Only Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989) has had more of his books filmed than English author William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). We don’t have the number for Simenon but for Maugham, to date and if television films are included, there have been more than 90 made from his novels, short stories and plays. Both writers are great favourites at The Budapest Times, and as well as reading them extensively we also look out for the films, so Robert Calder’s book is an invaluable, and cautionary, reference point for Maugham.
Of course, film-makers have always had a habit of setting their own scriptwriters to work “bettering” the source material for which they already paid a handsome sum. And the result often causes the original writers to throw up their hands at the travesty that their creation has become. And that’s very often the case here, as Calder details. He will advise.
Calder is a Canadian, Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, and he wrote a book of literary criticism, “W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom” in 1972, and a biography, “Willie, The Life of W. Somerset Maugham” in 1989. In this new book he tells how Maugham and Hollywood not surprisingly formed a long, productive partnership.
Maugham had a varied and prolific career from the 1890s to the 1950s, during which he achieved success both as a novelist, with 20 books, and a dramatist, with 32 plays. Few authors have achieved such success in both genres, Calder says, and Maugham completed an even rarer trifecta by writing around 120 short stories, some of which – notably “The Letter” and “Rain” – Calder describes as the most memorable in the English language.
In Calder’s assessment, Maugham’s writing appealed to the film industry because a recurrent theme and preoccupation was his concern for freedom, whether physical, emotional or intellectual. His territory was autonomy and enslavement, seeing humans as surrounded by narrowness and restrictions, trapped by poverty or the class system, restricted by a role such as colonial administrator or humble verger, and imprisoned by their emotions.
In the early 20th century, Calder writes, the moving picture was becoming the newest of art forms, embryonic compared to literature, drama, opera and the visual arts. Audiences were initially excited to see moving images but soon developed a taste for actual stories, and producers began scouring the world for plots and characters.
In 1915 Maugham’s fame as a novelist was still to come but he was a well-known dramatist whose plays were staged in London and New York, and he sold the rights to his play “The Explorer” to pioneering film producer Jesse Lasky. Of the 10 films made from Maugham stories in the silent era, only one – the novel “The Magician” – was not a play.
Straight away, the films shifted from Maugham’s original stories, downplaying sexual struggles and revising endings, for instance. “The Ordeal” in 1922, based on a 1917 Maugham play called “Love in a Cottage”, was extensively rewritten, making the play unrecognisable. Despite such revision and censorship, it’s an unfortunate cinematic fact that many silent films are lost, with most of the Maughams among them, never to be seen again.
Occasionally today one might still turn up in an attic in New Zealand or somewhere, but the chances reduce. Calder recreates the lost films from contemporary newspaper reviews and such. Usefully, he informs of complete changes of titles, so we now realise that “Charming Sinners”, released by Paramount in 1929, is actually the Maugham play “The Constant Wife” first performed in 1926, and “Strictly Unconditional”, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1930, is a version of another play, “The Circle”.
And who has even heard of “Dirty Gertie from Harlem”, from Sack Amusement Enterprises in 1946, let alone suspected that the plot is essentially an adaptation of “Miss Thompson”, which in turn is “Rain”. Maugham is not credited and it is claimed to have been an original tale written by the ironically named True T. Thompson. Sadie is disguised as Gertie La Rue.
When sound arrived, “Rain” offered particularly fertile material. This short story was originally published as “Miss Thompson” in April 1921 and is set on a Pacific island, where a missionary’s determination to reform a hardened, cynical prostitute leads to tragedy.
It was filmed as “Sadie Thompson” by Gloria Swanson Productions in 1930, with Swanson in the lead, then as “Rain” by United Artists in 1932 with Joan Crawford, and as “Miss Sadie Thompson” by Columbia Pictures in 1953 with Rita Hayworth.
At one stage, in 1940 when Mary Pickford owned the rights, she was approached by three studios. RKO wanted the story for Ginger Rogers, MGM saw it as a vehicle for Ann Sothern and Warner Bros. had Bette Davis in mind, but these projects all remained just that.
Calder’s account of Swanson’s determined efforts to make a film that was essentially too hot for the moral crusaders trying to rein in Hollywood “excesses” is a particularly intriguing look at the machinations in play. The Hays Office and its “code of decency” barred profanity, nudity, miscegenation, scenes of childbirth and ridicule of clergy. Single beds and no toilets.
Despite Swanson’s trickery to evade the censors and put Sadie on screen, her film is sanitised and ends not with a bang but a mawkish whimper, Calder recounts. It wasn’t alone.
Maugham’s semi-autobiographical fiction “Of Human Bondage” included what could well be his most compulsively page-turning section ever, as medical student Philip Carey repeatedly subjects himself to humiliation by the slutty waitress Mildred. Bette Davis played the tormentor in RKO’s 1934 film and Leslie Howard took the kicks. Unknown to us until now, Warner Bros. filmed it in 1946 with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker, and finally Seven Arts Productions did a version with Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey in 1964.
Davis was also the murderess Leslie Crosbie in the Warner Bros. film of “The Letter” in 1940, and Calder assesses that of all the Maugham adaptations it is the one that most enriches one of his stories with the artistic possibilities of the medium. As for the worst, this was surely “Isle of Fury” starring Humphrey Bogart in Warner Bros.’ 1946 version of Maugham’s novel “The Narrow Corner”, seemingly “the product of a team trying to win a quickie film contest”.
Jeanne Eagels played Crosbie in Paramount’s “The Letter” in 1929, and Warner Bros. adapted it again as “The Unfaithful” in 1947 with Ann Sheridan. Warners had also filmed “The Narrow Corner” in 1933. Other “multiples” were “The Painted Veil” in 1934, 1957 (as “The Seventh Sin”) and 2006, “The Beachcomber”in 1938 (as “Vessel of Wrath”) and 1954, “The Razor’s Edge” in 1946 and 1984, and “Theatre” as “Adorable Julia” in 1962 and “Being Julia” in 2004.
Calder details how Hollywood signed up eminent authors to write specifically for the studios because their names on posters guaranteed increased ticket sales, and while some of them adapted to the demands of creating film scripts, Maugham was not one. On a Hollywood sojourn in 1920 he got a $15,000 commission for a script but it was never used.
After that he declined further offers. “I’m amazed at the way in which producers buy my stories and then change the plots. If they like their own plots best, why bother to buy mine?”
Calder gives us the eviscerations and revisions designed to satisfy the censor and the perceived tastes of moviegoers, if not the expectations of their author.
