List Price: $14.98You Pay Only: $13.49 You Save: $1.49 (10%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0024543172383
Format: Closed-captioned, Black & White, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
Label: 20th Century Fox
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: 20th Century Fox
Region Code: 1
Release Date: May 24, 2005
Running Time: 145 minutes
Sales Rank: 9469
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Theatrical Release Date: 1946-12
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Editorial Review:
Description:
Narrated by on-screen observer Maugham (Herbert Marshall), this intriguing tale centers on a soul-searching World War I veteran (Tyrone Power) who finds he can not settle back into the world of the upper class. Shunning his planned marriage and career, he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and career, he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and causes his distraght fiancee (GeneTierney) to seek solace with another man (John Payne).
Amazon.com:
The Somerset Maugham novel should be read by everybody at a certain age (say, early twenties), and this 1946 movie adaptation of The Razor's Edge stays faithful to the book's questing spirit. Despite its apparently uncommercial storyline, it was a pet project of Fox honcho Darryl F. Zanuck, who saw the spiritual journey of Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) as an 'adventure' movie. Power, who was newly returned to Hollywood after his military service in World War I, does his most soul-searching work as the WWI vet who needs to find something in life deeper than money and conformity. The search takes him away from fiancee Gene Tierney and her skeptical uncle Clifton Webb and into Parisian streets and Himalayan mountain ranges. Herbert Marshall deftly plays the role of 'Somerset Maugham,' the observing author, and Anne Baxter picked up the supporting actress Oscar for her brassy turn as a floozy. The picture has the careful, glossy look of the studio system's peak years (you can sense Zanuck 'classing it up' and squeezing the life out of it), and Edmund Goulding's tasteful approach is hardly the way to dig deep into the soul of man. If it seems a little staid today, its square sincerity nevertheless holds up well--and it just looks so fabulous. The really amazing thing about the movie is that it was made at all. A 1984 remake, with Bill Murray, is an extremely weird variation on the material. --Robert Horton
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - razers edge
it's a wonderful movie.Plus the sevice I got from amazon was just as
wonderful.I got my dvd quickly and without a lot of hassel.Thanks
amazon.co.
kevin dee vicory
Rating:  - Darryl F. Zanuck wrestles with enlightened goodness in Somerset Maugham's novel. Zanuck wins
What if Somerset Maugham had written a novel about a coal miner who decided to search for transcendental enlightenment by trying to join a country club? If he had, he could have called it The Razor's Edge, since the Katha-Upanishad tells us, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." But Maugham decided to stick with the well-bred class, and so we have Darryl F. Zanuck's version of Larry Darrell, recently returned from WWI, carefully groomed, well connected in society and determined to find himself by becoming a coal miner.
Or, as Maugham tells us, "This is the young man of whom I write. He is not famous. It may be that when at last his life comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on this earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Yet it may be that the way of life he has chosen for himself may have an ever growing influence over his fellow men, so that, long after his death, perhaps, it will be realized that lived in this age a very remarkable creature."
The Razor's Edge has all of Zanuck's cultural taste that money could buy. It's so earnest, so sincere...so self-important. As Larry goes about his search for wisdom, working in mines, on merchant ships, climbing a Himalayan mountain to learn from an ancient wise man, we have his selfish girl friend, Isabel, played by Gene Tierney, his tragic childhood chum played by Anne Baxter, the girlfriend's snobbish and ... Read More
Rating: - Searching for one's soul
What do you want from life? What does it all mean in the end? Why should one man die & another man live? Is it all just arbitrary?
Here's a sumptuous adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel about one man's search for answers to those questions. It's done in grand Hollywood style, with a fine cast, beautiful sets, and sharp dialogue. Granted, it takes some minor liberties with the source material, and the acting style isn't as naturalistic as modern viewers might expect. But I think those are quibbles, and don't interfere with the movie as a whole.
Tyrone Power has the most difficult part, in that he has to play the seeker Larry Darrell according to the stylized conventions of screen piety at the time. Even so, his slightly stiff & detached performance does convey the sense of someone not quite in synch with the everyday world, someone who's still looking for something solid & real. He never comes across as a prig or stuffed shirt -- rather than seeming above everyone else, he seems apart from everyone else. He's naive in some ways, but he's not stupid. And his empathy for & acceptance of his friends, just as they are, is obvious.
The rest of the cast is quite good as well. Gene Tierney's Isabel is stunningly beautiful, with just the right balance of coolness & yearning ... and as we see later, capable of vindictive cruelty. John Payne's millionaire could easily have been a stock villain, the Crass Rich Man, but instead he's simply a decent ... Read More
Rating: - Pretentious, glossy entertainment
The film version of W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Razor's Edge" must have been another of Darryl F. Zanuck's shameless bids for a best picture Oscar, an obsession with the producer from the moment his 1944 film "Wilson," a biography of the U.S. president, failed to win the gold. The Academy had demonstrated, as they continue to do, that "prestige" pictures, movies that aspire to more than entertainment, were favored over lighter fare, and Zanuck made it a point to have at least one such attraction made at 20th Century Fox each year until he got his hands on the top prize.
"The Razor's Edge" earned a best picture nomination, but failed to reach the finish line ("The Best Years of Our Lives" was named the year's best). Few films of the era were as "prestigious" as this one from Maugham's acclaimed philosophical novel, but its "importance" seems forced.
The studio's number one glamour boy, Tyrone Power, plays Larry Darrell, a man so disillusioned by his experiences in World War I that he now rejects society, as well as the love of his socialite fiancee (Gene Tierney), in favor of loafing in Paris and investigating spirituality in India.
It's an unlikely theme for a glossy studio film, but as noted earlier, Zanuck wanted that Oscar, the kind of worldly honor Larry Darrell finds so meaningless. It was Anne Baxter, as a woman who turns to the bottle and whom Darrell attempts to save after her family is killed in an automobile accident, who took home an Oscar. Others ... Read More
Rating: - Beautiful movie
A mans journey searching for the truth, wherever that might take him and no matter what anyone else wants of him.
The original is so much better that the remake with Bill Murray
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