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OF HUMAN BONDAGE is, I guess, the first kind of classic John Cromwell film, in that it's well-remembered and has a classic source (Somerset Maugham) and iconic stars. And it's compelling. Leslie Howard plays the mug of a hero beautifully, and Bette Davis, who invents the Dick Van Dyke cockney accent, gives a fearless, fiercely committed performance free of vanity.

Anyone who's read the novel will surely feel the spirit of Maugham's complex characters in their nuanced performances, though Cromwell and crew were forced to work around the newly enforced Production Code... Cromwell's OF HUMAN BONDAGE is a competent adaptation of a great novel that's notably heightened by exceptional performances.

Nearly all the supporting actors register as virtuous ciphers (Frances Dee and Kay Johnson, as good-girl love interests, offend most blandly) or chew the scenery with relish (Alan Hale as an adulterous German stuffed shirt, Reginald Owen braying as an avuncular eccentric). And journeyman director John Cromwell defaults to shooting the female players and Howard in cross-cut, head-on close-ups when he's not hamstrung by RKO's shoestring recreation of London streetscapes.

Transitions between fantasy and reality blur: at these moments Of Human Bondage ceases to be a prestige adaptation of a famous, if controversial, middlebrow novel, and becomes a narrative-displacing, avant-garde cycle of monomania, desire, and deluded male power, prefiguring Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir (1977).

The high spots of the entire picture are those contributed by Bette Davis, as Mildred... Miss Davis makes of her one of the most thoroughly unsympathetic characters the screen has ever produced... [and she carries] it through with such a fierce consistency, extracting from it every last nuance of unpleasantness.

The very lifelike quality of the story and the marked authenticity of its atmosphere cause the spectators to hang on every word uttered by the interesting group of characters... There is nothing stereotyped about this film, and even the closing scenes are set forth with a pleasing naturalness and a note of cheer.