New Picture

The Moon and Sixpence (United Artists) films Somerset Maugham's famed novel more faithfully than any book has ever been filmed before. The result, despite the efforts of a superb cast, is more like a still life than a moving picture.

Author Maugham based his unfriendly fable about genius in the raw on the life of unfriendly Painter Paul Gauguin. Like Gauguin, Genius Charles Strickland (George Sanders) reaches his prime as an overdomesticated stockbroker. Like Gauguin, he abruptly quits all that for Paris, semistarvation and oil painting. He takes over the studio and the wife (Doris Dudley) of a piteous fellow painter (Steve Geray). Later he leaves the wife to suicide, and heads for Tahiti where he marries a sleek young native with a Mona Grable smile (Elena Verdugo), slaps out masterpieces by the gross, dies (lingeringly) of leprosy.

Maugham told this high-colored tale in a series of flashbacks narrated by an author (in the picture, Herbert Marshall), a doctor (Albert Bassermann) and others who knew the great man. The device worked out well enough in print. On the screen it is all but disastrous--especially since Adaptor-Director Albert Lewin has Maugham's book read, obbligato, almost word for word. The reading is excellent, but it freezes the action into little more than a set of magic-lantern slides.

Herbert Marshall's Bond Street voice and general air of bemused gentility make a perfect foil for George Sanders' playing of the brutal genius. One of the few cinemactors with any real presence, Sanders has for years been using it to put starch into supporting parts and B pictures. The Moon & Sixpence gives him his first big chance. It also puts his fine performance in a vacuum.

George Sanders divides cinemactors into three classes: "business, ham or glamor." His typical ham is "my friend Larry Olivier. He is sincere and has a conviction that what he is doing has great importance." Typical glamor actress is Norma Shearer ("glamor attracts the star who no longer needs the money but doesn't want to retire just yet"). Typical businessman: George Sanders, who drifted into films for the fat pay checks, may just as coolly drift out of them again.

Sanders was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father (an Englishman) ran a rope factory. He went to England as a child, became an athletic star in three schools, wound up at the Manchester School of Technology, "where for some extraordinary reason I thought I wanted to learn about textiles."

Later, hard at work in a textile mill, he had another extraordinary idea: if, as an employe, he bought cloth at less than cost, and sold it for more than cost, he would soon be in the money. He was soon in the street, his ears ringing with the millowner's "long talk on England, cricket and all that sort of thing." Next he tried "the tobacco road" to wealth. His firm shipped him to South America "to discover why the natives were not smoking our cigarets." When he turned up at his boss's engagement party floating in alcohol, he was pushed across the Andes.

Then an operatic uncle suggested that Sanders try nightclubs and the stage. Six months' hard training developed his excellent baritone (which Hollywood has never used) and a job in the musicomedy Ballyhoo, which "flopped in rather a hurry." Later he sang One Alone for "every chorus audition in town." ("In the chorus I knew that if you look fairly eager you always get a chance to understudy, and as understudy I tried with varying success to get the principals drunk. In short, I progressed.")

He progressed into an H. G. Wells picture The Man Who Could Work Miracles as a nude god riding across the Milky Way. The shooting was done outdoors, at night, in midwinter. So he went to warmer Hollywood, where he made his debut menacing Tyrone Power and the British Empire in Lloyds of London. Lancer Spy was supposed to make a "supernova" of Sanders. "A super-nova," 20th Century-Fox explained, "is what astronomers call a big star which appears suddenly and shines with great brilliance." Instead, Sanders became one of the best scene stealers in the business and one of Hollywood's more sinister personifications of Evil (Man Hunt, The Son of Monte Cristo). As Evil, Sanders' greatest asset has been a suggestion of cold intelligence and a nasty sneer. Hounding Evil, as The Saint and as The Falcon, has been duller work.

For coldly refusing roles which bore him, Sanders has been suspended three times. He does not mind. Suspension leaves him free -- to accept more exciting roles from other studios ; to tinker with an obstinately earthbound airplane which he has been inventing for two years ; to sleep, which Sanders regards as the pleasantest thing a man can do.

Only once has he ever regretted refusing a part: "I had just got home from the last all-night session in shooting a picture to find a note curtly ordering me to report for work a day or so later -- dressed as a gorilla. My refusal grieved my stand-in no end. It seems that for two years he'd been painfully sewing together just such a costume."

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