The Stop Button

An appreciation of amusements.

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Entries Tagged as 'W. Somerset Maugham'

The Seventh Sin (1957, Ronald Neame)

October 16th, 2007 No Comments

If only it weren’t for Bill Travers… his performance drags the film into the realm of absurdity. It isn’t just his inability to act, it’s also his utter lack of charisma. It’s unbelievable anyone could like Travers the movie star (I’m thinking there must be or have been Victor Mature fans and George Raft fans, […]

The Razor’s Edge (1946, Edmund Goulding)

March 21st, 2006 No Comments

While home video did wonders for increasing film appreciation, I have to wonder if MGM’s embracing of the format for their old catalogue didn’t greatly hinder young people in the 1980s from learning about film. As a child, I had seen MGM, I had seen RKO, I had seen Warner Bros. But I never saw […]

Of Human Bondage (1946, Edmund Goulding)

January 9th, 2006 No Comments

Slow-moving (which probably goes hand-in-hand with the source material, a novel that took me two months to read, just for lack of interest), but still rather good. Goulding is an interesting director, he really holds his shots, and he creates the material out of the basic frameworks of the novel. Paul Henreid’s Philip Carey becomes […]