Dorothy Arzner | Craig's Wife / 1936

house keeper

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mary C. McCall, Jr. (screenplay, based on the stage play by George Kelly), Dorothy Arzner (director) Craig's Wife / 1936

 

Winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Craig’s Wife was seen in its day as a “woman’s drama,” beloved by the female sex who made it a Broadway hit. Today such a truly nasty look at domineering and self-enchanted woman, Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell) seems an unlikely work for that moniker and, beyond that, a very odd choice to win such a dramatic prize. True, it is a well-made play in which everything is laid carefully out and comes together with firm significance within the 24-hours in which it is supposed to take place.

      But Kelly was never a brilliant mind, and despite some clever dialogue expressed, in particular, by Harriet, and plum roles for character actors—in the film version, Jane Darnel as the head servant Mrs. Harold, Billie Burke as the next door neighbor Mrs. Frazier, and Alma Kruger as Walter Craig’s aunt Ellen Austen, to say nothing of the male roles of Walter (John Boles) and his nervous, unloved friend Fergus Passmore (Thomas Mitchell)—the play and screenplay creak along in its attempt to empty the house before the end of the play.

       The housekeeper in this case is neither the head servant nor the maid Mazie (Nydia Westman), but Harriet Craig herself, who has married not for love but for the security of just such a house that she has created, down to its every piece of cold furniture and bric-a-brac of interior decoration—designed by former gay MGM movie star William Haines, drummed out of his acting career for choosing his gay lover over a studio-arranged marriage. Harriet even admits to her niece, Ethel (Dorothy Wilson) that she has chosen to marry in order to cherish and hold forever just such a mansion as opposed to the empty world her mother inherited when her husband, Harriet’s father, left for another woman.

     We also discover through George’s aunt’s observations, that in the two years of her marriage to George she has managed to exclude the entire world from her protected domicile, including all of his old friends. Even the next door neighbor who brings roses and other flowers from her garden as a friendly gesture, is made to feel unwelcome.

      George’s smoking is prohibited. His nights out with his old poker friends severely disapproved of. Visitors are not permitted, unless at Harriet’s request.

      Despite all of this George, entirely ignorant somehow of her maneuvers, is still terribly in love with the woman he married, peacefully manipulated into a limited behavior that he is not even aware of.

      In the first few moments of this play, the house is happily empty of its jealous keeper, as Harriet has traveled to Albany to look after his sickly sister. Convinced almost immediately that her sister is improving (by play’s end she dies), she convinces her distraught niece Ethel to join her for a few days stay, in the meantime trying to convince her that marrying for love—as Ethel is about to do with one of her young professors—is a rash mistake too many women make. In marrying, one must choose carefully a man who will provide you with your needs and desires only: and in her case that centers entirely around her house.

      With a night alone, George decides to join his friends for an evening of poker, something he hasn’t done for months. But at his friend Fergus’ place he encounters a heavily-drinking, angry man who all the others have stayed away from. Fergus, we soon recognize, is suffering over the dissatisfaction in their relationship felt by his wife, who has taken up with another man.

      By the time George has returned home Harriet is back from Albany, finding what she perceives as chaos, the neighbor lady visiting the aunt in her room, the maid chatting with her boyfriend in the kitchen, and her prized Greek vase having been ever-so-slightly moved! She sends the neighbor packing, fires the maid, and finding an envelope with Fergus Passmore’s telephone number on it, proceeds to call the telephone company to determine whose number it is, checking up on her missing husband’s whereabouts.

      His aunt, moreover, has determined to move out and, unknown to either Harriet or him, the police are investigating the phone call since soon after George left his troubled friend Fergus killed his returning wife and himself. The request for the dead man’s number brings the police to the sacred house, and with their entry the possibility of all that Harriet has built her house to protect herself from: curious neighbors, unwanted visitors, and scandal.

      Things are made even worse when Ethel’s anxious fiancée calls the house only to be told by Harriet that he cannot speak to his girlfriend.

       His Aunt Ellen’s warnings about Harriet set George’s mind to wondering, and by the end of the day he was recognized in Harriet’s terrified attempts to protect herself and her castle that love has nothing at all to do with it. As Ellen warns Harriet, the sustaining maxim that serves as the weak bridge between all events, "Those who live for themselves, are left to themselves."

      From that moment on, we know that by play’s end Harriet will witness the emptying of her house. The issue is simply how to you move everyone out of camera’s view before the curtain falls.

      The maid has already been fired. The door closed to the neighbor. Ellen is worried about not hearing from her fiancée and he is hurrying to her not having heard a reason why she is visiting the Craigs. George spends most of the rest of the play pondering over the events that unfold to reveal Harriet’s villainy, which we perceive will have to ultimately end with his walking out, particularly since not having told the police that it was she who called to check out the dead man’s number, it appears Harriet is perfectly happy to sacrifice him as well. The only surprise, in the end, is that the head servant Mrs. Harold has obviously been closer than we might have expected to George’s Aunt, suddenly appearing with the many other exiting characters and her luggage to report that she is joining Ellen on her travels around the world.

      In the original play she explains her leaving with Ellen almost as if she might simply be serving as a companion, not necessarily a lesbian friend. Although playwright John Kelly, one of the Philadelphia well-off Kellys, uncle to Grace, later Princess of Monaco, was homosexual, living with his companion William Eldon Weagley for 55 years, Kelly was so highly closeted that most family members thought Weagley was his valet, and failed to even invite him to Kelly’s funeral. He snuck in at the last moment and sat in the last row of the Bryn Mawr chapel.

     Film director Arzner, although closeted from public scrutiny, was far more open, and was having an affair at the time with actress Billie Burke. Accordingly, the Mrs. Harold of the film makes no attempt at all to explain how she has come to announce her leaving with Ellen Austen. You can reach us at the Ritz Hotel is all she says, suggesting that this might be the moment she’s been long waiting for. No house for either of them, just the loving relationship which Harriet has never been able to experience.

     So the house empties. Harriet Craig breaks into tears and sits alone in her beautiful and pristine parlor with the keys to happiness sitting on her glass coffee table, returned by all of those who once co-habited the house.

     Russell and the others make this film an absolute delight to watch. But such a villainous housekeeper is somewhat hard to imagine. And surely such a portrait is fairly misogynistic. Can any woman love a house more than the man with whom she built it?

       But then I thought of my mother, who had lived for her house, as well, for most of her life, even if she always claimed to love my father. Even as he was dying and could longer walk, when we suggested a wheelchair for him, she refused the idea out of hand: it might make tracks in her carefully polished wooden halls. Hospice nurses coming in and out of her carefully kept rooms made her nervous, so at first she refused their service. As children we were never welcomed in our own living room where everything had a place which we were likely to forget and move it away from its perfect location. Moreover, we might dirty the carpet.

     The first thing that George does when he realizes the truth is to throw his wife’s sacred vase to the floor, shattering it into pieces. And we realize at that very moment that even after she is left alone Harriet will most certainly run out to purchase a replacement. In the meantime, we watch her turn the two surrounding ornaments in toward the spot upon which it once stood, just for balance. (That, my friends, is brilliant directing!) This film provided a new definition for the word housekeeper, something which most of the females in the audience had never wanted to be, and perhaps helps to explain why women so loved this play and movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).