Accuracy

In this the four directors certainly did the old boy proud. Every little gesture, every article lying carelessly on the tables or decorating the walls was made to tell, without obvious verbal embellishment. The directors turn in a workmanlike job, dispensing in a pleasing manner with angles for angles' sake (except in the opening cell scene in "The Kite"). And with the directors were the cast—everyone of them counting, right down to the two-line bit player who stayed with us only for a couple of feet of film. True to the spirit of a novelist whose interest is a predominantly in conventional people in pretty conventional situations, the cast were largely typed: but few of them were in a rut. Maugham relies on the accuracy of his backgrounds rather than the behaviour of his people for realism, and the result was that the characters were pretty stereotyped. Chief exception was Herbert, in "The Kite," who, with the best of the four stories and the meatiest of the less conventional parts to put over, almost convinced that he must in real life be just such a narrow, suburban, unintelligent type. But in a part where he could so easily have fallen into a comic, he made the obsession credible, somehow tragic. The allegory which diffidently lingers just behind much of Maugham's reminiscing came out most strongly in this story of the boy whose only lift from the humdrum prosaic round of existence was at the end of his kite string. Made a rounded person in the background of the obnoxiously ordinary suburban villa and his nearly shrewish mother, Herbert in the "Century of the Common Man" may have been an allegory which the novelist didn't intend.