In summer of 1984, American popular culture was dominated by Ghostbusters, a blockbuster that combined sharp comedy and spectacular visual effects on a scale — and in an unlikely harmony — moviegoers had never seen before. Its great success advanced the careers of everyone involved, not least that of Bill Murray. Having already been an early (if not immediately beloved) Saturday Night Live cast member and given much-praised performances in comedies like Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie, he brought his famously detached sensibility to the role of the ghost-busting Dr. Peter Venkman and thereby became the most in-demand comic actor in Hollywood. When, less than six months later, The Razor’s Edge opened with Murray in the starring role, fans bought tickets in hopes of more laughs.It’s not as if they hadn’t been warned. The Razor’s Edge was adapted from a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, a popular writer in his day, but hardly a straightforward humorist. On the promotional circuit, Murray stressed that this was “a serious movie,” not a comedy but a drama. Nevertheless, both critics and audiences at the time had trouble accepting him in the role of Larry Darrell, a once-lighthearted young man who comes back from World War I overwhelmed by the need to venture back out into the world in search of the ultimate truths of existence. Murray was driven to make the film (for which he took pay only as co-screenwriter) out of the deep identification he felt with the character, which can only have intensified the sting of its failure.That Larry was a fellow Chicagoan only explains part of the appeal. Murray’s thirtieth birthday, the birth of his first child, and the death of friends like Doug Kenney and John Belushi (who’s indirectly eulogized in the film) had put him in a reflective state of mind, while his growing wealth and fame brought personal and psychological challenges of their own. The prospect of exotic location shoots in Paris and the Himalayas, where Larry’s peripatetic seeking takes him, may have sweetened the deal. Revisited today, the result has plenty of memorable moments, some of them possessed of genuine beauty and grandeur. Alas, the story Maugham tells in the novel, rich with the subtleties of memory, perception, and deception, doesn’t survive the Hollywood tendencies toward over-compression and literal-mindedness.It must be said that some of the blame lies with Murray himself, whose goofball instincts clash against the nineteen-twenties setting; as he later admitted, he and director John Byrum were wrong to insist on a period piece. (Just imagine the possibilities of Murray playing a returned Vietnam veteran instead.) Regardless, he continued to follow his inner Larry in the aftermath, decamping to Paris with his young family in order to live and learn far from the American scene he knew. It was there that he encountered the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whose influence on Murray’s persona we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. That marked another step along the path of experience that would lead him to play wiser, sadder, yet never entirely unfunny characters in pictures like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation — and, in so doing, win dramatic respectability after all.Related Content:The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic PersonaThe Zen of Bill Murray: I Want to Be “Really Here, Really in It, Really Alive in the Moment”Listen to Bill Murray Lead a Guided Meditation on How It Feels to Be Bill MurrayAn Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of FameBill Murray, the Struggling New SNL Cast Member, Apologizes for Not Being Funny (1977)15 Great Films Adapted from Equally Great NovelsBased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.