The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence (1942) is a sombre, intellectually exacting film that steadfastly resists easy emotional entry. Adapted from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel — loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin — it is less a celebration of artistic fervour than an unflinching inquiry into the terrifying purity of obsession. The film dismantles the romantic mythology of the artist-genius and reveals, beneath its varnish, something brutal, isolating, and faintly inhuman.

Albert Lewin’s adaptation is marked by deliberate restraint. Eschewing spectacle, it relies instead on narration, recollection, and moral distance. The result is a film less concerned with dramatic flourish than with unsettling questions that echo long after the final frame: what is the true cost of genius, and does artistic greatness confer immunity from cruelty?

The narrative opens in London, where Charles Strickland (George Saunders) is recalled not with reverence but with bafflement. Once a respectable stockbroker with a wife and children, he scandalised polite society by abandoning everything — career, family, propriety — without explanation. His wife initially refuses to grant him a divorce, assuming the presence of another woman; when she discovers that his only infidelity is to painting itself, she relents, bewildered yet resigned.

The story is framed through the recollections of Geoffrey Wolfe (Herbert Marshall), a writer who once knew Strickland and later becomes obsessed with comprehending him. Wolfe serves as both narrator and moral interlocutor, striving to impose coherence on a man who defies interpretation. He traces Strickland to Paris, where he finds him living in near-squalor. Strickland has no interest in comfort, companionship, or reputation; painting alone commands his allegiance, even when no one believes him capable of greatness.

Saunders’ Strickland is deliberately repellant — cold, contemptuous, and utterly devoid of empathy. He neither explains nor defends himself. Confronted with the wreckage of his domestic life, he responds with an indifference that borders on the monstrous. Human relationships, for Strickland, are impediments to an inner necessity he cannot — or will not — articulate. His paintings find no audience, fetch no price, yet he persists, driven not by hope of acclaim but by a compulsion that resembles a curse more than a calling.

The film’s most devastating passage involves Blanche Stroeve (Doris Dudley), the gentle wife of Dirk Stroeve (Steve Geray), a struggling but humane painter who aids Strickland out of sheer kindness. Blanche initially regards Strickland with undisguised contempt, but yields to her husband’s urging to nurse him back to health — and in doing so, falls tragically in love with him. Strickland takes her as a lover without even the pretence of affection, exploiting her emotionally and artistically alike. He uses her body merely as a subject for his canvas, and when he discards her, she is left spiritually annihilated. Her fate stands as the film’s most searing moral indictment. Beauty may be born of Strickland’s art, but devastation follows in his wake.

Disenchanted with Europe and civilisation itself, Strickland sails to Tahiti in search of isolation and elemental truth. There, stripped of social artifice, his art finally matures into something extraordinary. He marries a local woman, Ata (Devi Wani), and fathers a child. In a bitter irony, it is only in physical decline — ravaged by disease and slowly going blind — that Strickland achieves his greatest artistic triumph. The murals he paints on the walls of his hut are described as visionary and terrifying, works that seem to tap into something primal and eternal.

Yet Strickland remains indifferent to posterity. His final act is one of pure negation: he orders the hut and its paintings destroyed after his death. Only fragments survive. A handful of canvases eventually reach the art world, where they are hailed as masterpieces by critics who never endured the man himself. Strickland becomes famous only when he is safely dead.

Wolfe, left to ponder the meaning of Strickland’s life, offers no consoling verdict. The world venerates genius, but the casualties it leaves behind are quietly forgotten. Unlike romanticised portraits of artists, The Moon and Sixpence presents creativity as fundamentally amoral. Strickland does not paint to communicate or uplift; he paints because he must. Art is not a gift he bestows upon the world — it is a demand the world exacts from him. The film refuses to resolve the contradiction between moral transgression and artistic achievement.

George Saunders delivers a chilling performance, terrifying precisely because of its emotional suppression. Herbert Marshall lends Wolfe elegance, irony, and a humane counterweight, his narration guiding the viewer through a landscape of moral ambiguity. Lewin’s direction is austere and literary, lending the film the air of a philosophical inquiry rather than a conventional drama.

The Moon and Sixpence is neither an easy film nor a comforting one. It offers no heroes and no redemptive certainties. Instead, it confronts the viewer with a deeply unsettling truth: great art may arise not from kindness, but from obsession, indifference, and pain. It lingers not merely for its imagery, but for the questions it refuses to answer. In choosing the moon over the sixpence, Charles Strickland attains immortality at the cost of his humanity — and whether that bargain is worth the price is left, hauntingly, to the audience.