I’ve been watching Bette Davis movies for spring and I’m stretching a bit into summer.
So what can I say about this week’s Bette Davis movie for my Spring of Bette feature?
“I watched this movie so you can just watch the clips of Bette Davis’s better parts.”
I’m kidding. Sort of. Is this a bad movie? No. It’s just not as good as others I have watched and, for me, it really dragged, partially because Leslie Howard’s character was such a wimp with no self respect who spent the whole movie whining and mooning over a woman who was truly evil and psycho.
The movie, released in 1934, is called Of Human Bondage.
Bette did play her part well – so well I literally hated her character. Honestly, I hated both characters. They were pathetic and that was how they were supposed to be. Two pathetic people ruining their whole lives and the lives of those around them because they created visions of each other that weren’t reality.
Blah.
I felt like shaking them!
An easy description for this movie is that a man with a club foot who has no self-respect, has White Knight Syndrome and thinks he can save Bette Davis’s character, who is simply a horrible, horrible person, so he keeps going back to her or letting her come to him.
Critics called this movie Bette’s breakout role and I can see why it was. At first, I hated the movie and her and couldn’t see why critics thought it was so good, but then I realized I hated her so much because she was playing the role so well.
This was Bette’s first movie with Leslie Howard, who I found out this week died young at the age of 50 while working for the war effort during World War II. There is a whole crazy story to that which I need to write about at some point. Nazi plot to take out a beloved British actor? Maybe….or maybe it was the Winston Churchill look alike that was on the plane.
But, I digress…let’s get back to the movie.
Leslie portrays Philip Carey, a man who was told he wasn’t good enough to be an artist so he left Paris and came back to London to become a doctor.
He meets Bette’s character, Mildred Rogers, in a diner when his friend has a crush on her but can’t get anywhere with her. I will warn you up front that Bette attempts a Cockney accent and it’s pretty awful. Like Dick Van Dyke level.
Philip becomes obsessed with Mildred and I think it is because she keeps playing hard to get. It’s more than that, though. She’s simply a person who likes to toy with the hearts and feelings of others and she’s loving watching… spin in the wind.
Plus she looks at his club foot in disgust. She can’t be with someone with a deformed foot…right?
Who she can be with, though, are married men who leave her in very bad positions and every time she gets in a bad situation she runs to Philip who always bails her out, hoping against hope she will truly fall in love with him.
He rejects relationships with good, caring women, always going back to the slop that is a relationship with Mildred.
The movie is based on a book by W. Somerset Maugham and was remade two times — once in 1946 and once in 1964.
Critics loved the 1934 film, but didn’t care so much for the remakes.
TCM put it well about Bette and her desire to have the role: “Mildred was manipulative and sadistic, raw and fascinating, and Davis wanted to play her more than anything in the world.”
Davis was working for Warner Brothers at the time and Of Human Bondage was an RKO production, but Bette desperately wanted to be a part of it. Back then the actors and actresses had contracts with certain studios and weren’t supposed to work with other ones but Bette didn’t like the movies she was being put in by RKO. She felt they were inconsequential and begged Warner to let her be loaned out for the movie.
Warner refused because he said the role, an unglamorous one, would ruin her image. Katharin Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Ann Harding had already turned the roles down for that reason.
Maybe the role ruined Bette’s image as a stylized, glamorous star, but it opened her world to meatier roles.
“I begged, implored, cajoled,” Bette later recalled. “I haunted Jack Warner’s office. Every single day, I arrived at his door with the shoeshine boy. The part of Mildred was something I had to have. J.L. could not possibly understand any actress who would want to play such a part. I spent six months in supplication and drove Mr. Warner to the point of desperation – desperate enough to say ‘yes’ – anything to get rid of me… If my memory is correct, he said, ‘Go and hang yourself.'”
Maugham approved of Bette, which was a huge endorsement since he had poured so much of himself into the story, which was semi-autobiographical — mainly the part about being orphaned, relying on family, and having to struggle to get himself a career.
Leslie apparently was not too thrilled with an American playing Mildred’s part.
“When Davis shot her close-ups Howard would feed lines to her as he read a book off-camera, totally detached from the process,” Jeremy Arnold wrote for TCM.com. “But when he realized that she was giving a great performance and was on her way to stealing the picture, he shaped up instantly and committed himself fully to working with her. They would pair up twice more, notably in The Petrified Forest (1936).”
I’m watching The Petrified Forest, next, incidentally but will be writing about Now, Voyageur first, which I watched a couple of weeks ago.
The lack of an Oscar nomination for Bette for this movie is what lead to a change in how nominations and voting was made for Oscars.
It was Claudette Colbert who won for Best Actress for It Happened One night in 1934 and though she was great, some said fraud had occurred. Because of the failure for her to receive the nomination, the write-in votes were banned and the accounting firm Price Waterhouse (now called Pricewaterehouse Coopers) took over and has done so ever since.
For those who are curious what I have watched for the Spring of Bette, this is my list:
My watch list for this feature:
Of Human Bondage (June 2)
Now, Voyager (June 5)
The Petrified Forrest (June 11)
Sources:
https://www.tcm.com/articles/31567/of-human-bondage-1934
https://garbolaughs.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/of-human-bondage-1934/
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