The Circle

The Circle is a highly polished, expertly structured piece that deals with the difficulties of the survival of love within marriage, with the pressures of society, and the triumph of character over circumstance.
Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Random House (2009)

Frank Borzage was that rarest of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist.
--Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, The University of Chicago Press, 1968

The romantic and the cynical are flip sides of the same coin and it is indeed fascinating to view Maugham's cynical play, successfully performed in New York and London in 1921, turned into a movie in 1925 by Frank Borzage, who overlaid the cynicism with overt romanticism. The ending of the play is ambiguous, with the married Elizabeth running off with her lover Edward, perhaps to face the same fate as her mother-in-law who ran off with her lover twenty-five years before.  In the play and in the film Elizabeth' s mother-in-law returns to visit her son Arnold, Elizabeth's husband, with her lover Lord Porteous, whose wife would never divorce him, even after twenty-five years.  But in Borzage's film Elizabeth's attempt to run off is thwarted by her newly assertive husband, encouraged by Arnold's father, while in the play Arnold's father is unsuccessful, while thinking he succeeded.

The play and the film quite elegantly view the complexities of marriage and the many different ways that love and commitment can be expressed.  I have always liked the intelligence and sophistication of Maugham but The Circle is the first play of his that I have read (Maugham stopped writing plays in 1933 when his cynicism became unpopular; he turned to novels, where he felt he could write more freely).  Borzage's film, of course, is silent and he uses gesture, camera movement and editing to effectively portray the ups and downs of marriage that Maugham conveys with dialogue.