The Moon And Sixpence (1942)

[poliphilo]

Charles Strickland, a London stockbroker, remarkable only for being outstandingly boring, leaves his wife and kids and goes off to Paris to learn to paint. There he turns into a heartless Nietzschean superman. A soft-hearted Dutch painter saves his life and he repays him by walking off with his wife, then dumping her. He is not exactly a seducer. He follows his destiny and if moths flutter into his hard gem-like flame so much the worse for them. He moves to Tahiti- which is full of Conradian soaks and hula-hula girls- marries a dusky maiden, makes a speech about women having no souls to mask the fact that he's falling in love, contracts leprosy, paints a final masterpiece (Gauguin meets Art Deco) and dies having left instructions that it should be burned. Cue raging inferno.

An end title flops up, telling us that Strickland may have been a great artist, but nothing can excuse the "ugliness" of his life. Phew, thank you Hays Code, you just saved me from jumping on the first tramp steamer to Polynesia.

Albert Lewin made a number of odd, infuriating, cack-handed but impassioned movies. The best of the ones I've seen is The Picture of Dorian Gray. This was the first. It aspires to be Citizen Kane but obviously isn't.  At times its reliance on voice-over narration reduces it to an illustrated lecture. George Sanders is magnetic as Strickland. 

Comments

[sovay]

I think it's a device that works better on the page than in film- which is essentially a visual medium.

He has the same problem in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), actually—I don't know if there was a source novel in that case, but he has an entirely superfluous amateur archaeologist played by Harold Warrender whose sole purpose in the script, so far as I could tell, is to narrate everything about the film that was already obvious to the viewer or comment on the conclusions we'd just reached. He didn't break the film for me, but I just kept wanting to reach through the screen and shut him up.

Incidentally:

Phew, thank you Hays Code, you just saved me from jumping on the first tramp steamer to Polynesia.

*snerk*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I saw that on TV ages ago. I'd forgotten about Warrender but I remember it being very brightly coloured.

They shot some it in Tossa de Mar in Catalonia and the local people have commemorated this significant event in their history by erecting a statue of Ava Gardner on a hill above the town. It doesn't look the least bit like her.