‘About as exciting as watching paint dry.’ A phrase not only for house painters. But thanks to Somerset Maugham’s re-imagination of Paul Gauguin into Charles Strickland for THE MOON AND SIXPENCE*, it’s easy to be pulled into the life of this bluntly honest, disagreeable man as he rejects bourgeois values, friends & family to pursue painterly bliss in Tahiti. Dropping Maugham’s fictional embellishments, Edouard Deluc does a reasonable job with the real Paul Gauguin in his bio-pic by limiting the time-frame to the artist’s departure from Paris and first stay in Tahiti. And he’s fortunate to have Vincent Cassel believably wasting away as an uncompromising Gauguin. But even with exotic love life & illness, it quickly runs out of things to say. So, the main interest in GAUGUIN comes in seeing how the real life stimulated Maugham’s fictional embellishments. And craft wins out over genius.
Adapted into film by Albert Lewis, an ex film exec with a literary bent, he had artsy taste, but less aptitude for directing. Even with transformative cinematographer John Seitz on the project, there’s no swing to Lewis’s filmmaking. In 1942, it’s neat & polished compared to the realistic grunge & poverty on display in 2017. Yet the earlier film is quite good, in its way, with George Sanders’ Gauguin character fascinating & cruelly honest by his own reckoning. The last half reel was originally in TechniColor (and good luck finding it!), but the best section comes with a marital drama back in Paris between Sanders and the wife of second-rate painter Steven Geray. With class act Herbert Marshall doing his Maugham routine as our guide. Together, the two films make an oddly satisfying DOUBLE-BILL.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In an insane piece of casting, Florence Bates is something to see as a much married Tahitian sexpot, especially when doing a native dance.
READ ALL ABOUT IT: The Maugham book holds up beautifully.
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