Word: somersets
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Slave Trade in the World Today is an Italian-made documentary that pursues its righteous ends with unseemly gusto. It begins in almost Biblical solemnity, citing the U.N. declaration that "slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms." Next, Novelist Robin Maugham, nephew of Somerset, reports that he himself bought a slave in the Sahara for $105 and set him free. And who is to blame for the traffic in human beings in Africa and the Middle East? Who else but the U.S., which, Maugham says, cares only for her "vast oil interests. Britain does nothing...
...days-of-empire tales of Southeast Asia by Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad pulse and perspire with descriptions of the region's searing heat and sapping humidity. Southeast Asia's weather hasn't changed-Bangkok's November temperature still averages 80°, and in Singapore the humidity stays at 84%-but it is being dealt with in a way that might have forced Maugham and Conrad to rewrite some torrid passages. Air conditioning has come to Southeast Asia in force, cooling public places and some homes, changing ways of life, and coining money for the entrepreneurs...
...Human Bondage. When a Hollywood actress begins to hunger for juicier roles, she often ends up playing a tart. Sadie Thompson or maybe Nana. Or sometimes Mildred, the strumpet waitress who dishes out the spice and spite in Somerset Maugham's classic autobiographical novel of the torments of young manhood. Bette Davis flashed on-screen as the first movie Mildred, in 1934. Eleanor Parker entered a low bid in 1946. Now, all Mildred's beads, feather boas, and skin-tight finery bedizen the substantial person of Kim Novak. Though the film will give ordinary moviegoers little pleasure...
...native Cornwall in a red glider, then came down to record his sensations in whirling masses of rust reds, lichen greens and salt whites that vigorously joined the rugged earth below and the dazzling sky above; of injuries sustained when his glider nosedived into a macadam airstrip in Somerset, England...
Graham Sutherland began his career as an engineer, and underneath his soft brushwork there still are ruled lines that lend a cubistic solidity to his work. He has designed posters, ceramics, a tapestry for the new Coventry cathedral. His portraits of Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, Lord Beaverbrook are masterful interpretations of character. But when Sutherland works impulsively, he always returns to surreal scenes of natural forms, 25 of which went on view last week in Manhattan's Paul Rosenberg & Co. galleries...