From the opening scene down on the old rubber plantation to the final triumph of the inscrutable orient, this film keeps us in our seat. Wyler,the screenwriters, and Leslie Crosbie manage to wreck three lives in an amazing 98 minutes. Hammond was dead a few frames into the film, but lawyer Stephenson will never be able to practice his trade with the same suave surety again, and husband Marshall is unlikely to ever recover from the kick in the gut as Leslie/Bette Davis tells him she still loves the man she killed.
Maugham's tight little melodrama comes off better in the hands of master Wyler than Forster's Passage to India, another tale of colonial life brought to the screen by David Lean. Made in 1940, and written long before that, Maugham's and the film's characters did not have to include an Edward Fox giving an apologia for his fellow white men, and so we are able to concentrate on the pure melodrama of the story of a woman who shot her lover.
Stephenson is wonderful; as we watch we wonder what price he will ask Davis to pay for his breaking of the rules. He never speaks to her without a pause, as if to say 'what I am telling you is not all that is on my mind' and there is a certainty that he does not know what she will do with this information in the future.
Davis was probably the only actress of that time to be able to carry off her role, but the comment of another reviewer that she is not colonial enough is very well taken. We are used to seeing weak men playing opposite her, but Marshall provides more dignity than that as the noble cuckold.
My only fear is that someone will try to remake it today.
Maugham's tight little melodrama comes off better in the hands of master Wyler than Forster's Passage to India, another tale of colonial life brought to the screen by David Lean. Made in 1940, and written long before that, Maugham's and the film's characters did not have to include an Edward Fox giving an apologia for his fellow white men, and so we are able to concentrate on the pure melodrama of the story of a woman who shot her lover.
Stephenson is wonderful; as we watch we wonder what price he will ask Davis to pay for his breaking of the rules. He never speaks to her without a pause, as if to say 'what I am telling you is not all that is on my mind' and there is a certainty that he does not know what she will do with this information in the future.
Davis was probably the only actress of that time to be able to carry off her role, but the comment of another reviewer that she is not colonial enough is very well taken. We are used to seeing weak men playing opposite her, but Marshall provides more dignity than that as the noble cuckold.
My only fear is that someone will try to remake it today.