Revealing Mr. Maugham (2012)
Documentary film on the life and work of author W. Somerset Maugham. His life and work discussed by writers such as Armistead Maupin and Alexander McCall-Smith and experts such as Selina Hastings.
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To me, this movie is perfection.
Such a frustrating disappointment
Blistering performances.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
I really learned a lot from this film, I highly recommend it, made me read more Maugham. Not easy cramming 90+ years of a person life into an 80+ mins film but they did a wonderful job here.
. . . and, apparently, when the producers of REVEALING MR. MAUGHAM see what they've begun, decide to give Gay Guys in General 41. MAUGHAM's opening and overall premise is that "Gay guys thrive as spies" from Toddlerhood on up. Just as James Bond creator Ian Fleming and CATCHER IN THE RYE author J.D. Salinger, MAUGHAM was a Real Life Spy during the World War Era of the 1900s, as was that Turing bloke who broke the Nazi's Enigma Machine Code by building the World's first Super Computer. Whether closeted or not, Gay Guys like this quartet, or the winners of MAUGHAM's annual Gay Spy Award such as John Le Carre, and Public Latrine Secret Agents as a whole often if not usually perish miserably, frequently by their own hand, as was the case with MAUGHAM's own gay older brother, Harry. Though youthful LGBT losses such as Harry's or Brandon Teena's are full of pathos, a better word to describe the demise of those who linger on to the over-ripe age of 91 such as MAUGHAM is "bathos." Shunned by everyone he knew on his last trip home to London after a final 20 years of scribbling (and publishing) pure drivel, these MAUGHAM researchers reveal that "Billy" was forced to expire totally discredited in France.