I really did not enjoy Craig's Wife (1936) and I really can't stop thinking about it, so I'm writing about it. Well played, Dorothy Arzner.
In broad outline, the plot sounds like a woman's picture only the RNC could love: the protagonist is so pathologically house-proud that she'd rather obstruct a murder investigation than risk the disruption of her exquisitely arranged home in which her husband finally realizes he has no more weight than a meal ticket and leaves her, as does every other member of the Craig household, to the contrapasso nightmare of her totally undisturbed, perfectly controllable, echoingly empty house. I gather this was the drift of the original 1925 play by George Kelly and may well have been preserved faithfully in the first, now-lost silent film version; certainly it seems present in the mid-century remake starring Joan Crawford. In the hands of Arzner and screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr., the essential conceit of the woman whose house is more important to her than any human connection becomes, instead of open season on her frigidity, materialism, and general monstrosity, an ice-clear examination of the systems that lead a woman to barter herself for even the illusion of a room of her own, but then it's like watching an American Hedda Gabler or some AU of A Doll's House where Torvald's the one to walk out and I'm not saying it doesn't work, but I am saying that I may have miscalculated when I thought it would leave me feeling less bludgeoned than a rewatch of Christopher Strong (1933).
I appreciate that Arzner and McCall, in revising their source material, do not merely invert it to make Harriet Craig an uncomplicated hero. As played by Rosalind Russell in a chic, stark array of white or black outfits whose neoclassical lines echo the Grecian furnishings of her beloved home, she has an air of marble self-containment, sleek to the eye, unyielding to the touch. Introduced at her ailing sister's bedside, she's not weeping like her niece but coolly inquiring of a nurse whether it isn't true that patients make quicker recoveries without visitors to exhaust them; on the train with her niece, she receives the news of the younger woman's engagement with an indulgent amusement that barely masks adamant disapproval; once enclosed safely within the ice-cream sanctuary of her own parlor, she minutely corrects the position of the Attic red-figure vase on the mantel, ejects a neighbor's gift of homegrown roses for shedding petals all over the piano, and regards a hand-jotted note left beside the telephone as distastefully as if it were trash. "Mazie," the housekeeper cautioned the new maid in the first moments of the film, "never forget—this room is the holy of holies!" and indeed, it looks more like a shrine or a museum than a living room, each elegantly antique figure of furniture or statuary given its own dramatically effective space. Not a book, not a candelabrum, not a finger's sweep of dust is left to chance. Bare-breasted goddess-busts and dancing nymphs in bronze take the place of guests, or children, or friends. Even the servants' domain of the kitchen is as polished and seamless as ice. The same vestal principles reign in the white-curtained, white-carpeted, walk-in-closeted upstairs bedroom, where it's easy to envision a photoshoot by Better Homes and Gardens but impossible to conceive of that cross-bordered counterpane rumpled by anything so spontaneous as a nap or an embrace. No wonder the facade of the house when we finally see it stands in colonial revival contrast to the rambling trellises of Mrs. Frazier (Billie Burke), the widowed grandmother next door whose small house seems lashed together with the overgrowing roses of her well-gardened yard—she's the anti-Harriet, fecund, outgoing, and disorganized, while slim dark-haired Harriet herself fits into the neo-Georgian plinths and porticos of her grand house as cleanly as a caryatid into the Parthenon. You see how impossible it is to talk about one without the other, as if Harriet in her ferocious territorialism has made herself literally genius loci of the house her husband bought her and not an easily propitiated one, either. She can barely endure the presence of a guest she didn't invite herself and she never invites anyone herself; her husband has to go out to see his friends whose wives have learned to stay away. The household has gone through so many cooks that the agency won't send another without speaking to Mrs. Craig and the new maid gets the sack on the spot when her boyfriend drops by. Don't even ask what Harriet would say if she'd seen Mrs. Frazier's grandson scooting his toy car across a japanned cabinet. "You want your house, Harriet," her aunt-by-marriage warns like a malediction, "and that's all you do want, and that's all you'll have at the finish. People who live to themselves, Harriet, are generally left to themselves." Turning the pages of a coffee-table book without even a glance at the older woman, Harriet replies, "That's precisely what I've been asking for—to be left alone."
Especially with that icy disk of a mirror dominating her bedroom, such exchanges can encourage the audience to interpret Harriet as nothing more than a narcissist, a woman for whom other people exist only to do the invisible work of maintaining her private world. In fact she does a great deal of work to maintain her world: it's called being Craig's wife. "Not with any romantic illusions, dear," she answers her niece's shocked question about marrying for love. "I had no private fortune, no special training, so the only road to independence for me was through the man I married. I married to be independent . . . Independent of everybody." She quite firmly includes her husband in that last clause, though the film gives it an ironic twist by staging the conversation on either side of an anonymous male passenger like a tacit reminder of the male power on which Harriet's "independence" is contingent and by which it is circumscribed. Her domestic authority goes unchallenged only so long as it does not disturb her husband's image of their marriage. Of course she holds on to it so tightly; it's so small compared with the opportunities she might have had with wealth or education and it can so easily be taken away. Even so, it is her sole safe space. "What else has a woman but her home?" she urges her husband to understand, though they are fighting bitterly and he seems unable to process anything past the fact that she's lied first to the police and then to him. "I saw what happened to my own mother. I made up my mind it would never happen to me. She was one of those 'I will follow thee, my husband' women—believed everything my father told her and all the time he was mortgaging the house over her head for another woman. When she found it out, she did the only thing a woman like that can do, and that was to die of a broken heart." So Harriet has done everything in her power to secure as much freedom for herself within the sphere of the home while staying on the right side of her husband's pride and while the original play seems to have viewed his climactic denunciation of his "dishonest" wife as the henpecked worm turning at last, I am not sure that Arzner and McCall are as impressed with him as all that. I'm certainly not. Until the drama of the Passmore case, Walter Craig (John Boles) is not only tolerant of his wife's strong hand, he's readily acquiescent to it, happy to furnish his darling with whatever Greco-whatsit she's decided really ties the room together; two self-declared "grand years" into their marriage he's still as nuzzlingly limerent as a newlywed, catching her into his arms with assurances like "Here's the point about me and Mrs. Frazier or me and any other woman—I haven't the slightest idea what they look like. Can't see them. I'm too busy being in love with my wife." Twenty-four hours later, all that affection's polarized to disgust, apparently because it never before occurred to him to wonder whether his wife brought the same priorities to their marriage as he did. The scales don't fall from his eyes so much as he replaces them with different scales. His gestures of smashing her beloved vase and stubbing out cigarette butts all over the parlor to assert his untrammeled masculinity are spiteful and childish; he does not sound masterful but insufferably priggish when he seethes, "What have you ever done or a million others like you that you dare assume such superiority over your husband? . . . The presumption! To set yourself up to control the very destiny of a man!" I admit that I don't want my partners to lie on my behalf without at least asking me first, but Walter's final condemnation of their marriage as "a dishonest game" still rings oddly to me when as far as I can tell Harriet held up her end of the heterosexual contract. Walter supplied the financial stability; she was sexually desirable, accessible, and faithful and she kept his home in good order. She even loved him. Not the way he loved her, though, and that may be all his wounded machismo comes down to in the end.
There is, of course, a not very subliminal question of whether Harriet "married the wrong man," as her husband accuses her, or whether she is simply not interested in men at all. Not for nothing, I think, is her house full of ornamental female figures from the culture that gave us such useful referents as Sappho of Lesbos—the superbly theatrical sets were the uncredited, intelligent work of William Haines and I can't imagine that a lesbian director and a gay production designer just accidentally gave their film a mise-en-scène that seems so actively hostile to heterosexuality. The firing of the maid is the most blatant example, but the niece too departs the house as soon as her man arrives, pugnaciously and protectively, to escort her out. (I can't work up a lot of enthusiasm for their pairing both because the film appears to share Harriet's skepticism of her niece's romantic naïveté which places her engagement ahead of her college graduation and because the man she's planning to drop out to marry is one of her professors. I understand there's been a bit of a sea-change on that front lately, but it's still not a good look on him.) Walter walks as soon as he perceives his marriage as a sham. Harriet never looks better in Craig's Wife than she does facing off against her husband in a white peplos dress trimmed and belted with gilt laurels and she never looks less like anyone's housewife. Artemis the maiden, asexual Athene. Crucially, however, the film never makes the mistake of claiming that the Craig marriage failed because Harriet was specifically, sexually unsuited for it. The Craig marriage failed because of the rigged games of patriarchy. The non-heterosexual couple leave, too—the middle-aged housekeeper Mrs. Harold (Jane Darwell) and the spinster aunt Miss Austen (Alma Kruger), going off into a future beyond employer and employee:
"I didn't know she planned to keep house."
"She don't. We're going to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York and then we're going all around the world, soon as she can get the tickets."
Some films you get to the end of them and they have the decency to suggest their own fix-it. All I've got for Craig's Wife is the return of Mrs. Frazier. The film is really not proto-noir despite its murder subplot, but I was reminded intensely of Max Ophüls' The Reckless Moment (1949) and Caught (1949), both of which regard the conventional securities of home and family as American nightmares rather than aspirational dreams; at 74 minutes it's no epic, but it's so densely packed that it feels like spending the relevant twenty-four hours with its characters, which may or may not leave you, too, wanting to chew your own leg off. I wish it had been permitted to close with its devastating last close-up of Rosalind Russell instead of the unnecessarily restated moral, but the ratio of annoyance to devastation is still quite small. Incidentally,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer, I have now seen what happens when Thomas Mitchell in his second outing on film tries to love someone heteronormatively. It ends in murder-suicide. No wonder he never did it again. This contract brought to you by my trustworthy backers at Patreon.
In broad outline, the plot sounds like a woman's picture only the RNC could love: the protagonist is so pathologically house-proud that she'd rather obstruct a murder investigation than risk the disruption of her exquisitely arranged home in which her husband finally realizes he has no more weight than a meal ticket and leaves her, as does every other member of the Craig household, to the contrapasso nightmare of her totally undisturbed, perfectly controllable, echoingly empty house. I gather this was the drift of the original 1925 play by George Kelly and may well have been preserved faithfully in the first, now-lost silent film version; certainly it seems present in the mid-century remake starring Joan Crawford. In the hands of Arzner and screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr., the essential conceit of the woman whose house is more important to her than any human connection becomes, instead of open season on her frigidity, materialism, and general monstrosity, an ice-clear examination of the systems that lead a woman to barter herself for even the illusion of a room of her own, but then it's like watching an American Hedda Gabler or some AU of A Doll's House where Torvald's the one to walk out and I'm not saying it doesn't work, but I am saying that I may have miscalculated when I thought it would leave me feeling less bludgeoned than a rewatch of Christopher Strong (1933).
I appreciate that Arzner and McCall, in revising their source material, do not merely invert it to make Harriet Craig an uncomplicated hero. As played by Rosalind Russell in a chic, stark array of white or black outfits whose neoclassical lines echo the Grecian furnishings of her beloved home, she has an air of marble self-containment, sleek to the eye, unyielding to the touch. Introduced at her ailing sister's bedside, she's not weeping like her niece but coolly inquiring of a nurse whether it isn't true that patients make quicker recoveries without visitors to exhaust them; on the train with her niece, she receives the news of the younger woman's engagement with an indulgent amusement that barely masks adamant disapproval; once enclosed safely within the ice-cream sanctuary of her own parlor, she minutely corrects the position of the Attic red-figure vase on the mantel, ejects a neighbor's gift of homegrown roses for shedding petals all over the piano, and regards a hand-jotted note left beside the telephone as distastefully as if it were trash. "Mazie," the housekeeper cautioned the new maid in the first moments of the film, "never forget—this room is the holy of holies!" and indeed, it looks more like a shrine or a museum than a living room, each elegantly antique figure of furniture or statuary given its own dramatically effective space. Not a book, not a candelabrum, not a finger's sweep of dust is left to chance. Bare-breasted goddess-busts and dancing nymphs in bronze take the place of guests, or children, or friends. Even the servants' domain of the kitchen is as polished and seamless as ice. The same vestal principles reign in the white-curtained, white-carpeted, walk-in-closeted upstairs bedroom, where it's easy to envision a photoshoot by Better Homes and Gardens but impossible to conceive of that cross-bordered counterpane rumpled by anything so spontaneous as a nap or an embrace. No wonder the facade of the house when we finally see it stands in colonial revival contrast to the rambling trellises of Mrs. Frazier (Billie Burke), the widowed grandmother next door whose small house seems lashed together with the overgrowing roses of her well-gardened yard—she's the anti-Harriet, fecund, outgoing, and disorganized, while slim dark-haired Harriet herself fits into the neo-Georgian plinths and porticos of her grand house as cleanly as a caryatid into the Parthenon. You see how impossible it is to talk about one without the other, as if Harriet in her ferocious territorialism has made herself literally genius loci of the house her husband bought her and not an easily propitiated one, either. She can barely endure the presence of a guest she didn't invite herself and she never invites anyone herself; her husband has to go out to see his friends whose wives have learned to stay away. The household has gone through so many cooks that the agency won't send another without speaking to Mrs. Craig and the new maid gets the sack on the spot when her boyfriend drops by. Don't even ask what Harriet would say if she'd seen Mrs. Frazier's grandson scooting his toy car across a japanned cabinet. "You want your house, Harriet," her aunt-by-marriage warns like a malediction, "and that's all you do want, and that's all you'll have at the finish. People who live to themselves, Harriet, are generally left to themselves." Turning the pages of a coffee-table book without even a glance at the older woman, Harriet replies, "That's precisely what I've been asking for—to be left alone."
Especially with that icy disk of a mirror dominating her bedroom, such exchanges can encourage the audience to interpret Harriet as nothing more than a narcissist, a woman for whom other people exist only to do the invisible work of maintaining her private world. In fact she does a great deal of work to maintain her world: it's called being Craig's wife. "Not with any romantic illusions, dear," she answers her niece's shocked question about marrying for love. "I had no private fortune, no special training, so the only road to independence for me was through the man I married. I married to be independent . . . Independent of everybody." She quite firmly includes her husband in that last clause, though the film gives it an ironic twist by staging the conversation on either side of an anonymous male passenger like a tacit reminder of the male power on which Harriet's "independence" is contingent and by which it is circumscribed. Her domestic authority goes unchallenged only so long as it does not disturb her husband's image of their marriage. Of course she holds on to it so tightly; it's so small compared with the opportunities she might have had with wealth or education and it can so easily be taken away. Even so, it is her sole safe space. "What else has a woman but her home?" she urges her husband to understand, though they are fighting bitterly and he seems unable to process anything past the fact that she's lied first to the police and then to him. "I saw what happened to my own mother. I made up my mind it would never happen to me. She was one of those 'I will follow thee, my husband' women—believed everything my father told her and all the time he was mortgaging the house over her head for another woman. When she found it out, she did the only thing a woman like that can do, and that was to die of a broken heart." So Harriet has done everything in her power to secure as much freedom for herself within the sphere of the home while staying on the right side of her husband's pride and while the original play seems to have viewed his climactic denunciation of his "dishonest" wife as the henpecked worm turning at last, I am not sure that Arzner and McCall are as impressed with him as all that. I'm certainly not. Until the drama of the Passmore case, Walter Craig (John Boles) is not only tolerant of his wife's strong hand, he's readily acquiescent to it, happy to furnish his darling with whatever Greco-whatsit she's decided really ties the room together; two self-declared "grand years" into their marriage he's still as nuzzlingly limerent as a newlywed, catching her into his arms with assurances like "Here's the point about me and Mrs. Frazier or me and any other woman—I haven't the slightest idea what they look like. Can't see them. I'm too busy being in love with my wife." Twenty-four hours later, all that affection's polarized to disgust, apparently because it never before occurred to him to wonder whether his wife brought the same priorities to their marriage as he did. The scales don't fall from his eyes so much as he replaces them with different scales. His gestures of smashing her beloved vase and stubbing out cigarette butts all over the parlor to assert his untrammeled masculinity are spiteful and childish; he does not sound masterful but insufferably priggish when he seethes, "What have you ever done or a million others like you that you dare assume such superiority over your husband? . . . The presumption! To set yourself up to control the very destiny of a man!" I admit that I don't want my partners to lie on my behalf without at least asking me first, but Walter's final condemnation of their marriage as "a dishonest game" still rings oddly to me when as far as I can tell Harriet held up her end of the heterosexual contract. Walter supplied the financial stability; she was sexually desirable, accessible, and faithful and she kept his home in good order. She even loved him. Not the way he loved her, though, and that may be all his wounded machismo comes down to in the end.
There is, of course, a not very subliminal question of whether Harriet "married the wrong man," as her husband accuses her, or whether she is simply not interested in men at all. Not for nothing, I think, is her house full of ornamental female figures from the culture that gave us such useful referents as Sappho of Lesbos—the superbly theatrical sets were the uncredited, intelligent work of William Haines and I can't imagine that a lesbian director and a gay production designer just accidentally gave their film a mise-en-scène that seems so actively hostile to heterosexuality. The firing of the maid is the most blatant example, but the niece too departs the house as soon as her man arrives, pugnaciously and protectively, to escort her out. (I can't work up a lot of enthusiasm for their pairing both because the film appears to share Harriet's skepticism of her niece's romantic naïveté which places her engagement ahead of her college graduation and because the man she's planning to drop out to marry is one of her professors. I understand there's been a bit of a sea-change on that front lately, but it's still not a good look on him.) Walter walks as soon as he perceives his marriage as a sham. Harriet never looks better in Craig's Wife than she does facing off against her husband in a white peplos dress trimmed and belted with gilt laurels and she never looks less like anyone's housewife. Artemis the maiden, asexual Athene. Crucially, however, the film never makes the mistake of claiming that the Craig marriage failed because Harriet was specifically, sexually unsuited for it. The Craig marriage failed because of the rigged games of patriarchy. The non-heterosexual couple leave, too—the middle-aged housekeeper Mrs. Harold (Jane Darwell) and the spinster aunt Miss Austen (Alma Kruger), going off into a future beyond employer and employee:
"I didn't know she planned to keep house."
"She don't. We're going to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York and then we're going all around the world, soon as she can get the tickets."
Some films you get to the end of them and they have the decency to suggest their own fix-it. All I've got for Craig's Wife is the return of Mrs. Frazier. The film is really not proto-noir despite its murder subplot, but I was reminded intensely of Max Ophüls' The Reckless Moment (1949) and Caught (1949), both of which regard the conventional securities of home and family as American nightmares rather than aspirational dreams; at 74 minutes it's no epic, but it's so densely packed that it feels like spending the relevant twenty-four hours with its characters, which may or may not leave you, too, wanting to chew your own leg off. I wish it had been permitted to close with its devastating last close-up of Rosalind Russell instead of the unnecessarily restated moral, but the ratio of annoyance to devastation is still quite small. Incidentally,
moon_custafer, I have now seen what happens when Thomas Mitchell in his second outing on film tries to love someone heteronormatively. It ends in murder-suicide. No wonder he never did it again. This contract brought to you by my trustworthy backers at Patreon.
