OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934)

Famous, fascinating, ultimately unsatisfying, John Cromwell (working from credit-shy Lester Cohen’s lumpy script) tries cramming Somerset Maugham’s 450 page auto-biographical novel into a spare 83 minutes. Cromwell, already an experienced director, seems out of sorts here, with odd positioning on reverse angles & needlessly fussy out-of-focus dissolves between scenes. Even with half the book lopped off, it’s all bare-bone highlights and little connective tissue as Leslie Howard’s cash-poor/club-footed med student gets knocked down in life & love from low self-esteem & even lower expectations. Howard nails the crippling kindness & personal embarrassment of the part, but at 41, the masochism & self-abasement come across as fatigue. To see a real Maugham character come to life, keep your eyes on Reginald Denny as fellow student/ frenemy. And, of course, Bette Davis in her breakout role as the Cockney trollop Howard can’t shake. Much of her work now looks like Hollywood period stuff and may not fly for a modern audience, starting with the wavering accent, but YOU - CAN’T - TAKE - YOUR - EYES - OFF - HER. And when she does let go, in some brief, intense scenes charting her rapid dissolution, she goes places actresses hadn’t touched since the silent era. Two later attempts at the book fail badly; afraid of an unsympathetic Mildred: with Eleanor Parker in ‘46 & Kim Novak in ‘64, both over-parted. (Though in the latter, Laurence Harvey, in theory, if not quite in practice, is perfectly cast in the Howard role.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Attention to your DVD edition. Lots of dreadful Public Domain discs out there. Best of a bad lot is on KINO, sourced from the Library of Congress archive.

DOUBLE-BILL: Howard & Davis made two more films together, poetically stranded in THE PETRIFIED FOREST/’36 (Humphrey Bogart’s breakthru, thanks to Howard who insisted he repeat his B’way perf - and Bogie does seem to be repeating it) and a delightfully unexpected comic backstager, IT’S LOVE I’M AFTER/’37, with Olivia de Havilland as a junior third wheel.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: With Maugham’s rep in a well-deserved rebound these days, maybe someone will give this the space demanded via cable/streaming format and not have to skip over so much of the book. Come to think of it, same goes for THE RAZOR’S EDGE.