W. Somerset Maugham

This intoxicating combination of wicked comedy and smart drama stars Annette Bening as Julia Lambert, a beautiful and beguiling actress in 1930's London. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Somerset Maugham was a master teller of stories about superficial people who are revealed and drastically changed by circumstance or luck. His novella Up at the Villa is a tale of death, seduction, blackmail and theft among British and Americans in Florence in the turbulent days just before World War II. The film, despite an outstanding cast including Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne Bancroft, Sean Penn and Derek Jacobi, is strangely mannered and rather flat, more like a waltz than the tango Maugham might have had in mind. (imdb)

During the first world war, novelist Edgar Brodie is sent to Switzerland by the Intelligence Service... (imdb)

Abandoning artistic ambitions, sensitive and club-footed Philip Carey enrolls in medical school and falls in love with illiterate waitress Mildred Rogers. She rejects him, runs off with a salesman and returns unmarried and pregnant. (imdb)

A prostitute finds redemption in some Hawaiian isle thanks to a hard missionary man. (imdb)

While her husband inspects his rubber planatation, Leslie Crosbie murders Geoffrey Hammond. His widow has a letter written by Leslie asking him to meet her as her lover the night of the murder. (imdb)

Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham and set against the visually stunning backdrop of China during one of its most dramatic periods of upheaval, The Painted Veil tells a unique love story of an estranged husband and wife who find redemption and unexpected grace in a very unlikely place. (Warner Independent Pictures)

Well-to-do Chicagoan, Larry Darrell, breaks off his engagement to Isabel and travels the world seeking enlightenment, eventually finding his guru India... (imdb)

In Austria, Katrin is lonely after her sister's marriage and she agrees to marry her father's research associate Dr. Walter Fane. Fane takes her to China but constantly ignors her in favour of his medical research. Lonely Katrin has an affair with Jack Townsend of the British Embassy... (imdb)

Consisting of three adaptations of W. Somerset Maugham short stories, this film follows the tales of a verger, a jewelery dealer, and the patients of a sanatorium.

He had everything and wanted nothing. He learned that he had nothing and wanted everything. He saved the world and then it shattered. The path to enlightenment is as sharp and narrow as a razor's edge.

Medical student Philip fall in love with Mildred, a waitress. Although she is a flirt, they have a love affair. But when Philip is told about her constant infideliy, they break up. Mildred quits her job and becomes a prostitute. But Philip is still in love with her. (imdb)

Sadie Thompson arrives in Pago-Pago to start a new life, but when extremist missionary Davidson lashes out against her lifestyle and tries to force her back to San Francisco, she may lose her second chance. (imdb)

A young femme fatale-type woman realizes that the wealthy man she married is an incorrigible wastrel. (imdb)

At a lonely military outpost on American Samoa, sticky heat alternates with torrential rain. A ship quarantine strands here Sadie Thompson, a "breezy dame" who sets the Marines afire... and self-righteous Mr. Davidson, powerful head of the Mission Board, who suspects Sadie is a fugitive from the notorious Emerald Club of Honolulu. Meanwhile, Sadie is courted by crude but good-hearted Marine Sgt. Phil O'Hara. (IMDd)

When her long lost husband returns after her re-marriage, a woman decides to try life with two mates. (TCM.com)

An Englishman sought for murder escapes to South Seas island. (imdb)

Four of Somerset Maugham's short stories are brought to the screen with each introduced by the author himself. (imdb)

An American heiress marries into the British nobility. (TCM.com)

This film is successful in capturing the spirit of Maugham's tale of slovenly remittance man Charles Laughton drinking and wenching away his monthly allowance in the picturesque Dutch Islands. Elsa Lanchester (the real-life Mrs. Laughton) plays the prim sister of sanctimonious missionary Tyrone Guthrie, who slowly regenerates the wastrelly Laughton. Our hero redeems himself fully through his courageous behavior during a cholera epidemic. (allmovie.com)

Mr. Gray is the new Resident in Charge of the Welcome Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Islands are full of life, but the only other Europeans are the "sanctimonious, psalm-singing" brother-sister missionary team of Martha and Owen Jordans, and the Honourable Ted - a hard-drinking, womanizing social outcast whose English family pays him to stay away. Martha and Ted become an unlikely team when cholera threatens the islands and they must do their best to stop its spread. (imdb)

A beautiful Austrian refugee in England--who is also a Nazi agent--marries a scholarly English pacifist. He nives near a secret military base she needs to get information about so she can help in Hitler's planned invasion of England. (imdb)

Loosely inspired from Gauguin's life, the story of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged stockbrocker who abandons his middle-classed life, his family, his duties to start painting, what he has always wanted to do. He is from now on a awful human being, wholly devoted to his ideal: beauty. (imdb)

An adulteress tries to redeem herself by helping her doctor husband fight an epidemic in China. (TCM.com)

A young girl, Margaret Dauncey, is caught between the forces of a charlatan magician, Oliver Haddo, whom she is unable to resist,and the love of a young surgeon, Arthur Burdon, who has saved her from being a helpless cripple by performing a delicate operation on her spine which startled the medical world. (imdb)

Three for the Show is a musical remake of the 1940 comedy Too Many Husbands, which in turn was based on a play by Somerset Maugham. In her next-to-last film, Betty Grable plays Julie, a popular musical comedy stars whose husband Marty (Jack Lemmon) is reported missing in action during WW2. After an appropriate waiting period, Julie makes plans to marry Marty's best friend Vernon (Gower Champion), even though she still carries a torch for her "late" husband. (allmovie.com)

A medical student with a club foot falls for a beautiful but ambitious waitress. She soon leaves him, but gets pregnant and comes back to him for help. (imdb)

Charming Sinners was a stilted adaptation of Somerset Maugham's play The Constant Wife. Robert Miles (Clive Brook) starts the ball rolling when he falls in love with Anne-Marie Whitley (Mary Nolan), the best friend of his own wife Kathryn (Ruth Chatterton). In retaliation, Kathryn begins a flirtation with her former boyfriend Karl Kraley (William Powell). After reels and reels of verbal fencing, the status quo is re-established, and Robert and Kathryn are reunited. (imdb)

In spite of a fine cast and director, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer somehow managed to turn the stage play by W. Somerset Maugham into merely a classy-looking program picture. The Cheneys are "veddy" proper upper-class Englishmen, so it's a shock in the 1890s when Lady Catherine, wife of Lord Clive Cheney, runs off with Hugh Porteous, who was best man at the wedding. (allrovi.com)

The film is made from three short stories by W. Somerset Maugham. The first, "The Ant and the Grasshopper" concerns the trials and tribulations a ne'er-do-well brother, Tom Ramsey, puts his prim-and-proper businessman brother, George Ramsey through. (imdb)

An adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle.

Maurice and Stella Trent are happily married. When Maurice is crippled in an airplane crash, he and his mother send for his brother Colin to come help keep Stella busy. He is to show her a good time during what promises to be a 5 month recovery before an operation will allow Maurice to walk again. Stella and Colin become very close, and things come to a boil when Maurice believes his life may not be worth living any longer after all. (imdb)

Latvian feature film adaptation of eponymous novel by W. Somerset Maugham.

A lawyer is preparing to defend a rich, respected man's wife, who killed a friend of the family who was attempting to sexually assault her. The scenario changes abruptly for all involved when the lawyer discovers a love letter from the woman to the murdered man. (MUBI)

A staid, dull Englishman abruptly deserts his wife and children to become a painter in the South Seas.

The wife of a Malaysian planter kills an employee of her husband one night, but her stated motive begins to appear not entirely truthful.