This was a wonderful, relatively recent discovery for me. I’d ticked it off on my ‘for watch’ list but hadn’t got round to it. Recently I did, and I was absolutely delighted with this film. It’s a triple story film with separate stories that focus on an honest man’s wastrel brother, a garroulous female passenger on a cargo ship and a daredevil circus artiste. The stories were written by W Somerset-Maugham and each tale was introduced by the man himself from his home in the south of France.
The stories are called ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, the wastrel brother story, ‘The Winter Cruise’ and ‘The Gigolo and the Gigolette”. Each one is separate, each one has something unique about it, but they all have an element of comedy about them. Even The Gigolo and the Gigolette”, a tale of a high-diver who gets a bad case of nerves, have characters that are drawn comically, such as the retired human cannonball woman and her husband.
It was a film that I was delighted to finally get round to watching. I don’t want to give too much of these three short stories away because I enjoyed the endings of them including the little surprises.
I really enjoyed this film that although a film that was very much of its time, that still bears a re-viewing. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.
Trio (1950) and Quartet (1948) were two other Somerset-Maugham anthology films in the same series – also recommended.
Ah yes, I saw these on television some years ago. The introductions by WSM are the icing on the cake. Amazing how times have changed, isn’t it. I was reading a book by Debbo, Duchess of Devonshire recently, and she told how a young woman was invited to the Resident’s Lodge for dinner somewhere in Africa, and when she got there after driving for miles through the bush was refused admittance because she was not wearing gloves.