Paul Gauguin in The Moon and Sixpence (1942)
Review by John A. Walker (2010), the author of Art & Artists on screen.
In 1919, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote a fictionalised version of Paul Gauguin’s life entitled The Moon and Sixpence on which a screenplay by Albert Lewin (1894-1968) was based. Lewin also directed the film. (The strange title was derived from a remark about a young man who “was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet”.) Maugham assembled a substantial art collection that included one work by Gauguin. He discovered it— Bare-breasted Tahitian woman holding a breadfruit, (also known as Eve with apple)— a painting on the glass panes of the door of a hut, in 1916, while researching his novel in Polynesia.
Maugham never knew Paul Gauguin personally but in Tahiti he spoke to several people who had and he frequented cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris listening to anecdotes about him by artists like Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940), an Irish painter who had known Gauguin in Brittany and Paris.
The film’s storyline is simple: a 40-year old English stockbroker called Charles Strickland who has long desired to be a painter deserts his wife and children and moves to Paris where he does odd jobs but ends up starving and ill in a garret. A fellow painter and his wife kindly take him into their home but when Strickland recovers he callously steals his benefactor’s wife. Later, when Strickland abandons her, she commits suicide. He then travels to Tahiti where he marries a native girl and has a child. He creates some striking paintings and sculptures but becomes blind and then dies from leprosy. Following Strickland’s orders, his wife burns the hut containing his final large-scale mural and a statue.
The narrative is told indirectly through flashbacks and voice-overs, specifically through the eyes of a writer called Geoffrey Wolfe (a surrogate for Maugham himself) played by Herbert Marshall (1890-1966). Wolfe is a priggish character who is shocked by Strickland’s ruthless rejection of middle-class family values. Hence, Wolfe represents the category of moderate artists who are integrated into society as against bohemian rebels like Paul Gauguin. The latter is played by George Sanders (1906-1972), an English actor who specialised in depicting hard-hearted, insolent scoundrels. Sanders is persuasive as a person who cares about nothing except his need to make art. We are told repeatedly that he is a genius but the evidence for this is sparse. What is very implausible about him as an artist is that he has no desire to exhibit or sell his work and is content for his supreme achievements to be consigned to the flames after his death. The real Gauguin certainly did not share such lofty, impractical attitudes; indeed, all his career moves were carefully calculated.
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