Word: maugham
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...Somerset Maugham wrote this long novel of a cripple in unworthy love in 1915. Since then the book has sold some 300,000 copies and firmly established itself as a modern masterpiece. For years Hollywood has eyed it as a mighty challenge to the cinema's capacity to transfer literature to the screen without losing its precious essence. But there were real difficulties: Would the public accept a clubfooted hero? What was to be done with a love story involving a young man's revulsion from his baser instincts? How could a hateful shrew of a girl...
Director John Cromwell's version of Maugham's novel starts when Philip Carey (Leslie Howard) learns in Pans that he is a mediocre painter, makes up his mind to study medicine in London. Near the end of the picture Carey under goes an operation which cures his clubfoot. Director Cromwell and Lester Cohen, who adapted the story, took the intelligent course of deviating as little as possible from Somerset Maugham's narrative. Therefore the most memorable and important part of Of Human Bondage remains Philip's attachment for Mildred Rogers (Bette Davis), the waitress who turns...
...hard to tell what Shaw meant by Village Wooing, as he did not vouchsafe an explanatory preface. You are free to surmise many things: that he sought to show up the smart-talk writers from Maugham through Lonsdale, Coward and Milne; to beat them at their game...
...stories composing this latest volume from the analytical pen of Somerset Maugham are laid largely in the Federated Malay States and the neigbouring lands. But, as one who knows Maugham's work might surmise, the exotic setting of the scenes has little to do with the essential qualities of what is being related; here, as before, the author concerns himself more with the inner than the outer shells of his characters: he churns about in the soul, and finds it much the same on the Malay Archipelago as in East Wapping. Maugham has made the feelings of his characters more...
...because of gross and public cowardice. It is a tribute to the skill of the author that all these themes, so bloody and thundery when related in skeleton, impress the reader of the book as the most natural and commonplace. This fact is perhaps the most convincing proof that Maugham has succeeded in portraying reactions and motives in a way to jibe with the experience...