TURN-ONS AND TURN-OFFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : Excellent Good Fair Poor : COMPACT DISCS

“The Moon and Sixpence” by Somerset Maugham. Read by Frank Langella. Music by Don Heckman. (Two cassettes; abridged.) Caedmon. Maugham’s fictional version of the life of artist Paul Gauguin, who abandoned family and metropolitan prosperity for Tahitian poverty and art, receives a competent and listenable telling from Langella, whose tone--ever so slightly prissy, superior and detached--is well suited to Maugham’s narration, which is all those things. A minor irritant is the preserving of Maugham’s uncontracted verb forms, which read perfectly well but sound awkwardly literary and artificial. Let apostrophes thrive.