The first of the three maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was “Know Thyself”. Such simple advice, yet so difficult to follow. Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) is one of life’s great seekers; The Razor’s Edge is the story of what he found.
We first meet Larry at a country club party just after World War I. He’s young, intelligent, with good if not dazzling prospects—a veteran who made it through to the other side. He is engaged to Isabel Bradley (Gene Tierney), a beauty too aware of her charms to be truly endearing. Other guests include: Isabel’s uncle Elliott (Clifton Webb), a snob who judges everyone by rank and accompanying bank balance; her friend Sophie (Anne Baxter), a sweet ingenue; and W. Somerset Maugham (Herbert Marshall), the celebrated writer, and author of the book whose adaptation we are watching.
Maugham’s presence isn’t a quirk of the film’s script (by Lamar Trotti and an uncredited Darryl F. Zanuck, who also produced the film)—it’s a feature of the original 1944 novel. There’s an aloofness to the onscreen Maugham, a sense that he observes his fellow creatures from a great height and reads their motives more clearly than he’s often willing to admit. His presence makes the story feel more alive but also slightly off kilter. This isn’t Rudyard Kipling hearing the tale of The Man Who Would Be King (1975) from Carnahan and Dravot. This is Kipling deciding to up sticks and hike through the mountains with them.
At the party, Larry and Isabel receive the first inklings that they might be mismatched. Larry is haunted by the knowledge that he walks every day in another man’s shoes. A friend sacrificed himself to save him. There must be a greater purpose to life than simply amassing wealth and he is determined to find it. Isabel, on the other hand, is a prophet of materialism. The United States is poised to become the richest nation on earth and Larry is privileged to help make it so. (Like so many others, she is blissfully unaware of the impending Crash and Depression.) Still, he has his foibles and foibles must be indulged, so she agrees to let Larry go to Paris for a year and “loaf”. But when Isabel eventually comes to claim him, she is shocked by the garret he lives in and the meagre allowance he lives on. He’s looking for what he can feel; she wants something she can hold.
Released in the wake of World War II, The Razor’s Edge reflects the post-war urge to take stock. What had it all been for? In A Matter of Life and Death, the answer is love. In The Best Years of Our Lives, dignity, stability and home. (Like The Razor’s Edge, both films were released in 1946.) For Larry, the answer is enlightenment.
A hard road leads there. Larry works in factories and goes down mines, reads every book he can find and talks to everyone he can. Eventually he learns of a holy man in India and seeks him out. It’s a measure of the film’s earnestness, as well as its flaws, that it plays into every cliché of the subcontinent as a spiritual haven for lost Americans and Europeans, while also presenting the guru (sadly played by a Caucasian in brown face) as an honest philosopher who offers good advice.
Maugham was writing from experience. He visited an ashram in Tamil Nadu in 1938 and spoke with a well-known sage, Ramana Maharshi. The novel’s title is derived from a translation of a verse in a Hindu philosophical text that also serves as the book’s epigraph and is included in the film’s dialogue: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.” Like Maugham, Larry follows in the footsteps of the Transcendentalists, a path that would be trodden again by the Beat generation and the Beatles. He goes into seclusion in the mountains and there, meets his fate in a moment of ecstatic communion with the spirit that infuses all things. Relating the experience to his teacher, Larry is awestruck: Power’s eyes light up with a rapture Larry will carry with him for the rest of his life.
It’s difficult to convey transcendence onscreen. Director Edmund Goulding is so worried we might miss the wonder of Larry’s big moment that he follows it with a shot of a blazing horizon, Alfred Newman’s score mounting towards the heavens.
He should have had more faith in Tyrone Power. Power had an innate purity onscreen, a sincerity that seemed to emanate from his very core. Many of Power’s best films—The Mark of Zorro (1940), Nightmare Alley (1947), Witness for the Prosecution (1957)—work in concert with or counterpoint to this quality. And matched with his ethereal beauty, it made him a rare screen presence. Zanuck knew this. He delayed casting The Razor’s Edge until Power had been discharged from the Marines in January 1946. As Larry, Power avoids the pitfalls of sanctimony, breathing life into a man who is so honest and straightforwardly good that you want him to succeed. He is the film’s focal point.
His co-stars provide excellent support. Gene Tierney slowly reveals Isabel’s superficiality, one perfectly poised smile at a time. Clifton Webb adds Elliott to his collection of elegant, snobbish aesthetes and is marvellous to watch. Herbert Marshall had played a version of Maugham before, in The Moon and Sixpence (1942). Now playing the man himself, he imbues him with urbane detachment—a reminder that Maugham alone is ‘real’. And Anne Baxter won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Sophie, who endures more pain than most of her friends can comprehend.
The Razor’s Edge never fully explains Larry’s revelation in the mountains, a stylistic choice that’s both practical (it’s hard to dramatize a person’s interior spiritual life) and in keeping with the film’s emphasis on self-discovery. Nevertheless, it’s frustrating, as is the occasionally preachy dialogue and the impression that Goulding was acutely aware he was making a prestige picture. Yet the film is thoughtful and sincere. The path to salvation may be difficult, but that doesn’t make it any less worth seeking.
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