The Razor's Edge

1946. Dir: Edmund Goulding. Starring: Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter and Clifton Webb. ●●○○○



I had hoped to have seen Sugar, or even Everlasting Moments during the weekend, neither however have made it to the West Midlands so I was forced to randomly select a movie. Eventually picking this train wreck. The plot revolves around Tyrone Power, a Pilot from the First World War, who was saved by a friend. His shell shock at this event is such that he needs to leave the Mid-West with his fancy friends and socialite fiancee, electing to find himself in the artist quarters of Paris, the coal mines of Poland and the lower Himalayas.



When he returns his ex, who has since married falls in love with him again and then plans to control him and keep him for herself.

It's not that I dislike melodrama, some directors like Douglas Sirk or Leo McCarey could have made a decent three hanky picture from the source, however Goulding just isn't strong enough to bring the piece from the rather flat script and dull characterisation.

Power tries hard, in a somewhat thankless role of the man who finds himself and them becomes alomst annoyingly good. Gene Tierney (as the fiancee Isabel) simply resprises her Leave Her to Heaven role from the previous year, but she isn't given the room to develop the character. During at least two scenes other characters have to tell her (and us) her motivations. Surely that wasn't in W. Somerset Maugham's novel.

Clifton Webb is delightful, mind. His fussy unmarried uncle, clearly a homosexual even if it's not stated, is an incredible comic foil to the heaviness of the rest of the plot. It earned him his second (of three) Oscar nod.

Technically the film is merely perfunctory, even the set design (you have slums, mansions and mountain ranges) fails to impress. And the score typifies the excess of the period, and was probably a rush job from the usually reliable Alfred Newman.

The fault of the piece has to lie with writer Lamar Trotti, his previous experiences in Ford Westerns and quirky comedies meant he couldn't summon together the necessary emotional weight to fully adapt the more emotive scenes.

All in all I wish I had gone out to Leeds.