Product Description

Great Britain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD:it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Mono ),SPECIAL FEATURES: Alternative Footage, Interactive Menu, Photo Gallery, Scene Access,SYNOPSIS: An anthology of four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham. Titles are: "The Facts of Life," "The Alien Corn," "The Kite" and "The Colonel's Wife."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119802 in DVD
• Formats: Import, PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Features

• THIS DVD WILL NOT WORK ON STANDARD US DVD PLAYER

Customer Reviews

Quartet in Autumn
Quartet has few pleasures beyond the eternally strange and weirdly made-up face of W. Somerset Maugham, Really he made a better mummy than the Mummy, and the on location shots of Maugham "relaxing"--or propped up against the wall, against the lovely seascapes of his home near Cap D'Antibes in the south of France, only accentuates the pathos. He's great, I only wish he had used the occasion to explain his bewildering logo--that little line drawing that looks something like the pope's hat. Is it a Satanic symbol as many have suggested? Or maybe it stands in for the buzzing beehive his mind must have been, to think of so many plots.

Here we have "The Facts of Life,' rather daring isn't it, with the suggestion that our young hero lets himself be picked up (in the South of France) by a party girl who is secretly a thief hoping to scalp him of his casino swag. He comes out ahead of the game in a certain sense, but the filmmakers certainly do everything but scream that the attractive young people have done "it" as a warm-up to subsequent larcenous behavior, In its close association between sexuality and stealing money, it anticipates several jey features of Hitchcock's Marnie, wonder if Hitchcock saw this one (he had already filmed one of Maugham's novels, hadn't he). Then there's Dirk Bogarde in a bizarre story about the boy whose parents hated him playing the piano, so they made a strange bargain and let him go to Paris and study music, then if an expert declares he's not good enough to make it his career, he will quit it entirely and return to the family ways. This is "The Alien Corn." I kept thinking it could have used some actually Ridley Scott "Alien" touches, though they did everything but scream out that the visiting music expert was a monster from the far reaches of space.

"The Colonel's Lady" is, of all things, a story about poetry and how one book of poetry becomes an enormous sensation due to its scandalous Lady-Chatterley storyline, embarrassing the husband of the woman who wrote it. Moving uneasily between drab domestic drama and impish comedy, the story keeps you interested, winding up unfortunately in one of those twist endings that leave a sour taste in one's mouth. I have saved the best for last, well, not the best, the most English. In fact, I expect one would have to be English to understand what happens in "The Kite," which involves the struggles of a suburban housewife to keep her grown son at home and out of the arms of his wife, using kite technology as her bait.

Highly Recommended
the first reviewer's comments are quite odd, or maybe eccentric. These stories are beautifully written, acted, and directed. They show pathos, humor, irony. They used to be shown on TV a lot because they provide excellent entertainment from Britain's golden age of film. The script and direction are excellent. All the actors are superb. The stories are from a different time and culture is some ways and show a style of 1950's British film making--they are sophisticated, adult, not driven by teenage standards of culture, as well as touching and thought provoking. The script and the emotions of the characters are the main thing. Also see Trio, and Encore, the 2 other films like this of other Maugham stories.