Customer Reviews

Quartet - 4 Stories by W. Somerset Maugham ( The Facts of Life / The Kite / The Colonel's Lady / The Alien Corn ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
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the first reviewer's comments are quite odd, or maybe eccentric. These stories are beautifully written, acted, and directed. They show pathos, humor, irony. They used to be shown on TV a lot because they provide excellent entertainment from Britain's golden age of film. The script and direction are excellent. All the actors are superb. The stories are from a different time and culture is some ways and show a style of 1950's British film making--they are sophisticated, adult, not driven by teenage standards of culture, as well as touching and thought provoking. The script and the emotions of the characters are the main thing. Also see Trio, and Encore, the 2 other films like this of other Maugham stories.

Maugham. Adapted to film with lots of familiar British actors in thier prime. Some say this was the golden age of British films, the late 40's & 50's. Not a lot of pretense here, just four good, solid stories.
Facts of Life. A father allows his son to go to the continent alone for the first time. He has three bits of fatherly advice. Don't gamble. Do not loan money to anyone. Finally, do not get involved with any girls. As you can guess, all three will happen to this young man abroad for his first time alone. The results are as funny as they are unpredictible.
Alien Corn. A young man raised to a life of wealth & privledge spurns it all on the occasion of his 21st birthday. His father has expected him to step into the role lord of the manor so to speak. He wishes to take up the role of a poor, struggling musician with the hope of somday becoming a concert pianist. His father vehmently opposes this. He does relent, however with one stipulation. The decision results in tradgedy.
The Kite. A ludicrious little story that exhibits that strange, dry British sense of humor. A young middle class boy becomes enamored of kite flying. So much so it becomes his obsession as a adult. It is also an important tie to his mother's control issues as she cannot let go of her only son. He falls in loves & marries a girl who does not share his interest & in fact hates it & every moment it takes from their time together. It resolves in the end as a sit-com might.
The Colonel's Lady. The Colonel is a pompous self important businessman who pays scant attention to his very proper British wife. She writes a scandalous poem of forbidden loves that is published & becomes wildly popular. At first he ignores it then becomes very paranoid. Who is the middle aged women in the poem? who is her young lover? He needs to reevaluate his own life. The conclusion is somewhat predictible.
The short story is a neglected literary form & W. Somerset Maugham is a contemporary writer who has written quite a few & quite a few for tv & film. Most people will not ever read these. This movie in four chapters is not well known but easily accessible & recommended.

It's interesting that though only the second story ("The Alien Corn") deals with life and death, the stories grow increasingly complex, from the first ("The Facts of Life") to the last ( "The Colonel's Lady.") Which is, of course, as it should be. All the acting is excellent--the open and expressive George Cole in "The Kite," and the couple in "The Colonel's Lady" (Cecil Parker and Nora Swinbbourn--sp?) perhaps carrying the acting honors. But you will see many familiar faces among the character actors, all of whom do themselves proud.

I do not share the cynicism of the cynical reviewer--either about the character of Maugham himself (who I thought accounted for his stories and himself very well--and did NOT look "propped up"--he didn't die till 1965, at the age of ninety-something), nor do I agree that the couple in "The Facts of Life" had had sex before larceny--you know, one COULD portray an accomplished non-marital sex act between adults in 1948--as long as it did not result in a happy ending involving the couple's relationship*--nor did I find the conclusion of "The Colonel's Lady" to be a cop-out (although I have to confess I tentatively guessed it, but this may be the result of my having seen the film as soon as it reached America, in 1948 or 49, at the age of 13 or 14). I found the ending of this final story to be quite moving, but...perhaps I'm too sentimental.

I am very curious about who did the piano playing for Francoise Rosay ( a well-known French actress, and a singer)in "The Alien Corn." The woman seemed to be playing herself, and George (Bogarde) did a pretty good play-sync. It is very important to the plot that one recognize a qualitative difference between "George's" playing and "Lea's"--but (have I a tin ear?) I didn't. Her playing was of a more difficult piece, and she showed (thus) more technical proficiency (in fact, "Brilliance,"--a word she used to describe George's playing), but otherwise, I would not be surprised to hear both (actual) performances on the same concert stage. Since this is of major importance in the story--I wondered. Eileen Joyce is credited with the George piece--perhaps she played both.

I would also like the "pope's hat" (Maugham's signature figure) solved.

and...the origins of Bogarde's black onyx or sapphire signet ring, which I see he was already wearing in '48, and continued to wear, in most of his films, as well as elsewhere, for the rest of his life.

I am a short-story and novella person, and, while none of these would rank as absolute favorites...they are very, very good.


* in fact, in "The Small Back Room," (1949), Sammy and Susan are clearly living together, unmarried, and are happier at the end of the film than the beginning.

Quartet has few pleasures beyond the eternally strange and weirdly made-up face of W. Somerset Maugham, Really he made a better mummy than the Mummy, and the on location shots of Maugham "relaxing"--or propped up against the wall, against the lovely seascapes of his home near Cap D'Antibes in the south of France, only accentuates the pathos. He's great, I only wish he had used the occasion to explain his bewildering logo--that little line drawing that looks something like the pope's hat. Is it a Satanic symbol as many have suggested? Or maybe it stands in for the buzzing beehive his mind must have been, to think of so many plots.

Here we have "The Facts of Life,' rather daring isn't it, with the suggestion that our young hero lets himself be picked up (in the South of France) by a party girl who is secretly a thief hoping to scalp him of his casino swag. He comes out ahead of the game in a certain sense, but the filmmakers certainly do everything but scream that the attractive young people have done "it" as a warm-up to subsequent larcenous behavior, In its close association between sexuality and stealing money, it anticipates several jey features of Hitchcock's Marnie, wonder if Hitchcock saw this one (he had already filmed one of Maugham's novels, hadn't he). Then there's Dirk Bogarde in a bizarre story about the boy whose parents hated him playing the piano, so they made a strange bargain and let him go to Paris and study music, then if an expert declares he's not good enough to make it his career, he will quit it entirely and return to the family ways. This is "The Alien Corn." I kept thinking it could have used some actually Ridley Scott "Alien" touches, though they did everything but scream out that the visiting music expert was a monster from the far reaches of space.

"The Colonel's Lady" is, of all things, a story about poetry and how one book of poetry becomes an enormous sensation due to its scandalous Lady-Chatterley storyline, embarrassing the husband of the woman who wrote it. Moving uneasily between drab domestic drama and impish comedy, the story keeps you interested, winding up unfortunately in one of those twist endings that leave a sour taste in one's mouth. I have saved the best for last, well, not the best, the most English. In fact, I expect one would have to be English to understand what happens in "The Kite," which involves the struggles of a suburban housewife to keep her grown son at home and out of the arms of his wife, using kite technology as her bait.