The Moon and Sixpence (1942)

Director: Albert Lewin

Writers: W. Somerset Maugham, Albert Lewin

Composer: Dimitri Tiomkin

Starring: George Sanders, Herbert Marshall, Doris Dudley, Eric Blore, Albert Bassermann, Florence Bates, Steven Geray, Elena Verdugo

More info: IMDb

Tagline: "Women are strange little beasts - you can treat them like dogs, beat them till your arms ache and still they love you." says Charles Strickland

Plot: Loosely inspired from Gauguin's life, the story of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged stockbrocker who abandons his middle-classed life, his family, his duties to start painting, what he has always wanted to do. He is from now on a awful human being, wholly devoted to his ideal: beauty.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

George Sanders is the subject of the film and gets the highest billing but he's got little screen time considering.  Are you surprised he plays a cad?  Typecasting?   What makes this performance different is that he's not charming and exudes a coldness without possibility of warmth.  He's emotionless which is interesting to see from him.  In other films where's he's a downright bastard, there's a certain playful charisma that shines through.  Not with the character of Charles Strickland.  The film is largely told in flashback through Geoffrey Wolfe (Marshall) as a novelist who tries to understand the man whose greatness was discovered after his death.  There is A LOT of narration.  It gets tedious after a while and it feels like the 88 minute running time can't finish fast enough.  That is until a turn of events that takes the story down a darker path which finds a small bright spot before it blackens deeper.  It's not pretty but it does make for a more compelling film.  I doubt that we're supposed to like Charles but it's also hard to find anything sympathetic in Sanders' performance.  Maybe that was the point.  He led a tragic life striving to find one truth which he struggled with until almost the end of his life.  It's an odd picture in some regards but simultaneously a curious and periodically compelling one.