I am not sure I can emotionally recommend the double-header experience of reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (1925) in the same day as watching The Letter (1940), but sometimes these things happen to a person. Now, because all the public domain copies look like they were used as coffee filters, I'm stuck waiting for the 1929 version of The Letter to come around on TCM just so I can see what Herbert Marshall looks like when he's playing the murdered lover rather than the wounded husband and Jeanne Eagels in her only surviving sound role. I am debating whether I want to write about the later film for the sake of one line reading. I read the much more open-ended short story for the first time last year in The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (2019).
Coming to the novel of The Painted Veil after two out of three film versions—the 1934 with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall, who for extra credit also features in The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor's Edge (1946), and the 2006 with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, additionally ornamented with Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones—it interests me that while both movies ameliorate the bleakness by which the protagonist learns to grow up, one within the established lines of the plot, the other swerving wildly into fix-it territory, neither incorporates in any form the striking declaration she makes at the end of the book, speaking of her unborn child:
"I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I'm not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life . . . I'm determined to save my daughter from all that. I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have."
For this reason it now feels a bit like missing the point that the version which flashes forward enough to show the protagonist with her child, shows her with a son.
Because I always remember that I haven't yet seen the pre-Code Of Human Bondage (1934), somehow I keep forgetting just how much Maugham I have encountered in one form or another—I can't count the number of anthologies in which his short stories turn up. I still feel I may have gotten a somewhat misleading idea of his fiction by starting with Up at the Villa (1941), which takes his recurring concerns of loveless misalliances and passionate mistakes and runs them in the key of romantic suspense rather than spiritual tragedy. I keep meaning to rewatch the 2000 film version; it was one of the first movies I went to see not as a social or familial activity but just because I wanted to see it. It builds out the novella with at least one superfluous subplot, but it was my introduction to Anne Bancroft and there is Derek Jacobi in eyeliner.
Coming to the novel of The Painted Veil after two out of three film versions—the 1934 with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall, who for extra credit also features in The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor's Edge (1946), and the 2006 with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, additionally ornamented with Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones—it interests me that while both movies ameliorate the bleakness by which the protagonist learns to grow up, one within the established lines of the plot, the other swerving wildly into fix-it territory, neither incorporates in any form the striking declaration she makes at the end of the book, speaking of her unborn child:
"I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I'm not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life . . . I'm determined to save my daughter from all that. I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have."
For this reason it now feels a bit like missing the point that the version which flashes forward enough to show the protagonist with her child, shows her with a son.
Because I always remember that I haven't yet seen the pre-Code Of Human Bondage (1934), somehow I keep forgetting just how much Maugham I have encountered in one form or another—I can't count the number of anthologies in which his short stories turn up. I still feel I may have gotten a somewhat misleading idea of his fiction by starting with Up at the Villa (1941), which takes his recurring concerns of loveless misalliances and passionate mistakes and runs them in the key of romantic suspense rather than spiritual tragedy. I keep meaning to rewatch the 2000 film version; it was one of the first movies I went to see not as a social or familial activity but just because I wanted to see it. It builds out the novella with at least one superfluous subplot, but it was my introduction to Anne Bancroft and there is Derek Jacobi in eyeliner.
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