Word: murray
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Larry Darrell wants to find the Meaning of Life in some sort of mix of intensive reading and travel. The more Murray talks of reading and contemplation, though, the more it seems the film tries to yank our contact lenses of understanding out of out eyes, making the search for meaning little more than a vague blur. "Do you read all these books," asks a miner, pointing to a filled shelf. "I skim them," Time and again the books stay blurred; the brown blur could be a first edition Kant, the redder blur could be Bible, but they could just...
...find the answers in a book," a miner tells Darrell, as we must already have assumed. "You'll have to go there." There means India, the answers, once again, mean nothing. Filmed on location, the Indian seenes could just as effectively have superimposed Murray onto a set of postcards. If a Salada tea bag were a person, it just might be the mystic on top of the Indian mountain. "The path to salvation," the mystic intones in Dan Rather style Mid-westernese, "is narrow and as difficult to walk as razor's edge...
...that we have to go to India? His face still unchanged, but his body now wrapped in a robe, you can imagine Murray deadpanning. "I went to the East in search of meaning, and all I got was this robe." In return for watching Murray stare catatonically into space at various spots on the introspection circuit, we can feel only like we've intruded on some sort of home movie: lots of pretty pictures, clear evidence the trip indeed took place, our host conspicuously juxtaposed against exotic environments...
Even as a home movie, Razor's Edge lacks the Wears Traveller in the back telling us just what everything means. Despair not, Ever thoughtful Columbia pictures offers film critics a publicity pack complete with Murray and Director Byrum's musings that role well enough Characters, who seem only straight men a women for Murray take on complex even literary dimmensions. "Catherine's character (Isabel) is someone you fall in love with who returns that love but to the extent that it makes you feel miserable," Get it? Seeing the film won't help. Murray might as well have said...
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...