Romancefest 2017: Of Human Bondage

OF HUMAN BONDAGE is a title I've heard my entire life and never bothered to check out because it seemed so lofty. The 1934 film is based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. I guess it must have fallen into the public domain because the copy I got from Movie Madness was from a print so bad as to be almost unwatchable – but not quite. If you can see through the mud and hear through the noise, it's worth a watch.

Quite the opposite of being about big stuffy ideas, OF HUMAN BONDAGE is the very small and emotional story of a club-footed artist (Leslie Howard) who gives up on art to become a doctor when he is told he has no talent. He pursues his new career half-heartedly, for obvious reasons, and finds himself infatuated with a waitress (Bette Davis). Davis alternates between openly treating Howard like shit, making fun of his disability and verbally abusing him, and stringing him along by not quite rejecting all of his come ons, shrugging, "I don't mind."

Most of the movie is about this rocky relationship: poor Leslie Howard has low self esteem and can't stop thinking about Davis – Davis can't stop treating Howard like shit. She eventually marries someone else (Alan Hale!), Howard meets a nice lady (Kay Johnson) but then Davis shows back up again, pregnant and manipulating Howard into helping her. This ends Howard's nice new relationship, and he devotes himself to Davis again before she disappears.

Rinse, repeat, this time with Howard meeting Frances Dee and her whole family, all of whom treat him nicely and help him recover from his low self esteem. Still, Davis turns up again. And so on.

This is the movie that made Bette Davis a star, and it's an interesting star turn because it's an almost entirely unlikable character. She is not a traditional romantic lead here. In fact, she's the embodiment of the "bad girl" who will ruin your life, if you let her. Still, she's alluring and you can see why Howard's interested. She's also not totally unsympathetic as her story reaches its tragic end.

Howard, of course, is great, and whenever I see one of his films I always think about what a shame it is that his plane was shot down in 1943, robbing film fans of decades more of his performances. He still made his mark, but it's a shame he died so young because he could have been an even bigger star.