Alfred E. Green | Housewife / 1934

crêpes suzette

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manuel Seff and Lillie Hayward (screenplay, based on a story by Hayward and Robert Lord), Alfred E. Green (director) Housewife / 1934

 

It was difficult to decide whether to even include this mediocre soap-opera about domestic life in My Queer Cinema. Alfred E. Green’s Housewife (1934) could have used some good gay or lesbian activity; at least that might have let the viewer to be freed from the guilt for having fallen asleep during a performance by Bette Davis and George Brent, the duo performing far better in later works such as Dark Victory, Jezebel, and The Old Maid.

      It’s not that Manuel Seff and Lillie Hayward’s screenplay, based on a story by Hayward and Robert Lord, did not mean well. Their feature of a perfect wife and mother, Nan Reynolds (Ann Dvorak)—with Ronnie Cosby as her charmingly cute son, Buddy—having to first confront her milquetoast husband, Bill (Brent), pushing him to open his own advertising agency which almost fails were it not for her insistence that he try to get Paul Duprey (John Halliday), a women’s skin lotion manufacturer as his client; and then, after he becomes wealthy, to deal with his affair with their former high school  classmate, now advertising specialist Patricia Berkeley (Davis). It’s is a lot to ask of a modest and devoted woman. The fact that she succeeds is a testament to all women who define their lives as being a housewife. I suppose the real housewives Green and his writers imagined might flock to the movie houses to see this film, who might have redeemed their heavy-handed piousness, were simply too busy to take time out for picture show.

      If only, even out of self-pity and a little revenge, Nan were to have accepted Duprey’s offer to take solace in his arms and consequent kisses. Or if only Nan—Dvorak giving the closest imitation she can of Loretta Young—had taken the advice of her sister-in-law, the coarse Dora Wilson (Ruth Donnelly) and moved that little side table in front of the butler’s door for him to trip over. Or instead of pretending to get drunk with Bill in order to stiffen up his spine a bit, she had really gotten plastered herself. If only....we might have  had some fun along the way to the finale of this story filled with sacrifice, renunciation, and rediscovered true love. What I would have given to hear just one grunt of Davis’ hearty laughter.

     Even when things get bad and they may lose Duprey’s account, Nan knows what to do, bringing the old flirt Duprey and her arch enemy Pat back home to flambé some of her lovely Crêpes Suzette. At least her drunken brother George (Hobart Cavanaugh) knows there is another world outside of the loyal-housewifery, dim-witted executive, and wicked-working girl triangle in which these characters live, describing his sister’s caramelized sugar, butter, tangerine juice, and Grand Marnier delights as what they really are, “pansy pancakes.” Interestingly, they are the bachelor Duprey’s favorite. Unfortunately, that’s the cleverest line in the movie!

     As Davis remembered the film years later, "Dear God! What a horror!"

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).