As you must be aware by this time, Darryl F. Zanuck and the rest of the 20th Century Fox bunch have sunk untold millions into the salaries, set, costumes, and the rest of the impedimenta involved in this latest production of theirs. To help secure such a huge investment, almost as large a sum of cash has been lavished upon a publicity campaign second in magnitude only to the big. "Due in the Sun" build-up. If you happen to be an admirer of W. Somerset Maugham you may think it was worth all this effort, but if you're not, it will probably just add up to an awfully long three hours.

No one can successfully argue that the picture fails to achieve its main objective--an elaborate yet faithful translation into celluloid of Maugham's best-seller of a few years back. But in this very success lies what is perhaps the film's greatest weakness; for stripped of all the shiny trappings of mysticism and profundity that a facile pen alone can put across, the story reduces itself to a basic substance which is, at most, pretty shadowy. It's really too bad that when the Hollywood moguls finally forgot about the kind of treatment they usually inflict upon a novel they couldn't have picked a story of at least some significance.

As the protagonist, a singularly strange young man apparently dissatisfied with just about everything, who journeys hither and you about the globe in search of his soul. Tyrone Power tries very hard and succeeds in being adequate, if nothing more. Most of the remainder of a large and expensive cast, which includes Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter, Herbert Marshall, and John Payne, among innumerable others, gives the same sort of not-particularly-exciting performance. Clifton Webb, in a part which seems almost to have been custom-tailored for him, makes the most of every one of his opportunities, and should merit the greatest share of whatever acting murels you might care to hand out.

But on the whole, it all seems rather meaningless. Tyrone ends up by drifting off to parts unknown, while his audience still isn't exactly sure whether he really has found what he has been looking for all this time. It would seem that "The Razor's Edge," though it's had a pretty expensive honing, still isn't too sharp.