The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Razor's Edge (1946) is an intergenerational returning veteran historical drama episodic male point of view romance adventure two and a half hour Somerset Maugham worldliness versus spirituality adaptation which was a huge romantic hit in its time, and which owes little to film noir, but offers a stable and repetitive cascading style of romance story that is a soft-soap kind of storytelling, offering the purest kind of escape known to 1946.

This is not a film noir, and yet within it lurks the genes of the style not quite activated, but present as the underscored factual spiritual well from which draws a grabbing interest, between the snogs and high-class encounters. In the 1940s they did not have slacker movies, but they did have loafer movies, and this is one.

Edmund Goulding’s 1946 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s "The Razor’s Edge" is a lavish and oddly bifurcated epic. Ostensibly concerned with spiritual ascendance and metaphysical clarity, the film persistently undermines its purported moral quest with sequences dripping in satin, cynicism, and social cruelty.

The film masquerades as an odyssey of self-discovery, but it is instead a sumptuous psychodrama on the limits of moral action and the suffocating pressures of bourgeois respectability. Emerging from the novel’s dense fog of pseudo-Eastern mysticism and class satire, the film refashions Maugham’s protagonist, Larry Darrell, into a brooding cipher whose quest for truth paradoxically renders him inert.

Goulding's direction renders this journey in opulent strokes, alternating moments of introspective languor with social tableaux so richly adorned they distract from the film's vacant spiritual center.

The timing of the film’s release in 1946 cannot be overlooked. Emerging just after the Second World War, its narrative of a man shattered by the experience of combat and searching for meaning would have resonated with a global population scarred by atrocities and loss.

Yet, where postwar films such as "The Best Years of Our Lives" confronted reintegration and trauma with immediacy and psychological intensity, "The Razor’s Edge" diffuses its drama across continents and over decades, rendering it more allegorical than intimate. It was an ambitious undertaking for Twentieth Century-Fox and for Darryl F. Zanuck, who engineered it as a triumphant vehicle for the returning Tyrone Power.

Tyrone Power in The Razor's Edge (1946)

Still clad in the gilt of his matinee-idol reputation, Power was miscast. Earnest and physically impeccable, he proved incapable of embodying the tormented subtlety the role of Larry Darrell demanded. What Power offered was a sort of benign vacancy—his spiritual reawakening is told to us, not shown through transformation or gravitas.

The film’s true vitality radiates not from Power's aimless ascetic, but from the morally compromised, deeply human figures who orbit him. Gene Tierney’s Isabel Bradley is the film's most compelling presence. Initially poised as a society beauty whose love for Larry is tested by his unorthodox path, she is revealed over time as a Machiavellian force of emotional violence.

Tierney, glacial and glorious, turns self-interest into performance art. There is a gleaming restraint in her cruelty—a studied elegance in the way she orchestrates Sophie’s relapse with chilling finesse. Her beauty is unassailable, her intentions base. This intersection of poise and pathology makes Isabel one of the film’s most enduring creations.

If Isabel is the spiritual antagonist, then Anne Baxter’s Sophie MacDonald is its sacrificial lamb. In Baxter’s tremulous hands, Sophie’s descent from domestic bliss into despairing addiction is wrought with operatic tragedy. Her performance, for which she was awarded an Academy Award, throbs with a desperation that nearly overwhelms the stylized surfaces around her.

Gene Tierney in The Razor's Edge (1946)

Sophie, once a mother and wife, becomes a haunted revenant wandering Parisian nightclubs, drinking herself toward oblivion. She is the lone figure in the film whose suffering feels embodied and real. That Larry seeks to redeem her becomes the film’s most emotionally legible arc, even as it is swiftly, cynically curtailed by Isabel’s sabotage.

Now as has been pointed out The Razor's Edge (1946) is not a film noir film and there is nobody that has ever argued that it is, nor has it been seen nor said in the wildest manuals and comment threads that this is a film noir, for it is not, and has film noir elements none, it could be said, or if it could be said that returning veteran was a film noir subject, The Razor's Edge (1946) is a returning veteran picture with strong elements of the lousy husband genre.

Clifton Webb in The Razor's Edge (1946)

The noir influence permeates the film not merely in its aesthetic stylings but in its moral architecture. There is a creeping fatalism throughout, expressed through both character and mise-en-scène. Characters are driven less by free will than by cruel inevitabilities.

Paris, as rendered by Arthur Miller’s cinematography, is more sepulchral than romantic—a chiaroscuro playground of shadows and silhouettes. Sophie’s decline follows the classic noir trajectory of the doomed woman, destroyed not by vice alone, but by the manipulation of a femme fatale who operates under a sheen of social respectability.

Isabel, with her glacial beauty and imperious control, embodies a variant of the noir siren, not in a trench coat but in couture gowns. Her psychological warfare is no less deadly. Meanwhile, Larry resembles a noir anti-hero turned inside out—detached, unmoored, and consumed by an ambiguous quest for meaning that leaves casualties in its wake.

The film’s spiritual pretense is thus recoded as existential dread. It trades the traditional detective’s trench coat for the robe of a seeker, but the bleakness remains. Even redemption feels corrupted, its sincerity rendered suspect by the self-satisfaction of the man who offers it.

This epic non-epic, a non epic of the 145 minute flavour of what might be epic but which is tangible not, for there is not a sniff of the epic, not such a sniff, only the 145 themselves as a total might suggest it, but for all that the film offers a chilling portrait of a world in which women’s value is relentlessly commodified and their desires manipulated.

Isabel, for all her glamour, is constrained within the expectations of decorum and marriage. Her power is limited to that of emotional saboteur; unable to reclaim Larry through honest desire, she exploits Sophie’s weakness to reassert control. Sophie's arc, meanwhile, is a testament to the destructive myth of female redemption via male benevolence.

Larry believes he can save her, as though salvation were a masculine gift to bestow. When she resists the mold into which he tries to cast her—the penitent, reformed wife—she is cast adrift once more, ultimately discarded by a narrative that cannot accommodate her damaged complexity.

One of the film’s more peculiar gestures is its inclusion of Somerset Maugham himself, played by the urbane Herbert Marshall. Functioning as narrator and bystander, he becomes a voyeuristic presence, moving between scenes with amused detachment. In Marshall’s portrayal, Maugham is a man too genteel to intervene, but too curious to abstain.

Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, high-life in The Razor's Edge (1946)

His weird genial conversational stuffy un-stuffy soft-Wildean semi-suave omniscience distances the audience from events, reminding us constantly of the artifice at work. This technique, effective in the novel, dilutes the cinematic experience, inserting a literary remove that is at odds with the medium’s emotive immediacy.

Clifton Webb, reprising his patented prig, infuses Elliott Templeton with the kind of baroque theatricality that veers from delicious to grotesque. He is a dandy fossil, obsessed with appearances and crushed by the rejection of an exclusive social invitation. Webb’s character, perhaps the most purely comic, is also the most tragic. His deathbed scene—dying amidst luggage and unfulfilled dreams of decorous exit—is a mordant aria to social vanity. His aristocratic affectations are ultimately meaningless, reduced to embroidered undergarments and an imaginary sense of belonging.

Tyrone Power, low-life in The Razor's Edge (1946)

Historically, the film reflects the broader American disillusionment of the mid-1940s. Though ostensibly set in the interwar years, its themes are inextricable from the post-World War II moment. Veterans returned not only with physical wounds but existential queries.

Larry’s disaffection mirrored that of countless soldiers who found the pre-war world insipid and insufficient. Yet unlike the social realism of contemporary films, "The Razor’s Edge" cloaks its trauma in luxury. It nods toward the global, yet remains resolutely concerned with the trials of the American elite. Its America is one of moral exhaustion, still gorged on Gatsby's dreams but haunted by the trenches of Flanders.

This film, after its 145 have edged away from you, appears in the back mind as at once an artefact of prestige filmmaking and a philosophical inquiry neutered by decorum. It prefigures the restless anti-heroes of the 1950s, who would seek meaning in rebellion and existential outrage.

Larry Darrell’s quest paved the way for Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt—men for whom authenticity meant rupture, not resignation. But unlike these figures, Larry is strangely passive, his quest for goodness rendered through benevolent aloofness rather than active resistance. The film gestures toward transformation but ends with stasis. Larry departs not triumphant but gently indifferent.

The screenplay’s refusal to define Larry’s spiritual revelation is perhaps its most frustrating omission. He journeys to India, encounters a guru, and returns enlightened—yet nothing of his demeanor shifts. There is no vocabulary given to his experience, no moment of epiphany that transcends the perfunctory.

The Himalayas are rendered in semi-sensible flashes of super black and white artificial matte backdrops, and the sage, played with manicured placidity by Cecil Humphreys, resembles an Anglican bishop in Orientalist drag. These scenes border on parody, and they sap the film of the very weight it claims to bear. One is left with the suspicion that the filmmakers, like Larry himself, have no real idea what enlightenment entails.

And yet, for all its narrative diffusions and spiritual evasions, "The Razor’s Edge" retains an eerie allure. It captures an atmosphere of gilded despair—a world dissolving into shadows beneath the weight of unspoken regrets. Alfred Newman’s score, at once lush and mournful, guides us through drawing rooms and opium dens with the same lyrical fatalism.

Wanderer above the sea of fog by Caspar David Friedrich with Tyrone Power in The Razor's Edge (1946)

Saps of the sea and a great alcoholic performance from Anne Baxter, the liberation of grief and John Payne doing the hangdog as best he can when there is not much to be dog hanging about, he still does it, and then it is apparent that Arthur Miller’s cinematography bathes characters in pools of light and murk, suggesting truths that flicker just beyond articulation. The film’s surface polish only heightens its emotional inconsistencies, turning its beautiful exteriors into masks for deeper dissonance.

In the final reckoning, "The Razor’s Edge" is less a narrative of spiritual awakening than a compendium of moral failure. It is a story in which the truly wounded are sacrificed to the vanity of the unrepentant. Where its protagonist seeks truth, he finds only the limits of language.

And in the end, it is not Larry’s calm nobility that lingers, but the ghost of Sophie’s last drunken waltz, the flicker of Isabel’s triumphant spite, and the absurd dignity of Elliott Templeton dying in a brocade dressing gown. It is an American epic about the impossibility of epics, a portrait of redemption that refuses to redeem.

Highest-grossing films of 1946 were a domestic rentals bunch of classic liberation and drama adventure goodness, with Notorious (1946) being as much as a spy as it is in not many ways a noir. But here they ranked:

Duel in the Sun — Selznick International
The Best Years of Our Lives — RKO
The Jolson Story — Columbia
Blue Skies — Paramount
Saratoga Trunk — Warner Bros.
The Razor's Edge — 20th Century Fox
Night and Day — Warner Bros.
Notorious — RKO
The Yearling — MGM
Till the Clouds Roll By — MGM

They ran to see this adventure love lore famous family Paris and Eastern and nautical promise tale of frocks and deep fun. They lobbied them as follows with the tags of the happier part of the invitation:

Hunger no love . . . woman . . . or wealth could satisfy!
Theirs was a love hunger no earthly love could satisfy!

In the cinemas is twilight between cataclysm and consensus—between Hiroshima’s hellfire and the heralding of Bretton Woods—Hollywood undertook an ambitious, if sometimes risible, attempt to reframe American identity in both its intimate and imperial dimensions.

John Payne in The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Big Picture Cycle of 1945–1946 constituted less a genre than a genre-busting aspiration, an audacious cartography of postwar anxieties and aspirations transmuted through ostentatious production values, literary adaptations, and the veneration of spiritual and national myths. Emerging not as mere entertainment but as ideologically freighted artifacts of cultural diplomacy, these films enacted what we might call a cinematic psychoanalysis of the nation-state, parsing traumas incurred "over there" through the safely dislocated spectacles of devotion, dissent, and domesticity.

At the center of this elaborate mise-en-scène of moral recalibration stood The Razor’s Edge (1946), an anomalous spiritual bildungsroman cloaked in a plush cloak of cinematic prestige.

Yet this is not merely the tale of a postwar Hollywood in search of the sublime; rather, it is the chronicle of a studio system cannily reorienting its mythopoeic machinery in service of geopolitical readjustment. The eleven so-called “big pictures” of this period—marked by swollen budgets, highbrow literary lineage, and the sanctified seriousness of the ‘important’—demonstrate Hollywood’s infatuation with consequence, both actual and performative.

Eastern powers with Tyrone Power, Herbert Marshall, Gene Tierney and John Payne in The Razor's Edge (1946)

As exemplified by The Razor’s Edge, they encapsulate a paradox: the more strenuously these films gestured toward transcendence, the more garishly they betrayed their own artifice.

To comprehend the Big Picture cycle is to apprehend Hollywood’s reconstitution of the national imaginary in an epoch of epistemic upheaval. The war was over; the peace had yet to be domesticated. Nowhere is this liminality more apparent than in An American Romance (1944), where King Vidor sculpts a cloyingly monumental allegory of the immigrant condition transfigured through the alchemical forge of American industry.

Herbert Marshall in The Razor's Edge (1946)

Its protagonist, Stefan Dangos, christens the industrial machine with filial piety and literal patriotism—his children named after U.S. presidents, his soul smelted in the crucible of iron and duty. Here, the state is not merely a political abstraction but a metaphysical destination, an affective telos affirmed in a climactic scene of citizenship oaths and sentimentalized sacrifice.

Such melodramatic mythologization finds its kin in The Valley of Decision (1945) and Pittsburgh (1942), industrial epics that refract the hero’s journey through the furnace of labor. Whether privileged scion or pugilistic entrepreneur, each masculine figure traverses a via crucis of productive suffering en route to apotheosis in the national pantheon. This is not ideology disguised as storytelling; it is ideology as storytelling.

Yet the very excess of such narratives—their rhetorical hypertrophy and unsubtle didacticism—signals a form of overcompensation, a hysterical insistence on national coherence in the face of its imminent unraveling. It is no accident that these films coincided with Roosevelt’s death and the twilight of New Deal hegemony. In their voluble dramatizations of citizenship, labor, and sacrifice, they function as cinematic state funerals, mourning not only a man but an epoch.

If An American Romance imagines national becoming as industrial transcendence, The Razor’s Edge offers its inverse: the quest for personal salvation through metaphysical deracination. Directed by Edmund Goulding and adapted from Somerset Maugham’s philosophically muddled novel, the film is an ostensible repudiation of materialist excess in favor of spiritual asceticism. Tyrone Power’s Larry Darrell, disillusioned by the Great War, decamps from the beaux-arts salons of Chicago and Paris to the ersatz Himalayas of Hollywood’s backlot, wherein he presumably achieves Enlightenment between matte-painted peaks and faux-Buddhist platitudes.

That The Razor’s Edge functions at all as a “big picture” is due less to its spiritual pretensions than to its pedigree: a best-selling source novel, a star-laden ensemble (Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb), and the studio’s lavish mise-en-scène.

Yet the film’s sublimity is persistently undermined by its own performative awkwardness. Goulding’s direction never fully reconciles the metaphysical with the melodramatic. The lamasery scenes are palpably synthetic, an orientalist simulacrum that replaces actual transcendence with touristic spectacle.

And yet, in its failures, The Razor’s Edge illuminates the aspirations and anxieties of its time with astonishing clarity. The disjuncture between spiritual inquiry and cinematic excess is not a flaw but a symptom. This is postwar American culture attempting to reimagine virtue in an age of incinerated cities and mutilated psyches.

Larry’s disavowal of success, marriage, and Western rationalism is less a personal odyssey than a collective fantasy: that the American soul, so deeply implicated in mechanized violence, might still be salvaged by a detour into Eastern mysticism, however commodified.

While The Razor’s Edge gestures vaguely toward transcultural synthesis, the broader Big Picture cycle often treats Europe not as partner but pathology. The Continent is rendered, frequently, as a repository of aristocratic decadence and moral obsolescence. In Forever Amber (1947), Frenchman’s Creek (1944), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), British aristocracy is depicted as sexually lubricious, politically indifferent, and spiritually vacuous.¹

Even as Churchill and Roosevelt clung to a “special relationship,” Hollywood persisted in peddling an anti-elitist fantasy in which American pragmatism triumphed over European enervation.

The Office of War Information fretted about such portrayals, concerned that they would imperil wartime unity. Yet with few exceptions—The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), To Each His Own (1946), The Canterville Ghost (1944)—Hollywood was uninterested in sentimental Anglophilia.

For every Susan Dunn bridging cultures across class and ocean, there were a dozen Kittys and Ambers clawing their way into the corrupt heart of empire.

A distinguishing feature of the Big Picture cycle was its embrace of what contemporaneous trade discourse termed “exploitation”—a mode of marketing predicated on news-cycle adjacency and thematic immediacy.

Films like Since You Went Away (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) wove front-page exigencies—rationing, furloughs, readjustment—into their narrative textures.

Likewise, Wilson (1944) attempted to consecrate presidential idealism through historical reenactment, albeit at the cost of entertainment value.

The Razor’s Edge, by contrast, addressed postwar disorientation obliquely. Larry’s Great War trauma mirrored that of millions returning from the Second; his rejection of social norms echoed the disaffection of a generation bewildered by both victory and annihilation. His peregrinations across continents mirrored the geopolitical fluidities of the new world order.

If Wilson sought to indoctrinate through inspiration, The Razor’s Edge sought to console through identification.

Yet in both cases, the narrative center could not hold. The high-minded intentions of the studios collided with the narrative incoherence that often plagued prestige productions. Lengthy runtimes, stilted dialogue, and inconsistent tonalities—these formal shortcomings became the stylistic signature of the Big Picture genre.

The films dared to ask big questions but often lacked the rhetorical apparatus to answer them convincingly.

The Big Picture cycle of 1945–1946 did not end so much as exhaust itself. Its swan songs—Duel in the Sun (1946), The Outlaw (1946), and the beleaguered Forever Amber—betray a turn toward sensationalism, toward sexploitation thinly veiled as grand narrative. Howard Hughes’s gambit with The Outlaw redefined publicity as performance, advertising as provocation.

Jane Russell’s brassiere, more than any line of dialogue, became the locus of audience investment. The baroque excesses of these films—rampant cleavage, coded homoeroticism, taboo flirtation—marked the erosion of the Big Picture's moral earnestness.

In this context, The Razor’s Edge appears almost quaint—a final, earnest attempt at spiritual uplift before Hollywood surrendered to the tawdry logic of titillation. And yet, in its muddled sincerity, it captured the ambivalence of a moment when victory had not yet curdled into complacency, and when Hollywood still believed, or pretended to believe, that cinema could be a vessel of wisdom.

Elsa Lanchester and Tyrone Power in The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Big Picture cycle of 1945–1946 was, in sum, a performative exorcism—an anxious, extravagant, and intermittently profound engagement with the ontological debris of global conflict. These were not mere films; they were liturgies of national rebirth, sermons against cynicism, rituals of renewal.

In their vaulting ambition and inevitable incoherence, they articulated the incoherent ambitions of a nation drunk on victory and haunted by the specter of its own violence.

The Razor’s Edge remains the most poignant emblem of the cycle’s contradictions: lavish in production, earnest in purpose, and yet fundamentally at odds with its own spiritual claims. It promised salvation through renunciation but delivered it through a carefully lit close-up of Tyrone Power’s face. That such a contradiction could be both moving and absurd speaks to the peculiar genius of Hollywood in its big-picture moment: always chasing transcendence, even as it stumbled into artifice.

The Razor's Edge (1946)

Directed by Edmund Goulding

Genres - Crime, Drama, Romance | Sub-Genres - Film Noir | Release Date - Dec 9, 1946 | Run Time - 145 min. | Go go Wikipedia