Of Human Bondage (Studio One)

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"Of Human Bondage"
Studio One episode
Episode no.Season 2
Episode 11
Directed byPaul Nickel
Written by Sumner Locke Elliott
Based on Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
Original air dateNovember 21, 1949 (1949-11-21)
Running time60 minutes
List of episodes

"Of Human Bondage" is a 1949 American television play. Adapted from the novel Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham it was an episode of the anthology series Studio One . The adaptation was by Sumner Locke Elliott and the success of the show helped launch Elliott's television career. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Premise

A medical student has a disastrous love affair.

Cast

Production

The show had a script but producer Worthington Miner was unhappy with it. He contacted Elliott and asked for a script in two days. Elliott said "I'd never been in a studio in my life, nor seen a TV camera: I really knew nothing; but I took the book — Miner had marked with a slip of paper where the dramatization should start, two hundred pages into Maugham's story — and somehow or other I got that script written for him... and I'd become a television writer." [1]

Miner had mixed feelings about the production. He later said "I had great success with adaptations of novels of Henry James — The Ambassadors, for example. These stories concerned a small number of people in a mass of extraneous material that can be caught by the television camera. So I got carried away and decided to do Bondage. This was a fiasco. I got a pretty good script from Sumner Locke Elliott, all things considered; but it had one fault - it was 27 minutes too long!" [4]

References

  1. 1 2 Wilk, Max (1989). The Golden Age of Television: Notes from the Survivors. Moyer Bell. p. 32. ISBN   978-1-55921-000-3.
  2. ↑ "Of Human Bondage to be broadcast for the first time". Chicago Tribune. 20 November 1949. p. 9.
  3. ↑ "A business-minded young author". The Daily Telegraph. Vol. XV, no. 93. New South Wales, Australia. 8 July 1950. p. 23. Retrieved 26 September 2024– via National Library of Australia.
  4. ↑ Sturcken, Frank (1990). Live Television: The Golden Age of 1946-1958 in New York. McFarland & Company. p. 30. ISBN   978-0-89950-523-7.
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