A troubled production (three directors, all disowning it; feuding leads), it’s one of those famous book adaptations that touches all the bases, but never makes contact. Vaguely set in the early 1900s, Kim Novak’s career never completely recovered from her earnest, but jarringly contemporary attempt at Somerset Maugham’s slutty waitress who takes possession of Laurence Harvey’s easy mark of a Med student. The worse she treats him, the more he longs to debase himself. While more of the book gets covered, it misses the feral charge Bette Davis gave the 1934 version (see below) or the emotional undertow composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold brought to the otherwise tepid try of 1946. Here, Ron Goodwin’s score is simply intrusive and Ken Hughes, who seems to have directed most of the film, never finds a rhythm to pull together all the misjudged camera setups. (We’re always in the wrong spot.) Even so, the highly autobiographical story (possibly Maugham’s best) pulls you along. And now and then, especially when Roger Livesey shows up fully formed as the eccentric father of the long sought ‘right’ girl for the young doctor, you can see the film everyone was hoping to make.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As literary adaptations go, Jack Cardiff’s film of D.H. Lawrence’s SONS AND LOVERS/’60, made around the same time in a similar style and covering the same period, succeeds in most of the ways this one misses.
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