Of Human Bondage is the film to point to whenever some marketing guy is wanging on about “brand”. In it, Bette Davis demonstrates as clearly as can be done that it’s product – in the movies the role and performance – that’s critical. Get the product right and the brand takes care of itself. In doing it so brilliantly, Davis transformed her career. This was her breakthrough, in a part that most of her peers turned down – not on-brand enough for them.
Davis lobbied for it and forced Warner Bros to lend her out to RKO to play it. It not only made her a star but whipped up talk out of nowhere of an Oscar nomination for the relatively unknown actress. In the end studio boss Jack Warner, ever the churl, went to great lengths to thwart Davis’s Oscar hopes. (Claudette Colbert won, for It Happened One Night, so no real argument here). But the facts speak for themselves – the role got the town talking about her. Before Of Human Bondage Davis’s “brand” had been one lightweight bottle blonde among many. From here on out it was Bette Davis, the actress who’ll do whatever is necessary. (Which is a brand in itself, of course.)
Davis plays a sullen but cunning waitress who becomes the object of infatuation of Leslie Howard’s Philip Carey, a failed painter and now trainee doctor. Philip has a club foot and the self-esteem of a kicked dog. Though Mildred sneers at him at every turn, the hobbling Philip woos her relentlessly, only to suffers one rebuff after another. The story of the film is the story of this relationship – Philip at various points summoning up the gumption to give Mildred the heave-ho, then getting on with his life with another (much nicer) woman, before Mildred returns, down on her luck, to put the financial and emotional squeeze on him all over again. On each return she’s sunk lower, while Philip has gone up a bit in the world. But no matter how high he goes, he cannot break free of the “bondage”. Mildred is his club foot personified.
What can it be referring to, this doomed infatuation, this club foot? It’s been suggested that Philip is a self-portrait of Maugham himself, a qualified doctor, who had a similar unequal and extortionate relationship with a rent boy.
“There’s usually one who loves and one who is loved,” Philip says at one point, to one of the sweet women he gets together with in a Mildred-free period. This is a Somerset Maugham story and painfully asymmetrical power relations between men and women often feature. See, for example, The Painted Veil – in 2006’s lush but no-less-desperate version it it was Naomi Watts giving Ed Norton the romantic runaround in China.
In the original novel, Mildred eventually contracts syphilis as a result of her sexual activities. The filmic Mildred also gets ill, with tuberculosis. 1934 was the year the Hays Code was first introduced, so the change was made for that reason. The change doesn’t do the plot any real damage. In the 1930s both spelt doom.
The film was remade in 1946, with Eleanor Parker in the Davis role. And again in 1964, with Kim Novak as Mildred. None of the three actresses get the Cockney accent right, though Davis gets nearest and is the only one of the three to nail the character, because she goes all-in and to hell with her image. And though her performance is a touch strident, the speech that got that Oscar talk going – “It made me sick when I had to let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me… And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!” – is absolutely sensational and worth watching the film for on its own.
Leslie Howard, less incendiary but relentlessly watchable, a man in the grip of forces he cannot control rather than an out-and-out bonehead, holds it all together with some dignity. Howard’s Philip needs to be sympathetic at some level for this to work, rather than just a boob who needs to have a word with himself. He is.
The result is a cracking melodrama and bombs along at a hell of speed thanks to John Cromwell’s incredibly tight direction. I watched the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, which is about as good as it’s ever going to get – bit soft, bit grainy. It’s not been done with the original camera negative, second or possibly third generation material was used. How good Henry Gerrard’s cinematography would look with a better image.
Of Human Bondage – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
