THE BEACHCOMBER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 16, 13 October 1939, Page 34

THE BEACHCOMBER

(Universal) If you wanted to find faults in this film you would have to look for them; and looking for them pgp be much less fun than looking at. Charles Laughton. For ‘Laughton has done it again, with help from his wife, Elsa Lanchester, director Erich Pommer, and author Somerset Maugham. ‘The supporting cast would have the headlines in any picture in which Laughton did not appear. With Laughton in the picture even their excellence fades into anonymity — yes, even the dog, even his flopping spaniel ears and funny spaniel tail. _ The first scene: A flabby body face down on verandah boards, under a tropic sun. If you did not know the story came from a book of Maugham’s, if you had not been told that the island was in the "Eastern Archipelago," if you had not heard the title, you would still know somehow from the pose, the indolently sprawling legs, the head askew, the flesh flaccid on the planks, that this was Laughton, and that he was a beachcomber, a remittance man, a down-and-out, a scrounger, a patch upon The Flag, a blot upon the Empire’s escutcheon. For that is the art of Charles Laughton. The last scene: You'll be surprised by it, unless you have read Maugham’s "Vessel of Wrath." That is what his book is called but, in this country and some others, it has been changed to "The Beachcomber" for the film. And in between: Tears and laughter, and despair and hope, for the Mynheer, for the missionary-medico, and for Miss Muffitt, as they find that the incorrigible beachcomber on their small island demands attention. The ending is one of Maugham’s most cynical gestures, and does not come so

convincingly from the screen as from his carefully-ordered pages. But the director must have anticipated the danger even if he could not quite avoid it, and he has cut the finale to something very close to the right length. The Beachcomber’s father was a vicar. Miss Muffitt’s died of drink. So he became a trouble to his family. She was never even faintly pink. Elsa Lanchester is the Miss Muffitt, a model of virtue, so concerned with the salvation of the beachcomber. With her brother, she must forever be reforming or forgiving. But Edward Claude Wilson, the beachcomber, has no more wish to be reformed than forgiven. Somerset Maugham did not, however, intend that the prudes should be just plain prim. He wanted them to be unctuous as weil as pure, so that we could make fun of them, and show them off against the boozy beachcomber. I think the film does visually as much as he did in print-or even. more.

Between the extremes of virtue and vice is the consul-general or whatever his title is. This is an excellent part, full of the subtlety of seeming contradiction; and everything there was in the part has been brought out. Yet I can’t talk about this film without coming continually back to Laughton. I think I could recall for you every one of his gestures, every astonishing look on his astonishing face: his alcoholic stupidity, his painful sobriety, his witlessness, his cunning, his simplicity, or the twinkle in his eye. But you all know Laughton almost as well as I do. Not quite-you haven’t yet seen him as "The Beachcomber." Go to it.