Given that the film version of Maughram's novel, directed by John Cromwell, came out in 1934, and that's also when the production code (otherwise known as the Hays Code) came into use in Hollywood to police the morality of images in movies, there might be every reason to assume that Of Human Bondage was one of the films that inspired this code.
In fact, Cromwell's film is exactly the 53rd -- of an eventual 52,000 -- film to receive a Certificate of Approval number from the Production Code Administration (PCA) during the 34 years the code was in place. I know this because I noted its number when the movie started. The internet tells me John Ford's The World Moves On was the first. The code was finally retired in 1968, leading directly to the New Hollywood movement.
The bondage in question is actually the relationship that exists between people with power disparities in the amounts they love one another, which create life-long obligations borne of this unresolved obsession. The obsession doesn't seem to resolve itself even if the obsessor arrives at a new condition of comparative happiness.
Pretty heady subject matter for a movie made in 1934, but then again, heady subject matter was what caused them to institute the production code in the first place.
In fact this film seems very much to have been conceived with pre-Code standards in mind. The character played by Bette Davis in this movie is downright awful -- though it was a star-making performance for Davis -- and it is even implied that she becomes a prostitute as her story nears its grim end. (Sorry, I guess I didn't think it was necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 92-year-old movie.)
But I was most fascinated by how it gets inside the head of people who just can't quit other people, and how almost every character in this movie gives too much love to someone who is unworthy of them, and too little to a worthier person.
If you are a human being living in the world, this should be something familiar to you. Assuming you aren't at either end of the spectrum -- the most beautiful, most amazing person who has ever lived or a repugnant cretin -- you have likely performed both of these roles at some point in your life. You've given too much of yourself to a person who either ignores, or worse, teases your affections for their own entertainment, ultimately discarding you and rejecting you in cruel ways, or you have been the person to do that to someone else, even if you didn't mean to, or didn't think that's what you were doing at the time.
Although this applies to a number of characters in the story, the center of it all is Leslie Howard's Philip Carey, a failed artist and distracted medical student who also has a clubbed foot, but is handsome enough and kind enough to have attracted the attentions of several appropriate matches over the course of the narrative. But he can't be happy with any of them, because he still pines for Davis' Mildred Rogers, who encouraged his affections only to gleefully squash them, but then keeps throwing herself in his path and preventing him from achieving happiness with these other suitors.
Anyway, I found the whole thing pretty astute, and at only 83 minutes, perfectly brief for a Wednesday night movie starting after 10 p.m.
I also thought I should comment on Davis, whose eyes I always notice (thanks, Kim Carnes) any time I see her in a movie. Seeing this one Wednesday night made an interesting complement to having watched Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower on Tuesday night, because both actresses were in their mid-20s when they made these movies, both had only debuted a few years earlier, and both broke out big time after these performances. The deviation occurs with their Academy Awards fates. Though we know from yesterday's post that Hawn actually won for Cactus Flower, in the supporting category, it was felt at the time that Davis would have been an Oscar frontrunner for Bondage, in the lead actress category, but she didn't even end up getting nominated.
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