Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Robert J. Maxwell Paris in the 1920s. Leslie Howard is a striving young artist with a club foot who discovers he has no particular talent so he retreats to London and Medical School at St. Bartholomew's. (Nota bene: Living without a job in Paris, then deciding on medical school in London, with no visible means of support, and he just claimed to have "only a little" money.) Right off the bat, we can recognize this as a reckless fantasy from Somerset Maugham. Maugham was a decent writer who was considered middle brow and never credited with anything resembling a master work.In London he meets tarty Bette Davis, an uncultivated waitress, and, his mind distracted by her, he has evidently forgotten the difference between the male and female pelvises he used to joke about, he fails his finals in medical school. (When is this guy going to have to get a job?) She's brushed him off rudely. "Good-bye to bad rubbish." But he broods and dreams of their being together, in love, sipping champagne in fancy night clubs and cooing to each other. (But he'll have to find work first, won't he?) He does manage to work his way into Davis's good graces again -- him and his tuxedo -- but she's as flirty and sharp tongued as ever. He buys her a wedding ring but she tells him she's going to marry a German baron and walks off. Poor Leslie Howard. His love life and his mood have their ups and downs.Well, yes, good riddance to bad rubbish, the pragmatic viewer thinks, but as Howard's next amour, Norah, a settled and sensible authoress puts it, "It's almost as if you were bound to her." Howard's reply, that everybody is bound to something or someone in life, is a non sequitur. We're talking Bette Davis here in one of her bitchiest roles. Yet, when she returns to him, tearful and pregnant, even confessing to the lie that she was married, he sloughs off Norah and takes in the exploitative ex waitress, living on the fruits of love we must imagine.So Davis has her baby, stares at it in the hospital bed, and remarks, "Funny looking little thing, isn't it. I can hardly believe it's mine." And this is presumably just after delivery, during the 24-hour-or-so launch window during which an irrevocable bond forms between mother and infant. It could have been worse, I suppose. She could have said, "It looks just like my German baron." In any case, she promptly farms the kid out to a nursery.Life with Howard's nickum is no bowl of cherries, I assure you. He lavishes gifts on her (where did the money come from?) but she finds him boring and cultivates a relationship with an old friend of his. Not only that, but she taunts Howard with it. By this time I was having flashbacks to my marriage. She runs off to Paris with Howard's friend -- well, former friend, leaving Howard to turn slowly and stare silently and morosely into the camera. But Davis, being what she is, is thrown out of the former friend's house, despite following him around, panting like a poodle, until he must call the police and have her literally dragged away from his doorstep.By this point, Howard is half nuts, cramming for his medical exams again. Maybe this time he'll start earning some of that money that keeps appearing from nowhere. Also, by this point, we're getting tired of Bette Davis playing ping pong with men's hearts. Where the hell is the other woman? She swings through the door at 52:14 -- the enchanting Frances Dee. Thank God. She's wearing a black dress, black gloves, a black hat, and white collar and cuffs. The use of stark black and white outfits in black-and-white movies was a standard tactic for drawing attention to an important figure in the plot. Dee is as charming on screen as she was in life. She married actor Joel McRea around this time and they stayed together until he died on their 57th wedding anniversary in 1990. They donated hundreds of acres to the YMCA.Well, Howard and Dee develop a healthy relationship, while Howard carries on as a student at medical school. But, little did Howard know that Davis would show up yet again, lugging the baby around, one step from whoredom. He generously allows her the use of his bedroom. She's grateful and apologetic but it's not long before she's leaving hints of marriage around like my cat sheds clutches of hair on the carpet in mismatching colors. Very irritating, especially when you're too lazy to pick them up.Davis become her demanding self again. She orders him to destroy his early paintings from Paris, one of them a mediocre updating of Dominique's odalisque, with the same missing gluteal sulcus. I don't want to run out of space so let me sum up the activities that follow by saying Davis destroys his art, his medical texts, his bonds (that's where it came from), and storms out, leaving Howard down at the heels. It's 1934 now and a bad position to be in. I won't explain how but everyone gets what he deserve.The principals are okay. Davis overacts and signals each emotion like a traffic light. Think of what Angela Lansbury could have done with the role. The director has a discomposing habit of having the actors look and speak directly into the camera lens. Sometimes the moment is important, sometimes not. Usually the shot is eerily in close up, other times from halfway across a room. When possible, John Cromwell has TWO actors speaking into the lens at the same time.

Hot 888 Mama . . . but a Critic's Cabal of a Certain Perspective has Cowed the World into thinking that ANYTHING dashed off on Willie Maugham's note pads during the 1900s must be the Best Thing since Will Shakespeare put down his quill. WRONG!! You needn't be a Maugham Completist to realize that almost ALL of his twisted tales stem from personal grievances involving his unhappy childhood. Anyone exposed to Willie's dozen "best" stories will see that they share a monotonous misogyny and outrageous themes of Sadomasochism. OF HUMAN BONDAGE pretends to offer some deep Goldilocks Theory about Love: Norah's too hot, Mildred's too cold, but Sally's just right. Yet after Mildred croaks with a lit cigarette in her hand (eerily foreshadowing infamous Hollywood Chain Smoker Bette Davis' Real Life Breast Cancer Demise), Teaching Hospital Resident Phil's smirk as he rushes into the Autopsy Theater to dissect his Dead Crush is unmistakable. No, nothing here smacks of Family Values, which is why Kino Lorber includes an 87-minute expose on Willie's sordid personal life to help mainstream people decide whether it's safe to touch BONDAGE without a ten-foot pole.

James Hitchcock Fearing that he will never be anything more than a mediocrity, young painter Philip Carey abandons his artistic ambitions in order to train as a doctor. The film, however, is less about Philip's medical career than about his love life and about the three women who feature in it- waitress Mildred Rogers, romantic novelist Norah and Sally Athelny, the daughter of one of his patients. Somerset Maugham's title does not refer to "bondage" in its literal sense of "slavery" or in the sense of a sado-masochistic sexual practice. Instead, he uses the word as a metaphor for those strong emotions, especially unrequited love, which bind one human to another. Norah is "bound" to Philip, whom she loves deeply, but he is equally "bound" to Mildred. He suggests that Mildred is in turn "bound" to another man, Emil Miller, but this is not entirely borne out by the script. Mildred is too self-centred to be in love with Miller or any other person."Of Human Bondage" is sometimes described as the film that made Bette Davis a star. She certainly wanted the role of Mildred desperately and fought hard to persuade Warner Brothers, to whom she was under contract, to lend her to RKO, who were making the film. Studio head Jack Warner was initially reluctant to do so because he feared that the role might harm Davis's glamorous image, but eventually relented after several other actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, had turned it down. Her performance was critically acclaimed and the Academy's failure to nominate her for a "Best Actress" Oscar was controversial; a number of voters protested by "writing in" her name. In the event the award went to Claudette Colbert for "It Happened One Night", but Davis finished third, behind Colbert and Norma Shearer but ahead of Grace Moore, who had been officially nominated.In some respect Davis's performance is indeed a good one. Although this was an American film, it kept Maugham's British setting, even though it updated it from the late Victorian period to the 1930s, which meant that Davis needed to master a Cockney accent. Her accent in this film is what might be called "faux-genteel Cockney". It is an accent not much heard these days, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was commonly used by those working-class Londoners such as waitresses, shop-assistants and domestic servants whose work brought them into frequent contact with the upper classes. It can be a difficult accent to get right, even for British actors, but Davis nails it perfectly.Davis also succeeds in portraying convincingly the less attractive sides of Mildred's personality- not only selfish and self-centred but also vulgar, sluttish, hypocritical, lazy, spiteful, foul-tempered, vindictive and a bad mother. It is also implied, although never directly stated, that Mildred is sexually promiscuous; the film came out just before the Production Code was adopted, but even in the Pre-Code era there was a limit as to what you could get away with. What Davis does not succeed in doing- and here the fault may lie as much with the scriptwriter and the director John Cromwell- is to portray the more attractive sides of Mildred's personality. Indeed, it is strongly suggested that Mildred does not have an attractive side to her character- not even a superficially attractive side. She may be a hypocrite, but is not really a convincing hypocrite, and even when she is trying to convince Philip of her love for him her protestations seem false and hollow.To make a "good man loves bad woman" storyline seem convincing the bad woman should be seen to possess some redeeming qualities, in appearance if not in reality, and apart from her looks Mildred never strikes us as having a single characteristic which might make any man in his right mind fall in love with her. Philip might nominally be the hero of the film, but he comes across looking more like a booby. I think that the Academy got it right in giving the Oscar to Colbert; the pro-Davis campaign may have been motivated by the idea that performances given in serious dramas are somehow more worthy of such honours than those given in comedies. The psychological explanation we are given is that Philip, who has a club foot, is a shy, insecure young man, suffering from self-doubt. It is precisely because of this self-doubt that he falls so obsessively in love with Mildred, refusing to believe that any better woman could ever want him, and obstinately persisting in this belief even when two better women, Norah and Sally, have made it clear that they do want him. From what we see of his paintings and drawings, which reveal him to be more gifted than he gives himself credit for, there is also a suggestion that his abandonment of his artistic career may also owe more to a lack of self-confidence than to a lack of talent.Leslie Howard, however, never seemed convincing in the role; his normal screen image was that of the urbane English gentleman, sometimes outwardly reserved but generally inwardly confident and assured, and here I could never really accept him as a man plagued by self-doubt. It didn't help that he and Davis did not hit it off- he thought an English actress should have been cast in the role- and something of his off- screen coldness towards her comes across in his on-screen manner. Maugham's story is a good one, but this adaptation, although it has its good points, is never very emotionally involving. I have never seen the two remakes from 1946 and 1964 but would be interested to do so. 6/10

SilkyWilky A must watch film, I genuinely loved it. Easy to watch and get drawn into, not that dated at all, and a good story we can all relate to.Lots of reviews here waxing lyrical about Bette Davis' bawdy performance, and in general I go along with them, bar her pitiful attempt at a cockney accent.Its worse than Dick van Dykes (Mary Poppins) and I never thought I'd say that about anyone. Dick had a naiive comedic consistency in his americanised version. Bette is all over the place, mainly sounding like a posh girl pretending badly to be cockney and throwing in intonations I've never heard anyone speak. Very false and messed up, and irritating - but that is what she's portraying too, so it kinda works. She was either sheltered and made no attempt to get out and hear how people speak or she wouldn't have dared do what she did, or else she has no accent skills.Beyond the accent, yes, Bette makes the film funky and fun. The other actresses I think perform better, are more convincing character wise. Kay Johnson (Norah) is stiff upper lip British and understated, a mirror to Leslie Howards character, though lighter. Frances Dee (Sally) plays a young girl who accepts her place with a charm and a wisdom beyond her years - and is the heavenly beauty of the film.Watch, enjoy, and indulge in reminiscences of the unrequited loves in your life.