Of Human Bondage

(1934, USA, 83min, b/w)
d John Cromwell p Pandro S. Berman sc Lester Cohen ph Henry W. Gerrard ed William Morgan ad Carroll Clark, Van Nest Polgase m Max Steiner cast Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Frances Dee, Kay Johnson, Reginald Denny, Alan Hale

Although abounding with such risqué material as unwedded cohabitation, single motherhood, prostitution and syphilis, this is a superficial trot through Maugham’s novel, enlivened only by a fiery Davis in her star-making turn as the slatternly shrew of a cockney waitress to whom Howard feels eternally bound because he once cared enough to ask her to marry him. Sympathy is guaranteed by his long face and buttoned-up exterior, concealing the sensitivity and melancholy of a failed artist, and the Englishman’s classically pointless shame, a clubfoot. Davis aside, Maugham’s cold-hearted cruelty is cripplingly underplayed and the final scene, pilfered from Sunrise, is radically misjudged in ham-fistedly replacing psychological resolution with a cacophony of car horns; by that time, however, Davis is out of the picture and along with her, any reason to care.