OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934)

Philip (Leslie Howard) is a young Englishman—sensitive, passive, afflicted with a club foot—living in Paris and studying to be a painter, but his mentor tells him he's wasting his time, saying his work doesn't show talent, "just industry and intelligence." He goes back to London for medical school where he is treated like a freak, with teachers making him show his foot to the other students. He makes some friends, including good-natured Harry (Reginald Denny), and most of them assume that Philip is quite sophisticated because he painted nudes in Paris. But he's actually rather shy, so it's a surprise when he takes out Mildred (Bette Davis), a snippy Cockney barmaid who treats him like dirt—when he's upset that she doesn't seem excited about the prospect of a second date, she snaps back, "If you don’t take me out, someone else will!" He becomes masochistically obsessed with her even though she treats him like dirt, and when he proposes to her, she informs him she's going to be marrying his friend Emil. Eventually Philip starts dating Norah, a romance writer who is good to him, but when Mildred shows up on his doorstep one night, pregnant and unmarried, he leaves Norah to devote himself to Mildred. Well, guess what? Mildred starts seeing his friend Harry, and when that goes south, she tries to get back in Philip's good graces again until she explodes in fury one night ("It made me sick when I had to let you kiss me! And after you kissed me, I always wiped my mouth!!") and burns up the bonds that Philip was relying on for school tuition. Finally, Philip has his fill of her, and she leaves, becoming a street tramp with a sick baby. You can foresee her sad ending from a mile away. But can Philip ever shake his obsession and find happiness with someone else?

This is the movie that made Bette Davis a name to contend with, and also the movie that was probably responsible for her first Oscar, won a year later for DANGEROUS, largely seen as a consolation prize for not even being nominated for BONDAGE. She gives a fierce performance, coming off as one of the harshest harridans in Hollywood history. Her role is important but rather surprisingly she doesn't get a lot of screen time. Still, it's her you'll remember about this film, otherwise an average pre-Code melodrama, based on a Somerset Maugham novel. Howard is fine in another somewhat mealy-mouthed role like Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind, but he practically vanishes when Davis shares the screen with him. There is solid support from Reginald Denny, Reginald Owen, and Alan Hale; unfortunately, Frances Dee and Kay Johnson, as Philip's other romantic interests, don’t fare well against Davis. In the last half-hour or so, it's difficult to tell how much time is passing, and too much plot is crammed into too little time. The movie is in the public domain so it's easy to find, but most of the prints are in poor shape, so stick with TCM showings for this one. [TCM]