Quartet (1948)

Quartet, an unusual and entertaining British classic film, is a foursome of half-hour vignettes, each with its own director and cast, based on four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

Abroad for the first time by himself, a rising teen tennis star tests his father’s parting advice at Monte Carlo; a privileged young pianist has everything but the elusive artistic soul he craves; a kite enthusiast’s young wife must help her husband cut iron apron strings; and a pompous ‘man of affairs’ is nearly undone when his wife of thirty years publishes a book of poems which suggest she had a lover.

Maugham, who died the year the film came out, introduces the film with a succinct summing-up, noting: ‘In my twenties, the critics said I was brutal. In my thirties, they said I was flippant. In my forties, they said I was cynical. In my fifties they said I was competent. And then, in my sixties, they said I was superficial. I went my own way with the strength of the shoulders, following the path I had traced and trying with my work to fill out the pattern of life that I had made for myself.’

Perhaps Maugham, popular among readers but never quite in sync with the prevailing critical wind, simply was not the Right Sort of Chap. What writer is, though? This quartet deftly dramatized by R.C. Sherriff shows Maugham to have been a close and amused observer of both the Right and Wrong Sort, and the four casts share their pleasure in giving life to these vignettes.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott.

The first story, The Facts of Life, directed by Ralph Smart, opens in a London club with the then-popular comedy duo Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) at a bridge table. Here, Radford plays Henry Garnet, the father of a rising tennis star, and Wayne plays his bridge partner Leslie, as they do their routine as utterly conventional club men and cricket lovers. 

Leslie (Naughton Wayne) draws out Henry Garnet (Basil Radford) at bridge.

Leslie gets Garnet to recount the tale of the first trip abroad of his 19-year-old son Nicky. After a good tennis outing in Monte Carlo, we see a friend first encourage Nicky Garnet (Jack Watling) to try the roulette table, where he meets Jeanne (Mai Zetterling); Nicky later loans Jeanne money, and then he catches up with her after hours—all contrary to his father’s parting advice, and with unexpected results in each instance.

 

‘What infuriated me was the boy’s so damned pleased with himself,’ Garnet said.

'The mistake you made in the first place, if you don’t mind my saying so, was to let him learn tennis,’ Leslie said. ‘A thing like that would never happen to a cricketer.

Dirk Bogarde and Honor Blackman in Quartet (1948)

In Harold French’s The Alien Corn, George Bland (Dirk Bogarde), the son and nephew of prosperous businessmen and beloved of Paula (Honor Blackman), announces to his family that, rather than complete his final term at Oxford, he will go off on his own to Paris to dedicate himself to the piano. ‘I used to be fond of fishing when I was a boy,’ grouses his father, Sir Frederick Bland (Raymond Lovell), ‘but I did not become a professional fisherman!’ After Paula persuades Sir Frederick to allow George a two-year grace period to sink or swim, George dutifully pecks her on the cheek. ‘Is that the best you could do?’ asks the future Pussy Galore—but clearly not the future Mrs. George Bland.

A boy and his kite are a mother's best friend--Quartet (1948) 

Arthur Crabtree’s The Kite explores that special English ground between hobby enthusiast and eccentric. Prison Visitor Ned Preston (Bernard Lee) tells of meeting inmate Herbert Sunbury (George Cole) in the course of his duties. Sunbury has been gaoled because he refused to support his estranged wife Betty Baker (Susan Shaw). His parents Beatrice (Hermione Baddeley) and Samuel Sunbury (Mervyn Jones) encouraged and supported their son in his kite-flying hobby from a young age; and then Herbert up and married a woman he met at the cinema. But Betty becomes frustrated at taking third place to her ‘Bert’s’ hobby and, not too far behind kites, his mother. Herbert cannot understand why Betty does not divine the proper order of things; though Betty manages to square the circle.  

Hermione Baddeley and George Cole in Quartet (1948)

The final story, Ken Annakin’s The Colonel’s Lady, may better be titled The Colonel’s Education. Colonel Peregrine (Cecil Parker) is a self-important businessman in a long, childless marriage with Evie Peregrine (Nora Swinburne). He keeps a younger mistress, Daphne (Linden Travers), ‘in town’. [Parker and Travers also played an adulterous couple in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).] This man-about-town suddenly becomes aware that his wife not only has published a volume of poetry under her maiden name E.K. Hamilton, but that it is ‘a runaway success’ and ‘hardly suitable for children’. 

The colonel's lady wrote a book: Nora Swinburne and Cecil Parker in Quartet (1948)

At a reception for the book, Henry Dashwood (Ernest Thesiger), an enthusiastic critic, tells the horrified Peregrine, ‘What makes the book outstanding is the passion that throbs in every line. Naked, earthly passion. Of course, deep-seated emotion like that is completely tragic. How right Heine was when he said “the poet makes little songs out of great sorrows”.’

Linden Travers and Cecil Parker in Quartet (1948)

The colonel wracks his brain cherchant le pool boy, seeking an explanation from everyone but his wife. He admits to himself that he ‘can’t live without Evie’; with his next breath he adds: ‘I’ll never understand until my dying day: what on earth did that fellow ever see in her?’ A moment of clarity ensues.

Quartet 1948 U.K. (120 min.) directed by Saul Dibb; Jean Barker, editor; Ray Elton, cinematographer; screenplay by R.C. Sherriff, from four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham: The Facts of Life (25 min.), dir. Ralph Smart; The Alien Corn (25 min.), dir. Harold French; Kite (32 min.), dir. Arthur Crabtree; and The Colonel’s Lady (32 min.), dir. Ken Annakin with cinematography by Reginald H. Wyer.