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Of Human Bondage

1/1/2025

Reflections on Of Human Bondage (UK.1964)
Directors: Ken Hughes, Henry Hathaway, Bryan Forbes. Screenplay: Bryan Forbes, from the novel by William Somerset Maugham. DP: Osward Morris. Production design: John Box. Costume design: Beatrice Dawson. Main cast: Kim Novak, Laurence Harvey, Nanette Newman, Siobhán McKenna, Roger Livesey.

Philip and Mildred inhabit the familiar costume-film London of gas lamps and horse drawn cabs. Philip is a medical student and Mildred is a waitress. Philip sees Mildred once and Philip is obsessed. Philip becomes so obsessed with Mildred that Philip will suffer any degree of humiliation just for a kind word from Mildred, and he does this many times. Philip is as obsessed with Mildred as Scotty was with Madeline. Of course he is — she’s Kim Novak.

But Philip isn’t quite as stupid as Scotty. At some level he perceives that Mildred is using him, can’t help using him, and that his obsession will destroy him if he doesn’t watch it. He’d probably settle for an alternative, but the trouble is that none of the alternatives are ever Mildred, just as Scotty’s Midge is never going to be Madeline.

Accounts from those involved indicate that Of Human Bondage had a troubled production history and on release it generally underwhelmed both the critics and the public, with Kim Novak’s cockney accent attracting disproportionate scorn (it really isn’t all that bad in the great scheme of dodgy accents).

Early in the shoot the American director, Henry Hathaway, publicly humiliated Novak on set and was replaced by Ken Hughes, with reliable all-rounder Bryan Forbes directing some scenes during the changeover in addition to writing the script and appearing in a small part. As well as Novak’s trouble with Hathaway, rumours of discord between Laurence Harvey and Novak still thread their way into assessments of the film. She is said to have interrupted the shoot in Ireland by disappearing to London for a day to go shopping. If true, maybe she just forgot to come out of character at the end of the previous day – it’s for sure the most Mildred thing she could have done short of completely disappearing.

In his 1989 memoir Labour of Love, Tony Booth, who plays the small part of Mildred’s pugilistically inclined lover, wrote his own account of the Hathaway/Novak crisis in which he outlines the main course of events (while not neglecting to paint himself as the hero of the hour, chivalrously pleading with Hathaway to cut short his noxious tirade against Novak).

Hathaway is said to have wanted Elizabeth Taylor, who was the same age as Kim Novak within a year or so, to play Mildred, and years previously to have planned a version with Marilyn Monroe. Whether or not these two could have produced more acceptable cockney accents than Kim Novak, both had the potential to enact Mildred’s volatility and her underlying vulnerability, but did either possess Kim Novak’s inherent noirish inscrutability or very contemporary erotic appeal? Voluptuous, that very 1950s adjective denoting curvy sex appeal, could be, and sometimes was, applied to Monroe and Taylor, but it simply doesn’t fit either with Somerset Maugham’s Mildred or Kim Novak’s screen persona. She’s just more modern than that.

In any event, Kim Novak left the set in distress after Hathaway’s prolonged verbal onslaught and refused to return. If Hathaway was hoping that his exhibitionist tantrum would result in Novak being replaced by Elizabeth Taylor, the strategy spectacularly blew back in his face. What happened instead of Novak leaving the film was that producer Ray Stark wasted no time in having himself driven hot-foot to the studio and sacked Hathaway. Tony Booth relates that by the time he got back to the crew's Dublin hotel Hathaway had already been dispatched onto a flight back to the USA.

Kim Novak in Pushover (1954)

As is often noted, Novak’s performance opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover*, the 1954 quasi-noir heist thriller, prefigures her role in Vertigo, as do aspects of the film’s plot - most notably in the car tailing scenes - not to mention the spectacular age difference between herself and male lead MacMurray. But Pushover could also be an early audition for Of Human Bondage. Novak’s character in Pushover is not ruthless or inscrutable enough to be a top-ranking noir femme fatale but is a good match for Mildred’s instinct for an opportunity to practice advantageous duplicity.

Laurence Harvey didn’t live long enough to have a late career, or even a full middle career, by which to assess his stature as an actor in comparison to his contemporaries, but he did pack a lot of varied roles into his twenty-five year or so screen career. In so far as there was a common denominator of critical reception, it was a suggestion that his acting mediated the character he was playing via a sort of technical detachment, a lack of conviction (or at worst that he just wasn’t very good). In relation to his performance in Of Human Bondage, such criticism misses the point. Philip Carey’s burden is that he doesn’t know who he is or believe he can do anything, unless he attains Mildred. He is sleepwalking through his own life at the mercy of his own impulses and of other people’s opinions. Told that he won’t be a great artist he opts to try a full 180° flip from art to science and train as a physician.

Having spent the first five years of his life in Lithuania and the next twelve in South Africa before arriving in England and later making forays into Hollywood, Laurence Harvey was well practised in cultural and vocal shapeshifting and he maintained an ambiguity, not uncommon at the time, about his sexuality. In his screen roles, even when playing an unsympathetic character, he evinced some degree of the boyish vulnerability on show in Of Human Bondage.

Who of Harvey’s star contemporaries in British cinema would have been a better fit for sensitive physically disabled introvert Philip Carey? Not Michael Caine or Richard Burton, and certainly not alpha stallion Sean Connery. Peter O’Toole… maybe. Dirk Bogarde would have been too old in the mid-1960s but a strong contender when younger, although his back catalogue of Rank Organisation Doctor comedies might be a substantial impediment. From the US, maybe Anthony Perkins, who shares with Harvey a boyish demeanour and relatively slender build. But then he’d recently starred in Psycho – it would be risky, to say the least, to have that legacy shadowing a screen Philip Carey. Far from being one of its problems, the Novak/Harvey casting may be one of the remaining merits of this flawed, uneven and now usually neglected film.

Any screen version of Somerset Maugham’s interminable Bildungsroman must almost inevitably boil it down to Philip and Mildred’s affair - only one of several key narrative strands in the book - as do both the 1937 John Cromwell film and this 1964 version.

The film very briefly establishes Philip’s unhappy childhood and signposts his club foot, then goes straight to his decision as a young man to abandon his failed artistic career in Paris and return to London to train as a doctor, so moving briskly to his encounter with Mildred in the café where she is a waitress and all that then follows.

So, as this is a mid-century British film, here comes ubiquitous Robert Morley with yet another of his comic turns as a pompous pedantic bore. This time he’s impersonating Dr Jacobs, formidable head of the medical school where Philip is studying. When an opportunity presents itself, Dr Jacobs naturally loses no time in undermining Philip’s fragile self-esteem by making him expose his club foot to the class (although not to the camera, which has to make do throughout the film with an expensive looking costume boot).

And here among the boisterous and inattentive medical students is British cinema and TV stalwart Ronald Lacey, freckle faced and with peculiar whiskers and a permanently bewildered expression, playing Philip’s friend ‘Mattie’ Mathews. When we first meet Mattie it is he who is besotted with Mildred, whom Philip has yet to set eyes on, but Mattie is too shy to speak to her. Philip offers to act as Mattie’s intermediary, so triggering the remainder of the plot.

Now here's Roger Livesey, trailing clouds of Powell and Pressburger, playing Philip’s friend and eventual saviour Mr Athelny. In the 1934 film version Athelny was essentially a comic turn: an extravagant and rumpled fez-wearing caricature with comical facial hair and bohemian table manners, coupled with conservative views about the place of women. Mr Athelny in the 1964 film has to be, to a degree, relatable for young swinging 60s audiences, as of course do Philip and Mildred, in spite of being Victorians. So, while still extrovert and opinionated, this Athelny is, sartorially at least, a less flamboyant old boy - with Livesey’s well-shaped moustache, his silver hair neatly brushed back and wearing a well-tailored elegant suit or a gentleman’s tweed overcoat - some resemblance to the recently retired patrician Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, re-impersonated by Colonel Blimp, might be implied.

In fact, some items of the younger men’s wardrobe in Of Human Bondage seem to have been selected with a relaxed eye for period authenticity, either for reasons of economy or to connote a contemporary aura. Tony Booth recounts that, at director Hathaway’s insistence, he wore on set the suit he had worn to travel to the studios, and in some scenes Jack Hedley (as Philip’s fellow student, Griffiths) is wearing belted trousers cut to the hip which could have just dropped out of a Carnaby Street carrier bag.

Nanette Newman, Robert Morley, Laurence Harvey, Roger Livesey

The film, unlike its 1934 predecessor, excises the episode of Philip’s homelessness and near starvation that occupies a significant place in the novel, substituting a less severe period of gentlemanly financial embarrassment as he is progressively ruined by his attempts to support Mildred and her nameless baby.
The problem both in Maugham’s book and the films is that during Mildred’s absences, Mildred is absent. As Jane Smiley* observes in her introduction to the novel: 'With Mildred’s every entrance into the narrative, the novel perks up.'

All the more obliging of Somerset Maugham, then, to conclude Mildred’s appearances in the book with the definitively terminal line: 'That was the end. He did not see her again.' Thus the reader is freed to choose whether to bother ploughing through the remaining thirteen un-perked-up-by-Mildred chapters to find out whether Philip ever graduates as a doctor and marries Sally Athelny.

Ah, yes. Sally Athelny. Sally, who is definitely desirable and eligible but is equally definitely not-Mildred. She’s described by Maugham as blue-eyed and buxom, with a broad brow, full breasts, broad hips and golden hair, and as getting progressively more plump during the course of the story. With robust disregard for every word of this description, Nanette Newman, Bryan Forbes’ dark and fashionably slim wife, was cast in the role. This may represent nepotism, but it's also spot-on casting in the sense that Newman is sufficiently not-Kim-Novak to fail to entice Philip for the duration of his Mildred obsession, but is self-evidently attractive within conventional norms, so providing 1960s audiences with a satisfactory pairing with international film star Laurence Harvey at the story’s denouement.

Having finally qualified as a doctor and, as he believes, seen the last of Mildred long ago and determined to make a go of his medical career by serving the poor, we find Philip nearing the end of a long shift in an austere charity clinic. He’s washing his hands, carefully but with a far-away look in his eye. A nurse looks in and tells him the next patient is ready.

This, of course, is Mildred. She looks ill, although not so ill that she doesn’t look like Kim Novak. She is pale, has very dark rings round her eyes and wears the sort of wide-brimmed hat decorated with feathers favoured by factory girls and sex workers. She complains of a bad sore throat. So Philip examines her throat, peering deep down it with the aid of a spatula, a procedure that obliges him to put his face close to hers which, given the new circumstances, neither of them enjoy. Mildred just wants to be given a bottle of sore throat medicine and then get on her way, but Philip is edging towards a diagnosis. So tests are ordered, which naturally take place in a room featuring vials of bubbling liquid heated by Bunsen burners and staffed by men of few words in white lab coats.

Mildred has fled the hospital, but once the tests are in Philip traces her to a crepuscular subterranean brothel run by a pair of grubby characters straight from a Gustave Doré engraving of the villainous poor.

‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ says Philip, looming over Mildred as she cowers shivering on her rickety iron bedstead, ‘but have you ever seen anyone die of syphilis?’. To his credit, Laurence Harvey manages to minimise the comedic potential of this notable line of dialogue, so far as is humanly possible while still actually speaking the words.

Obsession can arise from unattainability. Although in this film (inevitably in a version made for the swinging 60s) Philip briefly attains Mildred sexually, he can never possess her in the idealised romantic way he yearns for. He will never be able to transform her into what he wants her to be. In this, the film’s portrayal of Mildred is inevitably and effectively underscored by the legacy of Vertigo in Novak’s screen persona. A ghost of a ghost of a collective memory of an illusion.

At one point in the novel, Mildred thoroughly trashes Philip’s room while he is away. But Somerset Maugham doesn’t give us a firsthand description of the act itself; the reader finds out about Mildred’s rampage when Philip arrives home and sees the extent of the violent damage. In the 1934 film, Bette Davis, dagger-like kitchen knife in hand, is seen furiously, psychotically slashing Philip’s paintings, ripping apart his treasured books, and burning his documents. This, obviously, is Bette Davis’s forte and it would have been a pity not to allow her, of all people, the scene. But the 1964 film follows the novel and we only see the damage through Philip’s eyes when he discovers it later. To have actually seen Kim Novak running rampage with a knife would have been too explicit a sight, a diversion from Mildred’s ultimately more deadly weapons: the wide warm eyes, the tilt of the neck, the mocking giggle, the bare shoulder framed by a white feather-boa glimpsed through the bedroom door, and her barbed, repetitive catchphrase – flippant but, for Philip, accumulatively wounding - ‘I don’t mind’.

And here, for the 21st century viewer, is the problem with both films. We’re not watching Philip and Mildred’s story, let alone Mildred’s story. We’re watching Philip’s story. We only see Mildred from Philip’s neurotic, obsessive point of view, both narratively and very often literally. It’s true that we hear her angrily accuse Philip of spying on her (or as we would put it, stalking her), but we aren’t shown cinematically how this feels for her. Bette Davis’s room trashing scene in the 1934 film is an outlier. So critics who suggested that Kim Novak’s 1964 performance lacked depth might more usefully have turned their attention to the adaptation itself, the innumerable major script and editing choices and micro-decisions made by Hathaway, Forbes, Hughes and their teams.

Suppose instead a revisionist version in which, rather than us only seeing Mildred when Philip is present, the exact reverse of this operates: we encounter Philip only when Mildred does and see his possessive obsession from her point of view, see her life when he isn’t there, meeting her other lovers, trying to look after her baby (which in this imagined version she has given a name), her slide into overt sex work. Is it really her aunt she lives with in the house in Peckham that Philip only ever sees the outside of? What is she like when she’s out with her female friends? This, of course, could only peripherally claim to be a film from Maugham’s novel, but imagining it highlights that the limitations of the existing film do not lie primarily in Novak or Harvey’s performances but in a patriarchal determinism originating back in the source text and embedded in the film’s authorship.

Readers turning to the novel after seeing the film may be disappointed, or even perplexed, to find that, with nearly a quarter of the book still to go, it takes its leave of Mildred not on her deathbed or at her funeral but crossing a busy London street and then buying an admission ticket and disappearing into a music hall and out of the book.

But, for the purposes of a ninety minute film adaptation, the powerful narrative arc set in motion by Philip’s obsession and the consequent cycle of mutually abusive episodes can only find a cathartic resolution if Philip’s life remains hopelessly entangled with Mildred’s right to the bitter end of her unhappy life, and that is the case both in this film and the 1934 one.

In the case of this version, Philip’s promise to Mildred to make sure she has a proper funeral -‘Like a lady’ - prefaces a touching (or, if you prefer, bathetic) final cinematic image as well as an economical narrative resolution to his relationships with both Mildred and Sally.

The interment itself in a bleak cemetery backing onto a railway embankment is seen in distant longshot – a small handful of black-clad men, presumably paid undertakers and gravediggers, are hastily carrying out the necessary work, along with an officiant priest in a white surplice. Right on cue for the committal, a dirty little steam train chuffs along the tracks in the background. Contaminating the air.

In the foreground with his back to us stands Philip, just inside the cemetery gates but observing the proceedings from a non-participatory distance. Is he only there to see that what he has paid for is done as directed or does the flame still burn, if only faintly? Either way, the camera tracks slowly back as he turns to leave and we see that Sally Athelny is waiting for him beside a carriage. In the deep background of the shot the priest who has just buried Mildred appears, striding away from the grave and towards the couple, signifying the inevitable future wedding.

The filmmakers, understandably reluctant to give us any less than our moneysworth of this striking and ingenious narrative tableau, then freeze and shrink the image into a black frame around which the end credits appear, accompanied by Ron Goodwin’s romantic Limelight-esque theme, swelling to one final crescendo.

The novelist George Gissing was in a sense a real-life analogue of Philip. His lifelong fascination with working class women fuelled unforgettably vivid characters such as the Lambeth hat-factory girl Thyrza in the eponymous novel. While a student at Oxford, Gissing embarked on an obsessive relationship with a sex worker, Helen ‘Nell’ Harrison, who suffered from epilepsy and alcoholism. Gissing eventually stole some money from a fellow student to supplement his frantic efforts to support her, so terminating his university career and leading to a brief gaol sentence. He nevertheless married Nell and a cycle of tempestuous separations and reunions ensued.

Gissing was unable to live with Nell for long and, although he continued to pay her a small alimony for the rest of her short life, she died in atrocious poverty and suffering from tertiary syphilis, alone in a tiny, bare back room in what was then a slum area behind Waterloo railway station.

Gissing was summoned to the house. He viewed Nell’s body and with a novelist’s eye compiled a careful list of her few possessions, which included one sheet and one blanket on the bed (in February), one crust of bread in a drawer, some pawn shop tickets, and all his own letters to her as well as his photograph and small prints of a Raphael Madonna, a Landseer, and portraits of Tennyson and Lord Byron*. Gissing paid for Nell’s funeral but did not attend it.

In his diary entry for the day that he had seen her body laid out in those insufferably bleak surroundings he wrote: ‘Came home to a bad, wretched night. In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong.’

Fate, eh? Maybe Philip saw things that way as well.

REFERENCES
*Pushover. Dir. Richard Quine. USA, 1954. Connoisseurs of strange coincidences may like to ponder that a supporting actor in the film is called Philip Carey.
*Somerset Maugham, W. Of Human Bondage. Bantam Classics, London, 2005
*Delany, P. George Gissing, A Life. London, 2008.