Pre-code Hollywood #3: Of Human Bondage (US 1934)

There seems to be a mini-revival of interest in W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) at the moment. Today I read a review of a new production of his play The Circle (1921) at the Orange Tree in Richmond and I believe I’ve come across his work a couple of more times recently. It’s not surprising perhaps. Maugham was what would now be termed a ‘Queer writer’ and he travelled and worked in many parts of Asia and Europe, often creating satirical melodramas about colonial life. Although I’ve been aware of him and his work for a long time, I haven’t seen that much and the only film I remember clearly is the The Letter (1940), a crime melodrama with Bette Davis as a woman accused of murder in colonial Malaya. I think it was William Wyler’s direction that attracted me and I watched several films by Wyler including Jezebel (1938) and The Little Foxes (1941) both starring Davis.

Of Human Bondage was written by Maugham just before the Great War started in 1914 and was published in 1915. It’s often thought to be his best novel, as a form of bildungsroman with autobiographical elements. This film adaptation, currently streaming on MUBI as part of an Oscars-themed strand, was adapted by Lester Cohen with Ann Coleman. The Oscar link is explained by the fact that a young Bette Davis (in her mid-twenties) was not nominated for the award of Best Actress but was ‘written in’ as a candidate by a sizeable number of Academy voters. She didn’t win (Claudette Colbert was in three successful pictures in 1934) but her performance was seen as the start of her rise to stardom. As in all the best Hollywood stories, Davis was actually out on loan from Warner Bros. when she made Of Human Bondage at RKO after several attempts to break away from the roles offered to her under her Warner Bros. contract.

The star of the film is Leslie Howard. It was directed by John Cromwell and featured a Max Steiner musical score. Howard plays Philip Carey who we first meet as an aspiring young artist in Paris who is, quite kindly but firmly, told that he has no talent. He decides to revert to his first possible career choice – to train as a doctor. He says he has only a ‘little money’ so he trains at St Bartholemew’s, a ‘Free Hospital’ back in London. Here he is humiliated by the Professor running the class when he is asked/told to remove his shoe and sock to show his club foot – “much more interesting” than the typical club foot of a young patient acting as a case study for the medical students. Philip has advantages in London. He is ‘well-spoken’ and clearly well-educated, but has now suffered two blows to his sense of self-esteem. This perhaps has a bearing on the events when he has an exchange with a waitress in a café. Mildred (Bette Davis) is pointed out by his friend Dunsford (Reginald Sheffield) who thinks she is “marvellous” and begs Philip to say something to her so that he, Dunsford, can meet her. Philip calls her over and gently pokes fun at her. The way she reacts shocks Dunsford who apologises to Philip saying Mildred is “ill-natured and contemptible”. But we see that Philip is interested in her and a relationship does slowly begin. However, we and Philip have also seen Mildred flirting with another customer, the rakish but buffoon-like Emil – a role for Alan Hale, the character actor/supporting player in nearly 250 films according to IMDb.

Philip persists and woos Mildred, only to be rebuffed after each date. I won’t spoil the whole plot but it’s clear that Mildred is yet another ‘gold-digger’ from early 1930s cinema. Mildred will return to him when her plans go wrong and she gets pregnant, once again using him. The narrative does allow him two other possible romances with first the wealthy Norah (Kay Johnson) a romantic novelist using a male nom de plume and later the more girlish Sally (Frances Dee) who does seem to be the ‘perfect’ partner for him (i.e. the conventional good girl). But Mildred is his real love and she is always likely to be the source of drama in the story. The mystery for me and I suspect for some other audiences is why he would prefer Mildred to the more attractive alternatives of Norah or Sally? Partly this is because, although I admire and respect Bette Davis as an actor, I very rarely find her attractive or appealing as a character. Charlotte in Now Voyager (1942) is one of the few roles in which I’m rooting for her. Clearly I’m out of line here, but the real question is what does Maugham present as the reason why Philip is willing to be humiliated in his quest to marry Mildred?

There is quite a bit of attention focused on Philip’s club foot and how this constrains him in walking. By all accounts Maugham himself had a stammer as a young man. If Philip is so self-conscious about his foot, does this in any way explain why he feels that winning Mildred is his only way of proving his physical problem does not prevent him being seen as desirable or does he just enjoy being punished by Mildred’s behaviour? The other psychological explanation is that Philip himself has somehow never got over the loss of his parents and though he has some income granted by an uncle, he has no father figure to look towards. A putative surrogate does then appear in the form of a patient Philip meets in hospital, Mr Altheny is in many ways an old-fashioned Englishman and a Yorkshireman to boot who has nine children, five of them girls including Sally. Athelney might have many reactionary ideas about women’s liberation but he’s presented as a father who is respected by his children and like the art teacher in Paris he appears to have good advice for someone like Philip. The adaptation may have excised much of the novel – I haven’t read the novel so I can’t be sure, but it feels like the film script is missing something that might explain Philip’s behaviour more clearly.

Kingsley Canham, who wrote a short guide to John Cromwell’s films (see The Hollywood Professionals, Vol. 5, Tantivy Press 1976), sees Of Human Bondage favourably as compressing a literary classic into 83 powerful minutes compared to the 120 minutes of comparable films at Warner Bros or the later films produced by Ross Hunter at Universal in the 1950s. In this comparison he sees the film not as a literary classic but as a ‘woman’s picture’ and what is captured in those 83 minutes is pure emotion. Canham sees Cromwell as working with the constraint of lower budgets at RKO, so not spending time admiring complicated sets but using a moving camera and close shots to frame Philip and Mildred along with devices such as montage sequences for time passing, blurred dissolves as transitions and short fantasy moments when Mildred ‘appears’ in Philip’s thoughts. I’m not aware of the work of the cinematographer Henry Gerrard who sadly died soon after this film was released at the age of 35. He was born in London but he is first credited as an assistant in Hollywood in 1918, though his first full credit was in 1927 at Paramount. I agree with Canham that the picture benefits from the moving camera and overall I found the film much more visually interesting than I had anticipated.

Cromwell had only a limited budget and needed stock footage and back projection/matte work to present Paris and London. Many of the leading cast members were British actors in Hollywood. Oddly, all the main men were British (apart from Hale) but the three women were all American. Kay Johnson and Frances Dee use a fairly neutral American accent which is not noticeable most of the time and presents no problems but the extraordinary vocal performance by Bette Davis certainly does. I’ve seen one explanation which suggests that Davis listened to a Londoner working as a domestic servant for several weeks rather than hiring a voice coach. The result for me is that her accent seems to slither all over the place. Again I’m probably in a minority and her accent becomes just part of the overall presentation of a monstrous Mildred. On the other hand, for many modern audiences it is a bravura performance by Bette Davis and signals the beginning to her rise to stardom. I just wonder how Ida Lupino would have handled the role ten years later? In 1934 Variety was perceptive in noting that despite its performances, this 1915 story was dated and that in middle America box office success would be limited. This proved to be correct.

One last point is the film’s relationship to the Production Code requirements. It was released officially on June 28th 1934 in New York and the new Production Code Administration under Joseph Breen required all films to be submitted for approval after 1st July 1934. So it just scraped in ‘pre-Code’. Although the adaptation excised some of the seedier aspects of the novel, Davis is presented in clinging dresses and she moves suggestively in ways that would appear shocking in the succeeding years. Mildred’s part-time prostitution in the novel has gone but there are other aspects of the plot that remain – Mildred as an unwed mother, her multiple sex partners (including one of Philip’s fellow medical students) – that would cause problems for later films. It seems to me now that the film is a good case study in the changing approaches to acting both between the UK and the US and as the studio system settled in. Leslie Howard’s playing is now seen as dated and Bette Davis seems way ahead of its time. The clash of the two approaches is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film. Here’s a clip.