Of Human Bondage
Director: John Cromwell
Year Released: 1934
Rating: 2.0
Leslie Howard's budding painter gets told his art is lousy, so he takes the safe route of abandoning the arts and going to Medical School - while there, he meets up with a pouty waitress (Bette Davis) and falls in love with her, but she treats him like trash. Cromwell's borderline incompetent direction is more than apparent, but the script is the biggest problem: it does a sub-par job truncating W. Somerset Maugham's admittedly elaborate novel, resulting in a crunched, rushed picture. Much has been made of Davis' performance - her incessant eye-rolling seems like a bad tick and her accent is a wreck, but it helped make her a star.
