To all the huddled masses of humanity out there, I ask, have you ever gotten up in the morning and found yourself on the wrong side of a one-sided love affair? If so, Of Human Bondage may be too painful to watch, unless you’re now in a successful relationship that’s been going on for at least five years. Since I unfortunately can’t make that claim for myself, I must admit that I viewed the film from a cramped fetal position beneath my bed, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose. Like Boomer, I feel that this is a wonderfully done movie, coming in second only to The Blue Angel on my personal top-ten list. Still, it is patently unpleasant to watch, thus I won’t go so far as to recommend it.

If someone were to ask me what Of Human Bondage "teaches" the viewer about life, I would have to say nothing, except how not to live it. Although the same could be said of The Blue Angel, there is a sort of tragic fall in the German film that has almost classical resonances -- a professor of some repute allows his hopeless love for a cold woman to transform him into a dissipated, barely recognizable buffoon. Philip Carey (Leslie Howard), on the other hand, starts out in a quagmire of mediocrity, then allows his love for Mildred Rogers (Bette Davis) to push him down even further before he manages to claw his way back to a station in life that seems only slightly better than where he began. His story, then is not so tragic as it is unremarkable, because in Carey, we see Everyman at his worst, buffeted about by those vagaries of living that are all to familiar for many of us. This perhaps makes the movie more realistic, but it is a realism filled with such pain and ugliness that I found it rather hard to sympathize with the characters after a point. Instead, I wanted to give them a few swift kicks and tell them to stop destroying themselves and each other. It takes fine acting to evoke such strong emotion, however, and therefore, like Boomer, I feel it most appropriate to focus on the manner in which Howard and Davis bring the film's principal characters to life.

Like most of the men Howard portrays, Philip Carey is an extremely sensitive individual who possesses more education than he does money, and who has a greater capacity to love than he does the opportunity to love in a manner he finds desirable. More than anything else, I am impressed throughout the film by Carey's magnanimity, his ability to extend kindness toward those who have wronged him and who continue to wrong him. Even near the movie's end, when all of Carey's romantic interest in Mildred has been expunged by her previous conduct, he still gives her money, and writes down medicines that she can take to treat the life-threatening illness into which she has fallen. Unlike most of Howard's characters, however, Carey is not excessively intelligent or intuitive, nor does he have a great deal of self-actualizing pride that could drive him to personal betterment. For example, in one of the movie's most painful segments, when Carey takes Mildred and his friend Griffiths (Reginald Denny) out to dinner, he idly sits by and allows the two to flirt and laugh with each other, then picks up the check. Foolishly, he believes Griffiths subsequent assurances that Mildred does not interest him in the least, only to find out the next day that the two are heading off to Paris for a tryst. Also, in an earlier scene, he turns his face to a blank window outside the eatery where Mildred works in order to avoid the attention of Emil Miller (Alan Hale), one of her other suitors. Watching him stand there, with shoulders slouched, head bent, and eyes pretending to look at nothing, I was reminded of a beaten-down dog sniffing around the door of a kitchen. Above and beyond all this, however, I ultimately disrespected Carey most for the way in which he ran from women like Norah (Kay Johnson) and Sally (Frances Dee), who showed him nothing but love and respect. Before the closing credits roll, Carey redeems himself somewhat by working to correct all these negatives of character, but it is a case of too little too late, at least from where I'm sitting.

Given some of my scathing remarks about the character of Carey, you can only imagine how I felt about Mildred. The film called for a vapid, self-absorbed, and profoundly cruel woman, so who better to play her than Davis, Hollywood's "Queen of Me-ness"? Mildred's stock response to Carey's questions is "I don't mind," and indeed, she minds very little for anything other than the way everyone else in the world perceives her. As she tells Carey after Miller has dumped her pregnant backside like a safe full of doorknobs, "I've still got me pride." Aside from dripping with affected Cockney (the only Brit accent Davis ever seemed able to do), this statement underscores the fact that pride is Mildred's greatest flaw, just as Carey's seeming absence of pride is his. I agree wholeheartedly with Boomer's observation that Mildred chafes at her need to rely upon Carey financially, but you'll forgive me if I can't muster up any sympathy over this. Ironically, like Carey himself, she finds caring, attentive lovers to be boring, and instead pursues cold men who ultimately mistreat her. The sorriest I feel for her is near the movie's end, when she realizes that Carey is the only true gentleman she's ever known, and that she has irrevocably lost him.

Allow me to close by echoing Boomer's comment that the film reaches near perfection in terms of its technical aspects. Max Steiner's haunting score mirrors and augments the drama throughout, as in the scene where a tortured and cacophonous version of "Lohengrin" plays while Carey thinks about Mildred's announced engagement to Miller. The cinematography is also very stylish and sophisticated, often taking bizarre twists. While Carey is studying for a medical exam, we see a skinless torso in his anatomy text transform into an image of Mildred. Along the same lines, in a later scene, Carey looks up from the exam and looks at a skeleton in the classroom which similarly metamorphoses into Mildred. Such nuances help illuminate the darker aspects of Carey's obsession, and obsession is what the movie is all about, after all.

  My rating:

TAKE TWO: BOOMER

 Of Human Bondage is essentially a character study. What happens in the film in and of itself is not very important. It is the personalities of the characters that we care about. To that extent, it seems to me that the only real way to review this film is to look at the characters and ask whether this film presents us with realistic, likeable, well-defined characters. In so doing, we need only really focus on two characters: Philip Carey (Howard) and Mildred Rogers(Bette Davis).

At first blush, it is far too easy to see Carey as the weak character who lets Mildred walk all over him. However, if one really looks more closely at the film, one realizes that Carey is far more complex than the victimized loser he first appears to be. This film deals Carey a very, very bad hand, yet Carey deals with all of his problems and reaches deep within himself to find the energy to persevere. Rather than feeling sorry about himself and quitting because of his club foot, his failed painting career, his disastrous love afair with Mildred, his failing his mid-terms in med school, and probably a bunch of other set backs I cannot recall at this point, he just keeps plugging away and eventually he finds love and success. Definitely not a loser. I rather admire him. Because I feel admiration and because I really wanted to see him succeed and because he bared his soul along the way, I believe this is a very well written character.

Now I turn to Mildred. Once again, the initial impression of this character is only half right. When we first meet Mildred we assume she is nothing more than a cold, claculating parasite. While this is in fact true, there is a good bit more to Mildred than that. There is actually a large dose of vulnerability beneath the harder than nails exterior. I have no doubt in my mind that it killed her to have to go back to Carey everytime fortune threw her a curve, yet she did it. She didn't want to go and hurt him (I don't think she wanted anything to do with him), and I don't believe she really ever wanted to hurt him. However, to her he represented the failure that her life had become. Rather than hating this woman for hurting Carey so badly, I felt very sorry that this woman did not have the ability to do anything other than to a man she did not love and then wallow in self-hatred for having to do it. She is an extremely interestingcharacter.

The true genius of this film is that through the use of these two characters, just about every emotion known in the human existence is looked into and laid bare for the world to see. This is not a simple love story (or a just a complex love story for that matter); this is a story about being human, and all acomplished through two characters. That is absolutely one of the most amazing achievements ever put on film.I am in awe.

Of course there are other aspects of the film upon which I need to comment. I am not really interested in these things so I'll touch on each briefly. Technically, this is a very sound film. It is beautifully shot and extremely well acted (perhap in the 10 best of all time in terms of acting quality). The sound is nearly perfect and the music track evokes just the right mood throughout. My only complaint (and it's not even really a technical matter) is the deal with the calender. It's a stupid gimick, and film makers should realize that we are smart enough to figure out that time has passed.

In the end, I really do believe this film approaches near perfection. My rating:

 Reserved Seating

 This is a new section of our page that we want to try out, in which we pose some trivia questions relating to whatever film has been reviewed.  The name of the first person to e-mail us with correct answers to all the questions will be put up on the following week's page, should he or she so desire, along with the title of his or her favorite classic movie.

1. Can you name another film from the 1930's in which Leslie Howard played a would-be artist and Bette Davis assumed the role of a waitress?

2. While making the movie referred to in question #1, Howard demanded that a then-obscure actor be brought in to play the villain of the piece. Who was that actor? 

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