Word: maugham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...subtitle, America's Magic Mountain, refers to Thomas Mann's novel of a sanatorium as microcosm. Fair enough; this lively history reflects a galaxy of medical and literary incidents. The cast is worth the entrance fee: W. Somerset Maugham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walker Percy and Bela Bartok, and even Gerald and Sara Murphy, the '20s couple who decided that living well was the best revenge. They all had one thing in common: tuberculosis, and the refuge in upstate New York offered the promise of recovery. Sometimes it was illusory. Bartok flourished at Saranac but later succumbed to the disease...
...himself after the death of the detective's creator. Still, most of those who find themselves appearing under other names have a tendency to seethe. The reason for their umbrage frequently has less to do with egos than with wallets. The model for the romantic doctor in W. Somerset Maugham's story The Happy Man was typical. The author had profited handsomely from his tale, complained the original, but where was the fee for the man who had lived it? A Swazi warrior named M'hlopekazi was more succinct. He was the inspiration for Umslopogaas, the intrepid tribesman of King...
...need of streamlining, but it offers him a contemporary setting for his favorite theme: the pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with sophistication and hummable tunes. The Shubert Organization's Bernard Jacobs...
...author calls "an overdeveloped inner life." Bernadette is a stinging portrait of stupidity (a pimp recruits her with veiled threats, and she mistakes him for a social worker). Blore is an overbearing ass who makes a big production about serving a modest Spanish wine and talks of W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence as if he has discovered the latest bestseller...
Smothered by Murray's miserable performance. Murray's co-stars, evidently unaware of their tangential relationship to the film, deliver strong performances. Denholm Elliot plays Uncle Elliot, the quintessential Maugham man of society with impeccable charm and studied superficiality. "I spent my life with the great names of Europe," he says with the perfect match of weariness and savoir-faire, "and who comes to visit me." Less successfully, Catherine Hicks portrays Isabel with the pain and confusion one associates with "the drugs and all of that" that are the sum of our knowledge of Isabel...