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.

. . . to the MGM Brass, desperately hoping that OF HUMAN BONDAGE would win her the coveted role of "Scarlett O'Hara" in that studio's three-times-longer copy-cat triangular love affair melodrama set during the War to Stamp Out Lazy Racist Confederate Traitors' Sadistic Black Slavery Racket, aka GONE WITH THE WIND. Since this BONDAGE story was crafted by a Professional Writer, it's five times as good and twice as short as Martha Mitchell's Murky Mess, GWTW. As we all know, Bette Who's-Counting-My-Six-Abortions Davis was beat out for the part of Scarlett by a crazy chick on furlough from the nuthouse. It's hard to see how Bette's strained effort in BONDAGE to speak Londoner could lead to ANY future jobs on the Big Screen (except, perhaps, as the witch who unhands Bruce Dern in HUSH HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE). To rub salt in the wound of the Cracked Davis Vanity Cup, MGM's fat cats DID see fit to cast Leslie "Phil the Pill" Howard to reprise his BONDAGE performance as GWTW's quintessential milquetoast, Ashley Wilkes. MGM also signed on BONDAGE composer Max Steiner to score their Treasonous bladder buster. Though few people remember it Today, BONDAGE almost completed a GWTW Trifecta, as it convinced MGM hotshot David O. Selznick to award the Plum Role of "Rhett Butler" to Alan Hale. However, when the S.S. Minnow entered a Time Warp during a planned "three-hour cruise" just before GWTW filming began, Dave was forced to substitute the relative unknown Clark Gable instead.

It's a little hard to watch this one, just as it was a little hard to read the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Leslie Howard plays the sensitive, club-footed young man who falls for a lower-class, vulgar woman who manipulates and exploits him time and time again. Bette Davis plays the woman brilliantly, and for her performance I could have notched up my rating half a star. The movie has one scene worth watching in particular – the one where she viciously rips into him after he tells her that she disgusts him. Her response: "Me?! I disgust you? You, you, you're too fine! You'll have none of me, but you'll sit here all night looking at your naked females...You cad! You dirty swine! I never cared for you, not once. I was always makin' a fool of ya. You bored me stiff! I hated ya! It made me sick when I had to let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me. Ya hounded me and drove me crazy! And after you kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! WIPE MY MOUTH! I made up for it. For every kiss, I had a laugh. We laughed at ya, Miller and me, and Griffith and me, we laughed at ya! Because you were such a mug, a mug, a mug! You know what you are? You gimpy-legged monster? You're a cripple! A cripple! A cripple!" Despite that, he STILL returns back to her (arrgh), which is disagreeable to watch, even though he has a benign acceptance about being doomed to love her, just as a much friendlier woman is doomed to love him. And so it goes. The movie would firmly establish Bette Davis as an actress, and rightfully so, though she was snubbed by the Academy. I found it interesting to read later that there was such an uproar over it that the Academy president said write-in votes could be cast, and Davis received enough to finish ahead of one of the nominees, but not enough to beat Claudette Colbert who would win for 'It Happened One Night' (the process would be changed the following year). Unfortunately, Davis can't completely overcome the masochism of the story, or Leslie Howard's somewhat wooden performance.

Oh dear, how this film is showing its age: the endless fades, the wooden acting, the actors twenty years too old for their roles. Perhaps also it is that the very ideas and themes are showing their age. In a modern era, Leslie Howerd's character just seems wet rather than sensitive - you wish the guy would just grow a pair; the attitude to his club foot seems horribly unenlightened in an era where we say 'disabled', not 'cripple'; and Mildred's 'shocking' behaviour and ultimate fate seem laughable and judgemental. Bette Davis's Cockney accent is dreadful, poor lass, but having said that, her acting is the only good thing in this film: Leslie Howerd is dire and the only bit-parter worth his salt is Alan Hale: the characters of Harry, Sally, Sally's father and Norah are all poorly drawn and the film attempts to cover far too long a time span. Although I am a huge fan of vintage movies, including silents, I was able to watch this particular film only as a curiosity piece. Worth watching perhaps once for the costumes, furniture and Bette Davis's eyes.