arch of an eyebrow, the policeman tells Maugham that, from all he has heard about the writer, it's obvious she was "not his type" (nudge, nudge).
For all its pretensions, "The Razor's Edge" is still a good show. All that gloss would normally make me retch, as would all that highbrow philosophy, but together they make an interesting combination.
Brian W. Fairbanks
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful movie
Comment: A mans journey searching for the truth, wherever that might take him and no matter what anyone else wants of him.
The original is so much better that the remake with Bill Murray
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