It stars Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, and Herbert Marshall, with a supporting cast including Lucile Watson, Frank Latimore, and Elsa Lanchester.

The Razor's Edge tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life.

His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune.

The Razor's Edge was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture, with Anne Baxter winning Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

In 1919, at a Chicago country club, Elliott Templeton, an expatriate who has been living in France, has returned to the United States to visit, among other people, his niece Isabel.

Larry works in a coal mine in France, where a drunk defrocked priest, Kosti, urges him to travel to India to learn from a mystic.

The holy man urges Larry to go back to his people but to not lose his awareness of the infinite beauty of the world and of God.

Later, while slumming at a disreputable bar in the Rue de Lappe, they encounter Larry's childhood friend Sophie Nelson, now a drunkard and drug user, and her abusive pimp.

Maugham and Larry later visit Elliott on his deathbed in Nice, where he tells Gray that he will now have enough money to pay his father's debts and rebuild the business.

"In the final scene of the movie, we see Larry with a certain look of contentment on his face, toiling on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, as he hoists cargo in the rain.

In August 1945, producer Darryl F. Zanuck had the second unit begin shooting in the mountains around Denver, Colorado, which were to portray the Himalayas in the film.

Although Maugham wanted his friend (whom he had in mind when he created the character) Gene Tierney for Isabel,[4] Zanuck chose Maureen O'Hara but told her not to tell anyone.

[8] An extensive advertising campaign had been launched to promote the film's premiere, which Motion Picture Herald dubbed "impressive in scope, even for so blasé a city as New York."

[8][10] New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther panned The Razor's Edge, complaining of its inability to explain the protagonist's spiritual awakening, and of "glib but vacuous dialogue" that hamstrung the actors, shortcomings he blamed on the limitations of the underlying Maugham story, which, said Crowther, was "a vague and uncertain encroachment upon a mystical moral realm, more emotional than intellectual.