The New York Times on the Films of W. Somerset Maugham

Another Encore for the Most Adaptable of Authors

By CHARLES McGRATH, New York Times, 10 December 2006

IF there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.

Maugham, who died in 1965 at 91, enjoyed an extremely long and productive career, which is a good start for a writer hoping to rack up his kind of stats; nor does it hurt that so many of his works were filmed more than once. Of Human Bondage was famously made into a movie three times: in 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, in the role that jump-started her career; in 1946, with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker; and in 1964, with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. So was "Rain", probably Maugham’s most famous short story: in 1928, with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore [titled Sadie Thompson]; in 1932 [Rain], with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston; and in 1953, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer [Miss Sadie Thompson. "Rain" was also filmed as Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. in 1946 with an all Afro-American cast led by Francine Everett and Don Wilson. How Mr. McGrath managed to not include the best-titled of all Maugham movies in his article is a mystery to me.]

The latest Maugham film, a new version of The Painted Veil starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, which opens Dec. 20, will make that less-known property a three-timer as well, pushing it ahead of The Razor’s Edge and The Letter, which were each filmed only twice.

The original Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis again, is probably the best of the Maugham movies. [There are actually three versions. The other two were released in 1929 and as The Unfaithful in 1947 .] On the other hand, the 1946 Razor’s Edge, with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, was pretty bad, despite an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Baxter as the alcoholic Sophie; the 1984 remake, starring Bill Murray in what amounts to a vanity production, was worse.

And the track record for The Painted Veil isn’t much better. The second version, renamed The Seventh Sin, came out in 1957 [with Eleanor Parker again] and sank like a stone. The 1934 original, a hard-to-find vehicle for Greta Garbo, is worth looking at for Garbo alone, but it’s a period piece and takes some very strange liberties with the book.

Both Mr. Norton and Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the new Painted Veil (and who is best known as the screenwriter of Philadelphia), say they have never seen it. Ms. Watts and John Curran, the director of the new film, each dug up copies, however, and took them along while shooting in China.

“I’d call Naomi and tease her, ‘Are you watching it?’ ” Mr. Curran recalled recently. “And she’d say, ‘No, I watched for 10 minutes, and that’s all I could stand.’ ” He added: “It’s almost unwatchable — a dull melodrama, all shot in the studio. I remember thinking, ‘Well, whatever happens, at least I’ll make a better movie than that.’ ”

Lytton Strachey once said that The Painted Veil, which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham’s work. He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist.

Maugham was a knowing and worldly storyteller, interested above all in characters and in the texture of their social relations, but he was also fascinated by people who were ready to renounce the world in quest of something better. The formula made him a great popular success, earning him a fortune, but he also managed his career so adroitly that he became a kind of brand name for classiness and elegance. His persona so appealed to Hollywood that for a series of anthology films in the late 1940s and early 1950s he appeared as himself, sleek and lizardlike, smoking a cigarette and introducing his own work.

The Painted Veil is the story of Walter and Kitty Fane: a priggish British bacteriologist and the frivolous social climber who marries him in a moment of desperation, convinced that she’s let all the better catches slip through her grasp. The couple move to Hong Kong, where Walter has been posted, and Kitty, bored and sexually frustrated, quickly embarks on an affair with a sweet-talker from the British consulate (Mr. Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he forces her into a kind of mutual suicide pact: she has to accompany him to a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic is raging, and there, though this is hardly what her husband intended, she discovers a larger purpose to her life.

The Painted Veil is shorter and more constricted than the novels for which Maugham is better known, Of Human Bondage especially, but it contains most of the ingredients that have made him such an attractive source for moviemakers. It’s smart and different, and like so much of Maugham it’s set in an exotic locale. (He is more famous now for writing about the South Seas, but he was one of the first modern British writers to visit China.) It’s sexy, opening with a scene of Kitty and her lover in bed together and giving them another near the end, when Kitty, at least partly redeemed and no longer in love with him, nevertheless yields to lust and loneliness. And the novel introduces a cast of strong and striking characters, very clearly delineated: not just Walter and Kitty but a number of supporting figures, including the caddish lover; Kitty’s appalling, ambitious mother; and Waddington (played in the new film by Toby Jones), a kindly Brit who has gone part native and has a secret Chinese mistress.

Maugham’s characters are so vivid, so starkly drawn, that they sometimes seem one-dimensional — not that this has troubled most moviemakers. This is the case in “Rain,” for example, with Sadie Thompson, the blowzy, big-hearted prostitute, and Alfred Davidson, the uptight missionary; in both the story and its several movie versions theirs is a clash of the single-minded. And it’s equally true of Walter Fane. Perhaps because Maugham modeled him on his older brother, Frederic, a cold, fussy and self-righteous lawyer who couldn’t accept Maugham’s homosexuality, Walter, in the novel at least, is so rigid and unforgiving as to seem almost inhuman.

The book stumbles in other ways as well, failing to develop, for example, the symbolic potential of the epidemic, which it barely describes, just as, for that matter, it mostly fails to describe China itself. The story takes place largely inside the heads of Walter and Kitty.

All these limitations the new Painted Veil turns into opportunities, so that it’s one of those rare Hollywood movies that are actually better than the books that inspired them. “I like to think that we didn’t change the book so much as liberate it,” Mr. Norton said in a recent interview. “We just imagined it on a slightly bigger scale, and made external some of what is internal in the novel.”

Maugham is not quite the hot property that he used to be, however, and making the movie took forever. Mr. Norton, who is also a producer of The Painted Veil, got involved with the project back in 1999. The script had already been bouncing around for a few years, shepherded by the producer Sara Colleton, and was going through almost countless drafts. There were strictly faithful versions, versions that took more liberties with the novel, and at one point even a feminist version.

It was Mr. Norton’s idea to enhance the role of Walter and include an element of redemption and forgiveness: in the movie, unlike the book, he eventually makes his peace with Kitty, and the two even fall in love. He almost literally melts before the viewer’s eye. It’s a development so natural, so in keeping with the book’s larger theme of transcendence, that you wonder why Maugham didn’t think of it.

“The novel is almost unremittingly bleak,” Mr. Norton said. “And the reason is I think Maugham had a pretty dim view of the potential of British colonials to change. But I went on the assumption that if you were willing to allow Walter and Kitty to grow, then you had the potential for a love story that was both tragic and meaningful.”

Mr. Nyswaner, the screenwriter, said: “Edward had this running joke with me that we couldn’t make a movie in which he was off screen all the time. But he was right — you have to have scenes for the male star. This was a case where the conventions of moviemaking actually helped.”

It was also Mr. Norton’s idea to enlist Ms. Watts for the part of Kitty, and that proved to be the deal clincher, but only after Ms. Watts became a bankable star with Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams. She in turn suggested Mr. Curran, who had directed her in We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), a tale of two disintegrating marriages. That movie convinced both Mr. Norton and Ms. Watts that he had a knack for depicting dysfunctional relationships, but as it turned out, he made an even greater contribution to The Painted Veil: he helped make China not just a backdrop to the story, as it is in the novel, but an essential part of it.

That the movie would be shot on location in China was a given almost from the beginning. “There is no way I was going to make a movie that looked as if it had been shot in Canada,” Mr. Curran said. And instead of just building a set for the cholera-stricken village, he held out for an actual piece of unspoiled Chinese landscape, not an easy thing to find these days.

“Even the Chinese crew members were amazed at the place we found, Huang Yao,” he said. “It was like going back in time.”

It was also Mr. Curran’s idea to set the film specifically amid the events of 1925, when the Chinese nationalist movement was just beginning, and Mr. Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale, immediately agreed. He even worked with Mr. Curran and Mr. Nyswaner to add some scenes based on Jonathan D. Spence’s book “To Change China,” about the often bumbling efforts of Western advisers there.

“We’ve let Walter become the proxy for the arrogance of Western rationalism,” Mr. Norton explained, talking about how Walter is baffled when the Chinese are insufficiently grateful for his help in fighting cholera. “Walter means well, but he’s the folly of empire, and that adds a whole new dimension to what happens in the story. It’s a metaphor for the way empires get crushed.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “Edward became passionate about the film. I tend toward despair, but he has this dogged optimism, and it’s because of him that the film ever got made.”

A movie about a love affair and a cholera epidemic in China in the ’20s is “such an unlikely project when you think of it,” Mr. Curran said. “Imagine the hurdles of getting it set up — all those executives looking with glazed eyes.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “At least 50 percent of our energy went into negotiations and fending off powerful people’s suggestions. We even got notes from the Chinese government. In the script there was a prose description of some mountains as gloomy, and the government said, ‘We don’t have gloomy mountains here — our mountains are joyous.’ ”

Random Trivia: Bette Davis gave one of her best performances in Of Human Bondage, and was favored to win 1934's Academy Award - which went to Claudette Colbert, who gave a very different superb performance in It Happened One Night. In her autobiography, The Lonely Life, Davis maintains that her Oscar the following year for Dangerous was an apology from the Academy for their previous indiscretion.