Word: maugham
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...Greek who follows a philosophical system called "Selectivist," "really an anti-system [containing the best points of] democratic, monarchic, ecclesiastic, Communist and fascist [societies]." Before the fun is over, the story introduces such British supporting players as a callow youth who wants to be "worldlywise like Mr. Somerset Maugham," bounding Newspaperman Wyvell Speen, and a goonlike consular official called Waldo Grimbley, who is delighted when Elaine Brent lands in jail, because he thinks her imprisonment may be used as "a pretext for taking over the bloody country again...
...Seventh Sin (M-G-M). Somerset Maugham's exotically scented brand of soft soap has kept the mass readership in a happy lather for the last half-century. But yesterday's suds, as that shrewd old party could have told the makers of this movie, just won't wash. The Painted Veil (1924), dragged out of Hollywood's bottom drawer, has faded so badly it is hard to recall that on Greta Garbo it looked good...
...Maugham wrote his bestseller during the era of the not-quite-emancipated woman-a time when literary convention prescribed, as the natural consequence of adultery, a cholera epidemic. In The Seventh Sin the epidemic is caused by an American girl (Eleanor Parker) married to a British bacteriologist (Bill Travers) but carrying on with a French business man (Jean Pierre Aumont) in Hong Kong. When her husband finds out, he (of course) packs her off posthaste to the nearest outbreak of cholera. Her character immediately begins to improve. The local white trash (George Sanders) philosophically assures her that Schnapps...
...Merrie England. Although Lucky Jim took the Somerset Maugham Award, the grand "Old Party" of British letters loosed a choleric blast at the "whitecollar proletariat." Said old (83) Somerset Maugham: "They do not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they have got one. scamp it ... Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are scum...
...Devil is in Us All! Considering the best-selling success of a recent, sensationalistic attempt by a young American marm, it would probably enjoy acclaim. When she isn't baking do-nuts or rolls for the rest of the village, she reads such writers as Dylan Thomas, Saroyan or Maugham, and is willing to take on all comers concerning their relative merits...