Anthologized: The World of W. Somerset Maugham On-Screen

The rest of Quartet abounds with standout performances. “The Alien Corn,” directed by self-professed “actor’s director” Harold French, features Dirk Bogarde doing some of the best work of his early career as a sensitive young man named George, a child of privilege hellbent on becoming a concert pianist. At the urging of his wily sweetheart (future Bond girl Honor Blackman), George strikes a bargain with his parents: he will go abroad and spend two years in training for his art, after which he will relinquish his dream if a pianist of note tells him he has no future as a professional. “The Colonel’s Lady” revolves around another aspiring artist—the wife (Nora Swinburne) of a Blimp-ish British colonel (Cecil Parker), who causes a stir when she publishes a collection of fiercely sensual poetry. The book becomes so popular that the colonel finds himself at his own club being told that his wife writes like Sappho. Annakin, the most visually dynamic of the Quartet directors, later said “The Colonel’s Lady” was “one of the best pictures I’ve ever directed,” and that he was especially pleased with the performances of Swinburne and Parker. The ending is more sentimental here than in Maugham’s original, again in line with the demands of the censors. But like the other segments, “The Colonel’s Lady” retains enough of the author’s characteristic sting and humor.

When Quartet was in production, Maugham was spending most of his time in the south of France. Darnborough persuaded the writer, well into his seventies and uneasy about his lifelong stammer, to travel to Pinewood Studios and film a prologue for the movie. The eager producer even duplicated Maugham’s French study, down to the worn patches on his favorite chair. Perhaps in response to this hospitality, Maugham seems visibly happy in the film. The sole trace of his stammer is a deep intake of breath here and there. One self-deprecating moment in his introduction became famous: “In my twenties, the critics said I was brutal. In my thirties, they said I was flippant; in my forties, they said I was cynical; in my fifties they said I was competent. And then, in my sixties, they said I was superficial.” In fact, while Maugham seldom complained in public, the dismissiveness of critics had stung, and the warm reception for Quartet pleased him a great deal. The British style of filmmaking brought out the essence of Maugham’s restless characters. With sympathy and wit, Quartet portrayed the problems that befall these people, and the problems they bring down on themselves.

Quartet’s rousing critical and commercial success made a sequel not just logical but inevitable. Trio was released two years later, with brief prologues that Maugham again shot at Pinewood, this time with him puffing heartily on a cigarette and walking around the duplicate office. Maugham introduces each story in just a sentence or two. Despite his overall pleasure in the success of Quartet, Maugham had politely disapproved of a couple of the new endings, notably the one for “The Colonel’s Lady.” As a form of redress, he shared in adapting the stories in Trio, along with Sherriff and Noel Langley. While promoting the film, Maugham told an American reporter, “There isn’t a single line of dialogue written by anyone but myself.” Any changes to the material were cleared by the author.

The best of Trio’s segments, “Sanatorium,” is its last and longest. The story could have supported a ninety-minute film, but at this length, poignant moments are never stretched out into mawkishness. The setting is a tuberculosis sanatorium in Scotland, presumably based on the one where Maugham himself spent months fighting off the disease in 1918. New patient Ashenden (Roland Culver) stands in for the author (as Maugham says in the prologue), and through him we meet patients who are there either to recover, to live out an existence too frail for anywhere else, or to die. The population of this little world is shown in pairs, including two elderly Scots who carry out a guerilla war of minor irritations against each other and a self-pitying patient who hates his wife for her good health. Ravishing Jean Simmons, barely in her twenties, plays Evie, who has spent most of her life in sanatoriums. She falls in love with George (Michael Rennie), a new arrival and barely reformed rake.

Director Harold French said he “particularly liked” making “Sanatorium,” but “I didn’t think I did it as well as I should have done. I should have been more honest about the disease than I was; I was concentrating on the romance too much. I should have made them more ill.” Viewing the film now, however, doesn’t support this assessment. Despite the beauty of the place—this nursing home could give Manderley a run for its money—there is always a sense of hovering death. One of the most haunting moments comes when Finlay Currie, as one of the squabbling Scots, tells Ashendean that he’s been there so long he can tell how long a patient has left as well as a doctor. And George, the man adds calmly, has at most two years.

Ready to test their luck with one more group of stories, the crew went to Maugham for Encore. The author’s prologues were shot at his house on Cap-Ferrat, the Villa La Mauresque. Maugham’s prologues still avoid details of plot, but here he offers broad hints as to interpretation and his own view of the characters. “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is perhaps the only story in the series of films that doesn’t work in any sense. The tale of two brothers, a worker and a sponger, features Nigel Patrick at his least engaging. If you’re watching in order, you may start to wonder if the series had already peaked.

Fortunately, the last two shorts are much better. “Winter Cruise,” Maugham tells us, was suggested by a woman he met on a voyage to the South Seas. Miss Reid (a superb Kay Walsh) is a good-natured spinster who likes to spend her winters sailing to and from the Caribbean on a regular working ship, as it’s cheaper and more practical than a cruise. Owing to a snafu, she is the only passenger on the ship's return trip. The officers are panic-stricken at the idea of having their peaceful male world invaded by her female chatter, and plot to escape her. Maugham was frequently accused of misogyny, but in this case, the charge doesn’t stick; Miss Reid knows herself better than anyone else suspects. The slightly noirish “Gigolo and Gigolette” plays out as a near-melodrama, its view of the importance of love to a woman set against a biting look at rich, jaded thrill-seekers. Circus performers Syd and Stella Cotman (Terence Morgan and Glynis Johns) have just one act: Stella’s dive from an eighty-five-foot tower into a five-foot-deep tank of burning water, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds. When Stella loses her nerve, she begins to think her earnings are more important to her husband than she herself is.

Although Maugham’s stories would later become staples of television anthologies, Trio marked the end for this postwar big-screen trilogy, intended to show off the strengths of British filmmaking. And in many ways these movies did, highlighting the excellence of British acting and the intelligence of its adaptations. Quartet, Trio, and Encore remain well-loved by many to this day, though their multiple directors and emphatic literariness make them unlikely to gain much favor with the rock-ribbed auteurists of the world. Still, they have played an invaluable role in cementing the legacy of a writer who was at once a widely read and esteemed literary figure and a victim of the vagaries of critical reception. Just as notably, these films are shining examples of how, as Gore Vidal put it, “Maugham dominated movies when movies were the lingua franca of the world.”