Quartet, a movie, and Four Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

"I am a Jew and you know it.  I don't want to be English."
--George Bland in Maugham's story The Alien Corn

"There are three things I especially want to warn you against:  don't gamble, don't lend anyone money, and don't have anything to do with women."
--Henry Garnet to his son Nicky in Maugham's story The Facts of Life.

"I like it and if you don't like it you can lump it."
--Herbert Sunbury to his wife Betty in Maugham's story The Kite.

"I don't deny that I've had a bit of fun now and then.  A man wants it  Women are different."
--George Peregrine in Maugham's story The Colonel's Lady

There doesn't seem to be much middlebrow culture around now, though others disagree (are Downton Abbey and Breaking Bad middlebrow?  The latter, at least, is not comforting the way middlebrow culture is alleged to be).  Somerset Maugham was once considered middlebrow but I think of his writing as highbrow, in the sense that it is challenging, intelligent and demanding.  I would say, however, that many of the movies made from his films are middlebrow because they add unnecessary clarity to what often remains unresolved.  In the film Quartet, 1948, for instance, the stories used have changed endings:  The Alien Corn (directed by Harold French) has an added ending where George Bland's suicide is considered by a coroner's jury to be an accident, since no man would kill himself because he couldn't be a pianist; The Kite (directed by Arthur Crabtree) has an ending added with the unhappy couple reconciling by flying kites together; and The Colonel's Lady has an added ending where Evie says that man she was writing about was her husband, before he changed into a Colonel Blimp.  The Facts of Life is less changed than the other stories, though Nicky and his woman friend do not sleep together. Maugham's essential irony is missing in these filmed versions of his stories.

Maugham himself makes a charming appearance at the beginning of the film -- "when I was in my twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties I was flippant, in my forties cynical, in my fifties competent, in my sixties superficial" -- so he may or may not have had a say in R. C. Sherriff's screenplays or he might have just been willing to take the money and let Gainsborough Pictures do what they thought necessary for commercial success, i.e. dumb down the stories a bit, though they did use talented actors.  It remains a mystery, however, why they used four different directors who had such similar styles.  Still, even with the changed endings the film did show some of Maugham's effective satire of the British class system. Why would one want to see these stories filmed?  To attract a larger audience to them, as Masterpiece Theatre allegedly increases the readership of Trollope and Dickens? Or simple curiosity, to see them as others perhaps see them?