[The] charge that Maugham was merely a commercial hack pandering to the tastes of a middlebrow audience is unjustified. A young author at the end of the Victorian era wanting to achieve popular success does not write a realistic and pessimistic slum novel (Liza of Lambeth, 1897), an iconoclastic story of a young man's suicide (The Hero, 1901), an account of a failed marriage, from which the wife is freed by her husband's timely death (Mrs. Craddock, 1902), or a bitterly cynical novel of a self-destructive concept of "honour" (The Merry-Go-Round, 1904). Furthermore, neither the philosophical core in Of Human Bondage (1915)—the meaninglessness of life—nor the amorality of the hero of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) are the ingredients to capture a mass audience. And many of the short stories, perhaps Maugham's finest writing, treat murder, suicide, and adultery with a kind of ironic detachment which is not the stuff of commercial authorship.

Those critics looking for signs of superficiality in Maugham have pointed to the number of adaptations of his writing for other media: the stage, radio, television, and film. Indeed, considering that his books have been made into forty films and hundreds of radio and television plays, it would be fair to say that no other serious writer's work has been so often presented in other media. Whether it follows that Maugham's stories are adaptable because they are entertaining in a merely superficial way is open to question. An examination of the translations of his fiction to the screen reveals a number of significant things … about Maugham's work…. (p. 262)

There are many reasons for the frequency with which radio and television producers and film companies have turned to Maugham's stories. The short story is almost always promising material for these media because it shares with them many of the restrictions of time, characterization, and narration; and the "unity of impression" which Poe ascribed to the short story can be maintained on radio or on the screen. Beyond this, Maugham was one of those prose fiction writers who was also a skilled dramatist, and this craft can be seen in all of his fiction His dialogue—whether witty, colloquial, or earthy—often needs little alteration by the screenwriter; and his realist's external point of view, with its diagnostic concentration on physical characteristics, provides memorable roles….

Paradoxically, however, while Maugham's ability to tell a fascinating story and his dramatic skill made him a rich source for radio and film, his tone, attitudes and themes have frequently been found to be unacceptable for those media. His tolerance of man's follies and vices, the ironies inherent in his stories, and the cynicism with which he views people's pretensions, had appealed to many readers in the Twenties, the period of his first real popularity as a writer of fiction. Just as war-weary, disillusioned and embittered readers responded to Huxley and Waugh, they turned to The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil (1925), "The Fall of Edward Barnard" (1921), and many other stories of rejection and escape. For the much more general audience which patronized films, however, and the producers who took the public pulse. Maugham's writing was a rather too bitter or realistic slice of life. Consistently, from the earliest film adaptation to the numerous radio and television plays of the Fifties, his stories were made blander, safer, and more narrowly moralistic than he had ever conceived them. (p. 263)

[Censorship] of the portrayal of sexual matters was certainly not unique to films of Maugham stories. In a more peculiar way, though, the movie studios were uneasy about the amorality, or what they considered the immorality, of many of his characters, situations, and especially the stance of "amused tolerance" from which the author viewed his creations. (p. 265)

While highly successful at the box office, [the film versions] … consistently stripped the original stories of their realism, cynicism, and satiric purpose. (p. 267)