Of Human Bondage (1934)

Paris in the 1920s. Leslie Howard is a striving young artist with a club foot who discovers he has no particular talent so he retreats to London and Medical School at St. Bartholomew's. (Nota bene: Living without a job in Paris, then deciding on medical school in London, with no visible means of support, and he just claimed to have "only a little" money.) Right off the bat, we can recognize this as a reckless fantasy from Somerset Maugham. Maugham was a decent writer who was considered middle brow and never credited with anything resembling a master work.In London he meets tarty Bette Davis, an uncultivated waitress, and, his mind distracted by her, he has evidently forgotten the difference between the male and female pelvises he used to joke about, he fails his finals in medical school. (When is this guy going to have to get a job?) She's brushed him off rudely. "Good-bye to bad rubbish." But he broods and dreams of their being together, in love, sipping champagne in fancy night clubs and cooing to each other. (But he'll have to find work first, won't he?) He does manage to work his way into Davis's good graces again -- him and his tuxedo -- but she's as flirty and sharp tongued as ever. He buys her a wedding ring but she tells him she's going to marry a German baron and walks off. Poor Leslie Howard. His love life and his mood have their ups and downs.Well, yes, good riddance to bad rubbish, the pragmatic viewer thinks, but as Howard's next amour, Norah, a settled and sensible authoress puts it, "It's almost as if you were bound to her." Howard's reply, that everybody is bound to something or someone in life, is a non sequitur. We're talking Bette Davis here in one of her bitchiest roles. Yet, when she returns to him, tearful and pregnant, even confessing to the lie that she was married, he sloughs off Norah and takes in the exploitative ex waitress, living on the fruits of love we must imagine.So Davis has her baby, stares at it in the hospital bed, and remarks, "Funny looking little thing, isn't it. I can hardly believe it's mine." And this is presumably just after delivery, during the 24-hour-or-so launch window during which an irrevocable bond forms between mother and infant. It could have been worse, I suppose. She could have said, "It looks just like my German baron." In any case, she promptly farms the kid out to a nursery.Life with Howard's nickum is no bowl of cherries, I assure you. He lavishes gifts on her (where did the money come from?) but she finds him boring and cultivates a relationship with an old friend of his. Not only that, but she taunts Howard with it. By this time I was having flashbacks to my marriage. She runs off to Paris with Howard's friend -- well, former friend, leaving Howard to turn slowly and stare silently and morosely into the camera. But Davis, being what she is, is thrown out of the former friend's house, despite following him around, panting like a poodle, until he must call the police and have her literally dragged away from his doorstep.By this point, Howard is half nuts, cramming for his medical exams again. Maybe this time he'll start earning some of that money that keeps appearing from nowhere. Also, by this point, we're getting tired of Bette Davis playing ping pong with men's hearts. Where the hell is the other woman? She swings through the door at 52:14 -- the enchanting Frances Dee. Thank God. She's wearing a black dress, black gloves, a black hat, and white collar and cuffs. The use of stark black and white outfits in black-and-white movies was a standard tactic for drawing attention to an important figure in the plot. Dee is as charming on screen as she was in life. She married actor Joel McRea around this time and they stayed together until he died on their 57th wedding anniversary in 1990. They donated hundreds of acres to the YMCA.Well, Howard and Dee develop a healthy relationship, while Howard carries on as a student at medical school. But, little did Howard know that Davis would show up yet again, lugging the baby around, one step from whoredom. He generously allows her the use of his bedroom. She's grateful and apologetic but it's not long before she's leaving hints of marriage around like my cat sheds clutches of hair on the carpet in mismatching colors. Very irritating, especially when you're too lazy to pick them up.Davis become her demanding self again. She orders him to destroy his early paintings from Paris, one of them a mediocre updating of Dominique's odalisque, with the same missing gluteal sulcus. I don't want to run out of space so let me sum up the activities that follow by saying Davis destroys his art, his medical texts, his bonds (that's where it came from), and storms out, leaving Howard down at the heels. It's 1934 now and a bad position to be in. I won't explain how but everyone gets what he deserve.The principals are okay. Davis overacts and signals each emotion like a traffic light. Think of what Angela Lansbury could have done with the role. The director has a discomposing habit of having the actors look and speak directly into the camera lens. Sometimes the moment is important, sometimes not. Usually the shot is eerily in close up, other times from halfway across a room. When possible, John Cromwell has TWO actors speaking into the lens at the same time.

. . . to the MGM Brass, desperately hoping that OF HUMAN BONDAGE would win her the coveted role of "Scarlett O'Hara" in that studio's three-times-longer copy-cat triangular love affair melodrama set during the War to Stamp Out Lazy Racist Confederate Traitors' Sadistic Black Slavery Racket, aka GONE WITH THE WIND. Since this BONDAGE story was crafted by a Professional Writer, it's five times as good and twice as short as Martha Mitchell's Murky Mess, GWTW. As we all know, Bette Who's-Counting-My-Six-Abortions Davis was beat out for the part of Scarlett by a crazy chick on furlough from the nuthouse. It's hard to see how Bette's strained effort in BONDAGE to speak Londoner could lead to ANY future jobs on the Big Screen (except, perhaps, as the witch who unhands Bruce Dern in HUSH HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE). To rub salt in the wound of the Cracked Davis Vanity Cup, MGM's fat cats DID see fit to cast Leslie "Phil the Pill" Howard to reprise his BONDAGE performance as GWTW's quintessential milquetoast, Ashley Wilkes. MGM also signed on BONDAGE composer Max Steiner to score their Treasonous bladder buster. Though few people remember it Today, BONDAGE almost completed a GWTW Trifecta, as it convinced MGM hotshot David O. Selznick to award the Plum Role of "Rhett Butler" to Alan Hale. However, when the S.S. Minnow entered a Time Warp during a planned "three-hour cruise" just before GWTW filming began, Dave was forced to substitute the relative unknown Clark Gable instead.

Not being into bondage myself, this did less than nothing for me. It was one of the least enjoyable films I've ever watched. Bette Davis is nasty in many of the films I've seen her in, and here she evidently finds her true metier, which will furnish her with roles for the rest of her career. The part was memorably unpleasant.Some films date, others don't. This does. It's like looking into a vanished world. People like Mildred Rogers and Philip Carey don't exist any more, if they ever did. Mildred did have a forerunner, however, in the person of Moll Hackabout, who features in Hogarth's series of ostensibly moral engravings, The Harlot's Progress. Their fates are similar, although Mildred's terminal illness, for the purposes of the film, has been changed from syphilis to tuberculosis. More excruciating than Mildred's fate was Philip's insatiable, obsessive and inexplicable desire for humiliation. Was this in some way autobiographical ? Even more astounding was Life Magazine's opinion that Davis gave "probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress". In one of her multiple divorces Bette's husband cited her "cruel and inhuman manner". Her daughter described her as an "overbearing alcoholic". I'm not surprised.

A must watch film, I genuinely loved it. Easy to watch and get drawn into, not that dated at all, and a good story we can all relate to.Lots of reviews here waxing lyrical about Bette Davis' bawdy performance, and in general I go along with them, bar her pitiful attempt at a cockney accent.Its worse than Dick van Dykes (Mary Poppins) and I never thought I'd say that about anyone. Dick had a naiive comedic consistency in his americanised version. Bette is all over the place, mainly sounding like a posh girl pretending badly to be cockney and throwing in intonations I've never heard anyone speak. Very false and messed up, and irritating - but that is what she's portraying too, so it kinda works. She was either sheltered and made no attempt to get out and hear how people speak or she wouldn't have dared do what she did, or else she has no accent skills.Beyond the accent, yes, Bette makes the film funky and fun. The other actresses I think perform better, are more convincing character wise. Kay Johnson (Norah) is stiff upper lip British and understated, a mirror to Leslie Howards character, though lighter. Frances Dee (Sally) plays a young girl who accepts her place with a charm and a wisdom beyond her years - and is the heavenly beauty of the film.Watch, enjoy, and indulge in reminiscences of the unrequited loves in your life.