OF HUMAN BONDAGE

 

Of Human Bondage is a 1934 film that forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to add a "write-in" option for acting nominees. This was the result of incredible backlash when Bette's performance was not nominated. It is her performance that placed this movie on my 2023 must-see list. The story is based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel. It tells the tale of Philip Carey (Leslie Howard), a British man of some means, who abandons his hopes of being an artist and instead sets out to earn a degree in medicine. While in medical school he meets a lower-class waitress named Mildred Rogers (Bette Davis) and falls in love with her.

After Philip expresses his interest in Mildred, she rebuffs him continually, giving him just enough attention to string him along as she also pursues other gentlemen. She’s a mean, cold, self-serving, and manipulative woman and Davis has no problems leaning into these aspects with abandon. Despite Mildred’s treatment, Philip proposes marriage. It’s a proposal Mildred turns down so that she can marry someone else. Philip moves on with his life and finds a new girlfriend, but he ends up leaving her when Mildred returns… pregnant and abandoned by her husband. After providing Mildred with housing and seeing her through the birth of her child, Mildred again is nasty to Philip and destroys his career and finances. She leaves again, only to turn up later as a very sick woman whose child died, and who we are led to believe takes care of herself through prostitution. She’s vile to Philip yet again and it is only after she finally dies that Philip seems able to move on with his life. Philip’s bondage to Mildred is never really explained other than perhaps his incredibly low self-esteem, stemming from his club foot (a deformity that gets way too much attention in the story). It’s hard to be happy for Philip in the end because of what a milquetoast he was throughout the movie.

The film is very dated, the sound quality quite poor, and the filming still includes the dramatic too-close/overly lit facial close-up shots (used ad nauseam on Howard) that carry over from the days of silent films. The storytelling is quite incohesive, with characters appearing and disappearing as needed and with very little character development.

Though the central character is Philip, Leslie Howard portrays him in such a stiff way that it only makes Bette Davis seem that much more interesting. Her performance was very bold for its time, allowing her to step outside of just being “glamorous”. However, her most climactic scene (where she wipes her mouth showing Philip how much she had despised ever kissing him) I had already seen in retrospectives of her career. Because of that, it didn’t provide me with quite the appreciation of the totality of her performance I had hoped for. That said, her characterization (shaky cockney accent and all) was by far superior to Claudette Colbert's in It Happened One Night. It Happened was a better-produced film overall, but Bette should have taken home the acting award, not Colbert.