What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off a story of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham, adapted by Sumner Locke Elliot. The Studio One adaptation stars Charlton Heston, Felicia Montealegre, Robin Craven and Faith Brook. It was directed by Paul Nickell. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, November 21, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open in Paris 1910. Charlton Heston, apparently a painter, is showing his paintings to a pompous European man, asking if he has any talent. The man bluntly tells him that he doesn’t. Another old man laughs at him, who himself admits that he’s a “mediocre poet”, but he’s lived a rich life. The poet gives Heston an old rug, saying that it may contain the secret to the relationship between the individual and the universe, and hence the meaning of life.
Later, back in America, Heston (his character name is Philip, by the weigh), has become a doctor and looks back on his days in Paris nostalgically. Apparently Philip is feeling humiliated because he was asked to show his malformed foot in class, and is saving up money to have it removed (the deformity, not the whole foot.) His friend Crenshaw (Craven) takes him to a diner to gawk at a waitress, who speaks with a very grating Cockney accent (Montealegre). After being made to wait for a while, Philip banters with the waitress a bit. He starts sketching her, drawing her attention. She likes the sketch and tells him that her name is Mildred. He makes an arrangement to take her to the ballet.
Some time later, Philip learns from Crenshaw that he failed the anatomy test. His friend accuses him of spending too much time and money with the waitress. Philip then sees another Charlton Heston in the window, telling him that he’s a fool, and that no one will ever love him because of his limp. Despite this, he continues his doting courtship, selling his microscope to buy Mildred a brooch. She doesn’t seem to care for it — when he asks to kiss her, her reaction is only “I suppose so.” Feeling the freeze and worried about a German guy she’s also seeing, Philip offers to take her to Paris, but she refuses him. His friend continues trying to dissuade him, but he continues his one-sided courtship. Finally, he asks Mildred to marry him, but she says she’s already engaged to the German Emil.
After the act break, Philip has finished his MD, and is toasting it with Crenshaw and his cousin Sally (Brook.) He’s even bought a new microscope, suggesting that he’s materially recovered from his earlier infatuation. After Crenshaw leaves, Philip really lays it on with the flirtation, and she actually seems to return his affection. A guy named Harry comes in to exposit that Philip has gotten top grades. This leads him to bitterly monologue about how much he loved Mildred, and hated himself for loving her.
But who should turn up at his door that minute but the very same Mildred? She cries, saying that Emil has left her and that she wishes she had married Philip. Sally beats a hasty retreat. Apparently the German was already married, and took off after knocking Mildred up. Philip takes her in, and soon enough the baby is born. Harry from next door comes in to creep on Mildred, and immediately starts making out with her. Philip is finally taking her on that trip to Paris on the weekend, but he has suspicions of Mildred, which he throws in her face as soon as he gets home. Bitter, Philip gives her his savings, proclaiming that he’s “buying his way out of bondage.”
Out in a very dark-looking English countryside, Philip is happy again, romancing Sally. Nevertheless, he is cautious because of his past bad experience with love. He swears that he’s trying to move on, but he unconsciously sketches Mildred’s face anyways. And when he gets back to London, there she is again, alone and hitting him up for a pound. Predictably, he takes pity on her and takes her into his apartment (sorry, “flat”) again. A letter informs Philip that the old guy who gave him the rug died. He bluntly tells Mildred that he doesn’t love her any more, and is disgusted by her. She responds by calling him a stuck-up mug (which is fairly accurate), and tears up the super-symbolic rug as well as the money he’d been saving for the operation.
After a slightly flubbed promo for an electric roaster, Philip staggers home. He’s apparently now unemployed and behind on rent, as there’s “no market for cripples.” Sally is apparently still interested in him, though. With her encouragement, they set up a doctor’s office, apparently just in his apartment (I guess the health code was more relaxed in pre-WWI England.) Sally has even mended the rug, and Alan comes by to say that he’s found a doctor who will fix up his damaged foot.
But wait, there’s Mildred again! Apparently she’s ill, and it’s terminal. He coldly sends her on her way, while she tells him that she’s the only gentleman she ever knew. Later, and limp-free he comes to Sally. He tells her that “freedom is a myth” and that everyone is in bondage to someone else, which is his very philosophical way of proposing to her. The music swells as we get a strangely conventional happy ending. All that’s left is for one more Westinghouse commercial — this time for a terrifying “krypton lamp, brighter than a thousand suns.” Is it already time for Adventures of Superman?
What I thought: When 1940s cultural critics talked about the potential of TV to bring culture to the masses, it was probably programs like this that they imagined. Unlike some of Studio One‘s previous installments, which aspired to the middlebrow at best, this was an adaptation of a genuine modernist masterwork, the 600+ page bildungsroman from W. Somerset Maugham. There were no murders under mysterious circumstances or comedic Irish stereotypes, just ordinary people trying to make the best out of their lives. Did it make for better viewing than the silly stuff? Well, sort of.
Paul Nickell’s adaptation necessarily cuts out a whole lot of the original material from Of Human Bondage, such as Philip’s childhood and his many ruminations on the art world. The direction is mostly straightforward, but Nickell does show a little craft in frequently lingering on Heston’s shoes to emphasize his unseen deformity. Charlton Heston, at this time doing the rounds on television (he had been on a now-unavailable episode of Suspense a few weeks earlier), doesn’t give a particularly expressive performance but does have the gravitas that would make him a movie star, and which really stands out in early television.
Unfortunately, sometimes one detail ruins the whole production. (My ur-example of this is Kenneth Branagh’s ridiculous facial hair in his film version of Hamlet.) In this case, it’s Felicia Montealegre’s accent, a cartoonish Cockney that might have been okay for a bit part but is unbearable for a major character. I don’t want to beat up on Montealegre, who had perfectly serviceable previous performances on Studio One and Suspense, but it’s hard to take Mildred seriously as a character who possesses a charismatic hold on multiple men when she sounds like an evil Mary Poppins. (Incidentally, Studio One would air a version of Marry Poppins in a few weeks, so maybe she was just practicing for that.) Really, we should probably just be glad that Heston didn’t try to do a British accent.
More interesting than this middling melodrama is the way in which “Of Human Bondage” represents a rare example of literary modernism on the small screen. The story begins in 1910, around the time that “human character changed” according to Virginia Woolf. Modernism emerged as a response to both Victorian romance and social realism, viewing the formal conventions of these works as stodgy and formulaic — the exact opposite of reality. Instead, modernism attempted to recreate the actual process of the human psyche, which was not the rational realist narrator of a H. G. Wells or George Eliot but rather a partial, frequently distracted and sometimes incomprehensible stream of consciousness.
I haven’t read Of Human Bondage (look, I said it was 600 pages), but just from the Wikipedia description it reminds me of other works of masculine modernism like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust and Joyce’s autobiographical narrators are consumed by their desire, desire that unfolds on the page in dense and recursive trains of thought. Perhaps a similar device could make Philip’s attraction to the disinterested Mildred seem real and compelling, a kind of cynical revision of Petrarch or Dante’s one-sided affections.
But how do you translate that to a one-hour television show? Can you have a stream of consciousness that’s interrupted every twenty minutes by a plug for Westinghouse washers and dryers? Nickell briefly makes an attempt by having Heston speak to his reflection, an awkward recreation of the internal monologue so essential to modernist fiction. But this device does not reappear, and for the most part these characters appear only as ciphers. Indeed, to the extent that the episode relates a narrative of Philip’s escape from his sinful desire for a socially disruptive relationship, it is more Victorian than Edwardian.
The root of this latent Victorianism is the script’s reactionary approach to class and gender. Mildred is a particularly unflattering portrayal of the lower class — dependent on her social superiors, but insecure and ungrateful. She lusts after Philip’s signifiers of class status, even as she detests him personally — this is represented by wanting to go on his trip to Paris, but with someone else. (As is typical in capitalist art and propaganda, the exploitative nature of wealth is inverted by making the poor parasitic on the rich.) And she is, of course, a caricature of the shrill cocktease, exploiting a hapless romantic’s emotions for her own benefit.
I have no idea if these prejudices are present in the original text (although it was written in the 1910s, so the odds aren’t great.) But it’s entirely of a piece with previous episodes of Studio One, which have a habit of staging a dichotomy between good and bad symbols of femininity. In this episode we have a literal virgin/whore complex between the redemptive Sally (whose role was apparently greatly increased from the novel) and Mildred (who, in the original text, worked as a prostitute and was afflicted with syphilis at the end, here changed to a mystery illness for propriety’s sake.) We can see a similar divide in past Studio One episodes like “June Moon” and to a lesser extent “Two Sharp Knives.” Whether this was a particular thematic fixation of Miner or just general cultural misogyny, one gets the impression when watching Studio One that dangerous, shrewish women are around every corner, ready to cut your heart out. The more television sought prestige, perhaps, the more it had to buy in to other social hierarchies.
Coming up next: An episode of Life of Riley, which I will probably not write so many words about.
The Eternal Couch Potato 