The Moon and Sixpence **** (1943, George Sanders, Herbert Marshall, Steve Geray, Doris Dudley, Eric Blore) – Classic Movie Review 4682

Writer-director Albert Lewin’s 1943 romantic drama is a compelling and thoughtful literary adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s classic novel about a money broker who puts art before family. The story is loosely inspired by the life of artist Paul Gauguin.

Lewin’s movie stars the supremely supercilious George Sanders, who takes the halfpenny and the sixpence in an outstanding star turn as a tortured cad Paul Gaugin-style artist, called Charles Strickland. This middle-aged stockbroker abandons his middle-class life, his family and his work to start painting. Alas he is now an impossible, dreadful person, devoted only to pursuing his art and beauty.

Herbert Marshall is also perfectly cast as Geoffrey Wolfe, a portrait of the story’s writer Maugham, and he carries off the role beautifully.

It is the splendidly wayward director Lewin’s first film, before making the equally exotic and admirable The Picture of Dorian Gray (also with Sanders), The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (also with Sanders) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

It is shot by cinematographer John F Seitz in classy black and white (sepia tone for reels 1-5, gold tint for reels 6-10), but Paul Gaugin’s art appears in Technicolor sequences in the last reel.

Also in the cast are Steve [Steven] Geray, Doris Dudley, Eric Blore, Molly Lamont, Elena Verdugo, Florence Bates, Heather Thatcher and Albert Bassermann.

Sanders, Marshall and Bassermann all appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.

Sanders cornered the market in playing cads and won an Oscar for playing one, the waspish theatre critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 4682

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