Of Human Bondage in the 30s

March 6, 2007

Hollywood in the 1930s was an interesting place.. and it could produce a picture like Of Human Bondage (1934) with Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. The narrative movement of the film often seems overhasty.. the visual effects ambitious but not quite right. These technical issues will be smoothed out by the time Hollywood hits the 1940s.. a period marked by technical grace. Of Human Bondage falls on the edge of strict Hays Code implementation.. and I don't think the story of a bad girl getting pregnant and continuing to haunt the existence of a young man would have a place in the Code period. This is another example of how Hollywood at this point had not quite reached the "agreed framework" that would underlie its golden age classics. This is exactly what makes me want to watch more films from this period.

Watching Of Human Bondage I had to control my impatience with the main character Philip Carey (Leslie Howard). He falls in love with a young and obviously low class tearoom waitress Mildred (Bette Davis). She is willing to go out with him, but then abruptly announces that she is going to marry someone else.. a loudmouth older man who also comes to the tearoom. This will be the pattern repeated through the film: Philip falls for the girl, gets his hopes up, and then the woman meanly trashes him. Even though Philip meets a couple of nice and attractive women who love him.. he is compelled to drop them when Mildred shows up yet again. That is where my impatience came in. I found it hard to fathom why he could not respond to the new women in his life and get rid of the mean one.

It occurred to me that Of Human Bondage would make better sense if I recognized Philip as gay. That low class waitress would then be not a specific woman, but an attraction to men.. the sorts of rough relationships that I associate with docks and parks. His lack of interest in the nice women that fall in love with him is now easy to understand: he is not attracted to them. At the end, when he learns that Mildred is dead, Philip proposes to the nice woman Sally.. but there is still an emotional void. I don't think Mildred will be gotten rid of so easily in real life.

A similar translation of sexual roles is necessary for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. The protagonist (Brick) is unable to respond to his wife on account of the suicide of his friend. Watching the film for the first time it did not all seem to add up. What exactly is making this guy treat Elizabeth Taylor this way! If you think about Brick as gay, then the emotional knots of the story start to make sense..

This seems like a reasonable strategy for gay writers in the past. How do you write about your experience? At most points of the last century you could not really talk about your feelings.. not in a popular forum. So the answer? To transform those feelings into a more acceptable form.. changing gender roles being the easiest way to do this. That works fine, but then the risk is that the true motivation for actions will begin to make less sense to the audience.. and the story gains a certain emotional opaqueness. That was the cause for my rising level of "frustration" with the characters in a film like Of Human Bondage.