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I'll carry a phone around with me
I did not enjoy Harriet Craig (1950) for entirely different reasons than I did not enjoy Craig's Wife (1936). It starts like a slightly curdled sitcom, but it finishes full bore Gothic. What it lacks in social criticism, it makes up in emotional cruelty. When offered a choice between a queer-eyed despair of matrimony and the anamnesis of a particularly nasty case, I may have to acknowledge that the property may be domestic horror whichever way it cuts.
Less of a remake than a re-adaptation by Anne Froelick and James Gunn of George Kelly's Pulitzer-winning Craig's Wife (1925), Harriet Craig was the second of three vehicles for Joan Crawford directed by Vincent Sherman and as such fascinates me because even in an era where the spectacle of a destructive, transgressive woman offered as much tinsel-sanctioned escapism as cautionary moral, the point of identification eludes me. Brittle, immaculate, her brows as blameless as her shoulders are squared, Crawford's Harriet Craig has none of the night-blooming amorality of Lizabeth Scott's Jane Palmer, the flinty nihilism of Ann Savage's Vera, or even the surreal avarice of Jean Gillie's Margot Shelby, a femme so fatale she gets the same man killed twice in the scrap-budget noir Decoy (1946). What she provides is less sensational, more frightening: a vividly convincing, realistically proportioned primer of emotional abuse.
I do not throw the word around lightly, in life or in fiction. In her four years of marriage to Walter Craig, Harriet has not merely redecorated their spacious, tree-shaded middle-class home to a pinnacle of inviolable glamour consistent with the Kelly-penned premise of a woman who treats her house better than anyone who has to share it with her; like a demurely inexorable cuckoo, she has expunged almost all traces of her husband's childhood home as systematically and successfully as she has isolated him from his former circle of friends, the better to reproach a rare wistful objection with the wounded, solicitous, "Darling, I didn't think we needed other people around to make us happy." She is always indulging her husband, always forgiving him, always bearing fondly with his oft-reminded naïveté which obliges instruction in the home-wrecking implications of a neighborly gift of roses as matter-of-factly as she plans his meals, supervises his schedule, manages the household accounts. The sexual candor of their relationship would be charming if it were not spelled out in so many words as one more tool in her box of tricks, so efficiently deployed that he cancels a golf date with his oldest friend at the mere whisper of a long, hot bath, his sticky, beglamoured expression leaving less to the imagination than her departing skin-swish of silk. "She could build a nest in his ear and he'd never know it." It is equally impossible for his Tati-esque inability to find a comfortable position on his own sofa to play as real comedy rather than an acrid literalization of just how uninhabitable this so-called living room has become since the days when half the kids in the neighborhood used to run wild through it and his mother kibitzed Thursday night poker—like the rest of the house, it exists now as an exacting showcase for its new mistress, even the nap of the carpet on the grand proscenium sweep of the staircase brushed to printless purity. The Chinoiserie of its formally flamboyant style invites admiration as hands-off as velvet ropes and glass cases. As the shell-shocked new maid observes to the battle-hardened housekeeper in one of the ringing silences an even fractionally displeased Harriet tends to leave in her wake, "I bet if she had her way, she'd wrap up this whole place in cellophane." The effect may hew more faithfully than Arzner's film to Kelly's stated conception of Harriet as an "SOB," but it forces the point as far as muddling it: the picture that emerges is less of a woman in desperate symbiosis with her house whose homeostasis she must maintain even at a cost of monumental deceit than a woman whose rigid, compulsive manipulation of other people necessarily spills over into control of their physical terrain. "I don't like the feeling of being rushed along in the darkness," a night journey by train prompts her to admit. "Having no control, putting my life completely in someone else's hands—" Her preemptive strike philosophy of marriage, in which a man is targeted, trained, and then constantly surveilled so as to assure the woman of her upper hand while protecting his illusion of autonomy, cues up Frank Loesser's "Marry the Man Today" in a key of gaslight, a ball-and-chain joke played horrifically straight. Harriet in 1936 was willing to obstruct justice to prevent a murder investigation from invading the fragile, conditional safe space of her home, but Harriet in 1950 all but destroys her husband professionally in order to keep him from an assignment in Tokyo that might get him six thousand miles out from under her thumb. That she fails is ultimately a combination of overreach and chance, the uncontrollable variables which she always tried to keep as contained as the maritally auspicious rice inside her prize antique of a fourteenth-century Ming vase. Until it's poured out in a final, contemplative slithering of abandoned luck, it feels telling of our understanding of Harriet that we weren't sure if there was anything inside the symbol at all.
As played by Wendell Corey with his irreplaceable flair for romantic losers, Walter is either the MVP or the biggest miscalculation of Harriet Craig. Instead of a dolt or a prig whose exploitation we might approve as turnabout for his complacent chauvinism, he's sweet, smart, and defenseless, a rising engineer in the new field of electroacoustics characteristically apologizing his entrance, "We were running a test on a new amplifier—I couldn't leave the lab till it was finished!" He is responsible for several of his company's patents, including the new system in Japan. The days of an unscheduled marital separation can be stratigraphically dated by the sedimentation of shirts, ties, socks, and shorts, and what may well have been the same suit all week. He doesn't seem to suffer from social impairment when he loans out the Sunday comics to the kid next door and is delighted to have the pants beat off him at gin rummy by his boss' card-sharping wife, but at the least reproof from Harriet he freezes into an anxious, schoolboyish guilt, fumbling through recriminations for the reprieve of a kiss that ends too soon. Her slightly tart claim to love him for his guilelessness may be an admission that he was the easiest gazelle to cut out of his herd, but the neg itself suggests the devouring is not yet complete. His sly, surprising humor sneaks out, his active concern for the lives and loves of other people will culminate in the sentence, so shocking it gets him listened to, "I don't care what Harriet said." It heightens the film's resemblance to a kind of hell-flipped Ibsen. Corey's celebrated impersonation of a lust-smacked sap notwithstanding, Walter's so earnestly hooked on his wife's happiness that even as the frog-boiling constriction of their married life dawns on him at last, he's still grasping for ways to understand a relationship that never was any such thing. No single lie or insult breaks the spell so much as the evening he spends with the forbidden neighbors, folded comfortably on the floor in front of the repaired radio with a pair of needle-nose pliers still in hand, smoking his much-deplored pipe and hugged so unselfconsciously goodnight by a child like the one he's never been able to have with Harriet, it's a gift he could never have asked for. It's more than the post-war ideal of the nuclear family, so conscious a contrast to the pristine sterility of the Craig household—a more sentimental film would have slotted him automatically as a stepfather elect, but for all of his wife's insinuations about "well-to-do young widows who specialize in approaches," there's not a milliampere of romance between him and Fiona O'Shiel's Mrs. Frazier, who knits as easily on the couch in her cat-eye glasses as if he's been coming around to fix the radio for years. It is simply, humanly nice. The well-used furniture clutters up the room a little, the coffee table slides with magazines, the books lean on their shelves as if they are often taken out. Walter on his abstracted way to the door trips over a model train and apologizes and is not scolded for it, just as when he asked a peculiar question out of nowhere, it was considered and given a serious, kindly reply. It is a house in which people live as if they actually like one another. It is as painful and recognizable as Harriet herself that the concept has become so strange to him. Not much can amend the adolescence of his famous gestures, on returning to his own untouchable, alienated house, of ashing his cigarette deliberately on the rug and breaking his wife's treasured vase, but Corey at least performs the latter with the volcanism of bridge-burning rather than spite and notably unlike his counterpart in 1936, he never takes refuge in the self-righteous myths of misogyny. Even at the last, with his coat over his arm and his hand on the door he has to walk out for his life, his movie makes no claim that he's stopped loving Harriet, this dazzling woman who made him feel that every bit of himself he gave up was the dearest, most romantic thing he could do for her. "I didn't say I could forget you. But I won't be back."
Harriet Craig allows its title character her tragedy. When she reveals, in a raw volley of a monologue contributed by Crawford herself, the grinding, demonizing poverty of her childhood into which she and her mother were precipitated after Harriet caught her father cheating and he never came home again, we understand without any psychobabble that some deep, driving part of her has remained that child frozen in guilt and abandonment, who believes like every child that the divorce, the abuse, the death was within their control; whose sudden, shuddering sob at the finality of the front door clicking shut makes far more sense than the loss of a punching bag or a meal ticket because it is exactly the nightmare she warped herself and everyone around her to prevent and so made sure of, compacting her life ever more forcibly into its porcelain illusion of perfection until it shattered under the strain. "I think you're telling me the truth for the first time . . . You'd never feel safe with anybody until you'd crushed them." Cool motive, still domestic abuse. And such a waste, when we can see for ourselves the formidable energies Harriet pours into the domination of her household as if, indeed, conducting a scorched earth campaign. Her interview with the head of the electronics company is a masterclass of malign diplomacy, tearfully, tactfully discouraging all chance of future promotion for her husband without risking the security of his current position, relying with exquisite vulnerability on the discretion of his boss who will do his paternalistic part to protect the brave little woman who entrusted him with her marriage's secret shames; in the meantime she has arranged an alibi as airtight as if she's assassinating a man and not just his character, including the intelligence that the victim will be safely occupied with voltmeters and oscilloscopes all afternoon. Imagine her handling the Tokyo job. General MacArthur, look to your stars. It makes her fixation on the domestic sphere feel even more damaged and self-sabotaging, especially since she is shown to exist in a world in which women work—it's not even a compliment, just a natural question when the serious suitor of the orphaned cousin whom Harriet has leashed as her personal dogsbody asks, "Say, how come a smart girl like you isn't holding down a good job someplace?" Harriet gave up a good job of her own to marry Walter, citing emotional over financial security. The American Fifties have become such shorthand for grey flannel and homemaking, it is fascinating to see this decision in 1950 regarded as suspicious and retrograde. In general Harriet Craig takes a visible care to distinguish its story from a battle of the sexes. The "old crowd" from whom Walter has been cleaved off are not a bachelor gang, but a mixed group of mostly couples; he makes a sharp crack about girls sticking together when he discovers Harriet's cousin covering for her, but in fact he has more female allies than male, however unwitting or unnoticed, the reality check of the nextdoorekeh, the shrewd matron who asks the questions no one else does and applies her own conclusions, the housekeeper who explains her endurance under Harriet with the stubborn, if slightly saddened, "Mr. Craig is a very nice man." Harriet, actually, seems just as isolated from feminine solidarity as from male impediments. Her cousin is not her confidante but her catspaw and her treatment of the servants is more honest only in that it is curter and colder still. She revises the truth so often as needed, it is impossible to tell if she really felt snubbed by the women of Walter's crowd when she met them or if the accusation merely furnished the excuse not to interact with them again. At the expensive sanitarium where her mother drifts in a private, dissociated reality even less penetrable than her daughter's house, she even cuts short her debrief with the chief doctor when the older woman's professional judgment does not conform to Harriet's preferred narrative. She may not be able to exist with anyone, really, whether she can crush them or not. She always needs to have charge of the story. She needs the world to be her way, especially when it won't.
Unlike Craig's Wife, I don't have even a straw-grasping fix-it for Harriet Craig: that last shot of her ascending into the shadows of her home, a small, implacable figure in a phantom float of peignoir, her hair sharp as darkness, her face weeping stone, as if she has become already the haunting of this house whose heart she devoured until it died around her, is so absolute that while it does not affect me in the same way as the ending of the earlier film, it must be acknowledged as blastingly depressing. I do not know what to do with it. Harriet's traumatized drive to reconstruct a family even if she has to suture it together with gaslighting and intimidation is too wounded to feel like the kind of bitch-goddessing that can be either defiantly or ironically embraced, too particularized and wrecking for any wider commentary. The film may have been stranded between its source material and its own story, translating actions and recasting lines that no longer run in tandem with one another. Except that it retains the image of the house itself crashing down, it is superfluous for Walter to smash the vase into the fire screen when he has already turned the rice out of it like an hourglass, the ritual of their marriage run out. "Since when have I been such a moron I couldn't struggle along without you?" is a much more hurt and less high-hat line than its sniffily sexist original, but then it's even nastier for Harriet to escalate the argument by ridiculing her husband sexually, and then it further confuses the issue that Columbia borrowed an actor who can look so braced and vulnerable as Walter makes himself articulate the terms of their marriage that he thought went without saying: "I've wanted you to be honest with me. To trust me. I've wanted you to love me." The production may also just have thrown a rod somewhere. Perhaps I should see more mid-century melodramas. Insofar as I have much sense of Crawford's post-Code image, I associate it with anguished women in social binds whom the audience is supposed to feel for, not women whose intimately murmured delivery of the promise, "I'll never let you out of my sight again," could cause an audience to move out of state just in case she looks round. It is not a bad performance. It is an extremely good performance, amplified by Corey and the ensemble acting of K.T. Stevens, Allyn Joslyn, Lucile Watson, Viola Roache, and Ellen Corby. It just happens to be an extremely good performance of a kind of behavior I don't enjoy. It turned up on Tubi and I thought I knew what I was getting from the Arzner film; I did not. At least I appreciate that it contains something which I am not sure I have seen even in a pre-Code, namely the suggestion of a woman faking orgasm. "How many ways can you lie, Harriet? You lie when you cry, you lie when you smile, you lie when you talk. Do you also lie when you—" This truth brought to you by my new backers at Patreon.
Less of a remake than a re-adaptation by Anne Froelick and James Gunn of George Kelly's Pulitzer-winning Craig's Wife (1925), Harriet Craig was the second of three vehicles for Joan Crawford directed by Vincent Sherman and as such fascinates me because even in an era where the spectacle of a destructive, transgressive woman offered as much tinsel-sanctioned escapism as cautionary moral, the point of identification eludes me. Brittle, immaculate, her brows as blameless as her shoulders are squared, Crawford's Harriet Craig has none of the night-blooming amorality of Lizabeth Scott's Jane Palmer, the flinty nihilism of Ann Savage's Vera, or even the surreal avarice of Jean Gillie's Margot Shelby, a femme so fatale she gets the same man killed twice in the scrap-budget noir Decoy (1946). What she provides is less sensational, more frightening: a vividly convincing, realistically proportioned primer of emotional abuse.
I do not throw the word around lightly, in life or in fiction. In her four years of marriage to Walter Craig, Harriet has not merely redecorated their spacious, tree-shaded middle-class home to a pinnacle of inviolable glamour consistent with the Kelly-penned premise of a woman who treats her house better than anyone who has to share it with her; like a demurely inexorable cuckoo, she has expunged almost all traces of her husband's childhood home as systematically and successfully as she has isolated him from his former circle of friends, the better to reproach a rare wistful objection with the wounded, solicitous, "Darling, I didn't think we needed other people around to make us happy." She is always indulging her husband, always forgiving him, always bearing fondly with his oft-reminded naïveté which obliges instruction in the home-wrecking implications of a neighborly gift of roses as matter-of-factly as she plans his meals, supervises his schedule, manages the household accounts. The sexual candor of their relationship would be charming if it were not spelled out in so many words as one more tool in her box of tricks, so efficiently deployed that he cancels a golf date with his oldest friend at the mere whisper of a long, hot bath, his sticky, beglamoured expression leaving less to the imagination than her departing skin-swish of silk. "She could build a nest in his ear and he'd never know it." It is equally impossible for his Tati-esque inability to find a comfortable position on his own sofa to play as real comedy rather than an acrid literalization of just how uninhabitable this so-called living room has become since the days when half the kids in the neighborhood used to run wild through it and his mother kibitzed Thursday night poker—like the rest of the house, it exists now as an exacting showcase for its new mistress, even the nap of the carpet on the grand proscenium sweep of the staircase brushed to printless purity. The Chinoiserie of its formally flamboyant style invites admiration as hands-off as velvet ropes and glass cases. As the shell-shocked new maid observes to the battle-hardened housekeeper in one of the ringing silences an even fractionally displeased Harriet tends to leave in her wake, "I bet if she had her way, she'd wrap up this whole place in cellophane." The effect may hew more faithfully than Arzner's film to Kelly's stated conception of Harriet as an "SOB," but it forces the point as far as muddling it: the picture that emerges is less of a woman in desperate symbiosis with her house whose homeostasis she must maintain even at a cost of monumental deceit than a woman whose rigid, compulsive manipulation of other people necessarily spills over into control of their physical terrain. "I don't like the feeling of being rushed along in the darkness," a night journey by train prompts her to admit. "Having no control, putting my life completely in someone else's hands—" Her preemptive strike philosophy of marriage, in which a man is targeted, trained, and then constantly surveilled so as to assure the woman of her upper hand while protecting his illusion of autonomy, cues up Frank Loesser's "Marry the Man Today" in a key of gaslight, a ball-and-chain joke played horrifically straight. Harriet in 1936 was willing to obstruct justice to prevent a murder investigation from invading the fragile, conditional safe space of her home, but Harriet in 1950 all but destroys her husband professionally in order to keep him from an assignment in Tokyo that might get him six thousand miles out from under her thumb. That she fails is ultimately a combination of overreach and chance, the uncontrollable variables which she always tried to keep as contained as the maritally auspicious rice inside her prize antique of a fourteenth-century Ming vase. Until it's poured out in a final, contemplative slithering of abandoned luck, it feels telling of our understanding of Harriet that we weren't sure if there was anything inside the symbol at all.
As played by Wendell Corey with his irreplaceable flair for romantic losers, Walter is either the MVP or the biggest miscalculation of Harriet Craig. Instead of a dolt or a prig whose exploitation we might approve as turnabout for his complacent chauvinism, he's sweet, smart, and defenseless, a rising engineer in the new field of electroacoustics characteristically apologizing his entrance, "We were running a test on a new amplifier—I couldn't leave the lab till it was finished!" He is responsible for several of his company's patents, including the new system in Japan. The days of an unscheduled marital separation can be stratigraphically dated by the sedimentation of shirts, ties, socks, and shorts, and what may well have been the same suit all week. He doesn't seem to suffer from social impairment when he loans out the Sunday comics to the kid next door and is delighted to have the pants beat off him at gin rummy by his boss' card-sharping wife, but at the least reproof from Harriet he freezes into an anxious, schoolboyish guilt, fumbling through recriminations for the reprieve of a kiss that ends too soon. Her slightly tart claim to love him for his guilelessness may be an admission that he was the easiest gazelle to cut out of his herd, but the neg itself suggests the devouring is not yet complete. His sly, surprising humor sneaks out, his active concern for the lives and loves of other people will culminate in the sentence, so shocking it gets him listened to, "I don't care what Harriet said." It heightens the film's resemblance to a kind of hell-flipped Ibsen. Corey's celebrated impersonation of a lust-smacked sap notwithstanding, Walter's so earnestly hooked on his wife's happiness that even as the frog-boiling constriction of their married life dawns on him at last, he's still grasping for ways to understand a relationship that never was any such thing. No single lie or insult breaks the spell so much as the evening he spends with the forbidden neighbors, folded comfortably on the floor in front of the repaired radio with a pair of needle-nose pliers still in hand, smoking his much-deplored pipe and hugged so unselfconsciously goodnight by a child like the one he's never been able to have with Harriet, it's a gift he could never have asked for. It's more than the post-war ideal of the nuclear family, so conscious a contrast to the pristine sterility of the Craig household—a more sentimental film would have slotted him automatically as a stepfather elect, but for all of his wife's insinuations about "well-to-do young widows who specialize in approaches," there's not a milliampere of romance between him and Fiona O'Shiel's Mrs. Frazier, who knits as easily on the couch in her cat-eye glasses as if he's been coming around to fix the radio for years. It is simply, humanly nice. The well-used furniture clutters up the room a little, the coffee table slides with magazines, the books lean on their shelves as if they are often taken out. Walter on his abstracted way to the door trips over a model train and apologizes and is not scolded for it, just as when he asked a peculiar question out of nowhere, it was considered and given a serious, kindly reply. It is a house in which people live as if they actually like one another. It is as painful and recognizable as Harriet herself that the concept has become so strange to him. Not much can amend the adolescence of his famous gestures, on returning to his own untouchable, alienated house, of ashing his cigarette deliberately on the rug and breaking his wife's treasured vase, but Corey at least performs the latter with the volcanism of bridge-burning rather than spite and notably unlike his counterpart in 1936, he never takes refuge in the self-righteous myths of misogyny. Even at the last, with his coat over his arm and his hand on the door he has to walk out for his life, his movie makes no claim that he's stopped loving Harriet, this dazzling woman who made him feel that every bit of himself he gave up was the dearest, most romantic thing he could do for her. "I didn't say I could forget you. But I won't be back."
Harriet Craig allows its title character her tragedy. When she reveals, in a raw volley of a monologue contributed by Crawford herself, the grinding, demonizing poverty of her childhood into which she and her mother were precipitated after Harriet caught her father cheating and he never came home again, we understand without any psychobabble that some deep, driving part of her has remained that child frozen in guilt and abandonment, who believes like every child that the divorce, the abuse, the death was within their control; whose sudden, shuddering sob at the finality of the front door clicking shut makes far more sense than the loss of a punching bag or a meal ticket because it is exactly the nightmare she warped herself and everyone around her to prevent and so made sure of, compacting her life ever more forcibly into its porcelain illusion of perfection until it shattered under the strain. "I think you're telling me the truth for the first time . . . You'd never feel safe with anybody until you'd crushed them." Cool motive, still domestic abuse. And such a waste, when we can see for ourselves the formidable energies Harriet pours into the domination of her household as if, indeed, conducting a scorched earth campaign. Her interview with the head of the electronics company is a masterclass of malign diplomacy, tearfully, tactfully discouraging all chance of future promotion for her husband without risking the security of his current position, relying with exquisite vulnerability on the discretion of his boss who will do his paternalistic part to protect the brave little woman who entrusted him with her marriage's secret shames; in the meantime she has arranged an alibi as airtight as if she's assassinating a man and not just his character, including the intelligence that the victim will be safely occupied with voltmeters and oscilloscopes all afternoon. Imagine her handling the Tokyo job. General MacArthur, look to your stars. It makes her fixation on the domestic sphere feel even more damaged and self-sabotaging, especially since she is shown to exist in a world in which women work—it's not even a compliment, just a natural question when the serious suitor of the orphaned cousin whom Harriet has leashed as her personal dogsbody asks, "Say, how come a smart girl like you isn't holding down a good job someplace?" Harriet gave up a good job of her own to marry Walter, citing emotional over financial security. The American Fifties have become such shorthand for grey flannel and homemaking, it is fascinating to see this decision in 1950 regarded as suspicious and retrograde. In general Harriet Craig takes a visible care to distinguish its story from a battle of the sexes. The "old crowd" from whom Walter has been cleaved off are not a bachelor gang, but a mixed group of mostly couples; he makes a sharp crack about girls sticking together when he discovers Harriet's cousin covering for her, but in fact he has more female allies than male, however unwitting or unnoticed, the reality check of the nextdoorekeh, the shrewd matron who asks the questions no one else does and applies her own conclusions, the housekeeper who explains her endurance under Harriet with the stubborn, if slightly saddened, "Mr. Craig is a very nice man." Harriet, actually, seems just as isolated from feminine solidarity as from male impediments. Her cousin is not her confidante but her catspaw and her treatment of the servants is more honest only in that it is curter and colder still. She revises the truth so often as needed, it is impossible to tell if she really felt snubbed by the women of Walter's crowd when she met them or if the accusation merely furnished the excuse not to interact with them again. At the expensive sanitarium where her mother drifts in a private, dissociated reality even less penetrable than her daughter's house, she even cuts short her debrief with the chief doctor when the older woman's professional judgment does not conform to Harriet's preferred narrative. She may not be able to exist with anyone, really, whether she can crush them or not. She always needs to have charge of the story. She needs the world to be her way, especially when it won't.
Unlike Craig's Wife, I don't have even a straw-grasping fix-it for Harriet Craig: that last shot of her ascending into the shadows of her home, a small, implacable figure in a phantom float of peignoir, her hair sharp as darkness, her face weeping stone, as if she has become already the haunting of this house whose heart she devoured until it died around her, is so absolute that while it does not affect me in the same way as the ending of the earlier film, it must be acknowledged as blastingly depressing. I do not know what to do with it. Harriet's traumatized drive to reconstruct a family even if she has to suture it together with gaslighting and intimidation is too wounded to feel like the kind of bitch-goddessing that can be either defiantly or ironically embraced, too particularized and wrecking for any wider commentary. The film may have been stranded between its source material and its own story, translating actions and recasting lines that no longer run in tandem with one another. Except that it retains the image of the house itself crashing down, it is superfluous for Walter to smash the vase into the fire screen when he has already turned the rice out of it like an hourglass, the ritual of their marriage run out. "Since when have I been such a moron I couldn't struggle along without you?" is a much more hurt and less high-hat line than its sniffily sexist original, but then it's even nastier for Harriet to escalate the argument by ridiculing her husband sexually, and then it further confuses the issue that Columbia borrowed an actor who can look so braced and vulnerable as Walter makes himself articulate the terms of their marriage that he thought went without saying: "I've wanted you to be honest with me. To trust me. I've wanted you to love me." The production may also just have thrown a rod somewhere. Perhaps I should see more mid-century melodramas. Insofar as I have much sense of Crawford's post-Code image, I associate it with anguished women in social binds whom the audience is supposed to feel for, not women whose intimately murmured delivery of the promise, "I'll never let you out of my sight again," could cause an audience to move out of state just in case she looks round. It is not a bad performance. It is an extremely good performance, amplified by Corey and the ensemble acting of K.T. Stevens, Allyn Joslyn, Lucile Watson, Viola Roache, and Ellen Corby. It just happens to be an extremely good performance of a kind of behavior I don't enjoy. It turned up on Tubi and I thought I knew what I was getting from the Arzner film; I did not. At least I appreciate that it contains something which I am not sure I have seen even in a pre-Code, namely the suggestion of a woman faking orgasm. "How many ways can you lie, Harriet? You lie when you cry, you lie when you smile, you lie when you talk. Do you also lie when you—" This truth brought to you by my new backers at Patreon.
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You're welcome. I thought I would recover by watching, you know, a nice film noir or something.
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Thank you. It was much more upsetting than I had planned for!
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EXTREMELY.
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Harriet's traumatized drive to reconstruct a family even if she has to suture it together with gaslighting and intimidation is too wounded to feel like the kind of bitch-goddessing that can be either defiantly or ironically embraced, too particularized and wrecking for any wider commentary. --Yeah, too particularized, as you describe it, even for misogyny. "Women be so controlling, amirite, dudes??" except this sounds so much more awful and hurtful all around that that line can't work (and especially since you point out that there are plenty of pleasant-seeming, but also capable, women in the wings).
Cool motive, still domestic abuse. --Right: and I'm glad the movie seems to agree with that assessment.
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I've seen movies from this period that espouse the opposite view—the expectation that a woman will only work until marriage, if she works at all, as opposed to just going to college for her M.R.S. It may have been the dominant one, at least pop-culturally. But it can't have been total, or the other attitude wouldn't have shown up in this movie, and I was startled and then just glad when it did. Without it, again, the film would feel a lot more deterministic about men's and women's roles, but also, seriously, it's 1950, Clare hovering at her older cousin's beck and call like some Victorian lady's companion is just weird. Harriet would so obviously fare better as one of the growing number of female executives in her decade, challenged at the level of her capacities, not trapped in a self-fulfilling trauma loop, except that if she were healthy enough to have made that kind of decision, the film wouldn't be happening.
[edit] I had to cut-and-paste it out from under its paywall, and if desired can cut-and-paste it for you, but this 1956 Fortune article on women as bosses is fascinating. Some of the problems haven't changed, but some of the attitudes I didn't expect, and the importance of proximity to the war feels like a factor I keep forgetting.
-Yeah, too particularized, as you describe it, even for misogyny. "Women be so controlling, amirite, dudes??" except this sounds so much more awful and hurtful all around that that line can't work (and especially since you point out that there are plenty of pleasant-seeming, but also capable, women in the wings).
If the film had presented Harriet as the logical extension of the penchant of women to domesticate and infantilize their men, I don't think I could have stood it even for Wendell Corey. The fact that it seems to argue so carefully against just such a reading is one of the reasons it's so interesting, but then absolutely one of the reasons it was so difficult to watch, because there's no insulation against the fact that people as destructive as Harriet exist in real life and not just as poisonous fantasies. The depth of her damage still feels slightly out of focus with the original stage/screen conceit, but it is in no way unbelievable.
--Right: and I'm glad the movie seems to agree with that assessment.
It does! And it doesn't blame Walter, either, as if a real man would never have let himself into this position in the first place. Harriet is just like this with people. She has the abuser's instinct for secrets. It is believable that until she has to tell too many lies to too many people such that the odds of two conflicting stories encountering one another in the wild dramatically increase, no one catches on.
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I do not! I snurched it old-school, which I did not think still worked, but I have just sent you the proof. (Sorry, Fortune.)
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She's incredible. She never becomes a cartoon. An hour and a half is just a very rough time to spend in her company and all the characters have had to deal with more.