I gather
that TCM has shown this at some point, but the vintage-film channel must have
buried it overnight, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see it
while I could. My guess is about 60 people joined me Wednesday night in the
audience at MOMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2.
I became interested in this film through my exposure, via the Off-Broadway troupes the Peccadillo Theater Company and The Mint Theater, to George Kelly, a member of the famous clan of that name in Philadelphia. (Yes, he was Princess Grace’s uncle, and reportedly a major positive influence on her decision to become an actress.)
The three
Kelly plans I saw through the Mint—The Show-Off (1922), Philip Goes Goes Forth (1931), and The Fatal Weakness (1946)—convinced me that
he has become an unjustly neglected playwright. If I found these plays of
merit, then how could I resist the allure of Craig’s Wife, which won the
Pulitzer Prize after it premiered in 1925?
One aspect of Craig’s Wife may account for why it might not be revived so much these days. A conservative Catholic, Kelly held to then-traditional ideas of a wife’s subservience to her husband, and to some extent this drama reflects these mores.
Harriet Craig, the title character, living in an age when women enjoyed little to no financial independence, would certainly win greater sympathy from modern audiences than she would before the rise of feminism in the Sixties. But Kelly’s severe indictment of her materialism and strange emotional detachment registers just as strongly as before, if not more so.
The playwright, who between Broadway stints worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, was reportedly displeased by how his prize-winning work had been adapted by other hands for the big screen. But today’s viewers are likely to regard the movie as an improvement—one that “opens up” the action, while streamlining the dialogue so that the peculiar chilliness of Mrs. Craig becomes more manifest.
The three people most responsible for this successful stage-to-screen transfer were all women—all perhaps better attuned than Kelly to the psychological undercurrents of the main character.
Rosalind Russell was supposedly none too happy about MGM loaning her out to Columbia Pictures to play this unsympathetic role. Her fears proved groundless. She not only received top billing for the first time onscreen but widened her range by playing the kind of challenging female lead in which Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would soon specialize. (In fact, the latter played Mrs. Craid in the 1950 remake.)
The role was carefully crafted with input from director Dorothy Arzner and screenwriter Mary McCall, Jr. The only female director who worked consistently in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties (and, I discovered from Ben Mankiewicz’s discussion of the film on TCM, the inventor of the “boom mic” that allowed actors greater freedom of movement), Arzner did something that male colleagues had done frequently before but might have given pause to someone in her exposed position: she fired the production designer.
Instead, she turned to former MGM star William Haines, who had forsaken his acting career to become an interior decorator. Using Kelly’s stage directions as inspiration, Haines transformed the upper-class Craig house into a virtual fortress in its own right—uninviting, even forbidding, reflecting Harriet's hauteur. With one additional, telling set of details: Greek motifs which subtly suggested that a tragedy of the protagonist’s own making was occurring inside.
With Arzner ensuring her presence on set, even enabling her to come up with alternative lines on the spot, screenwriter McCall reworked Harriet into a woman less status-conscious than intent on maintaining a hard-won measure of autonomy within marriage—breeding a fanaticism about her home that alienates everyone in it, even her besotted husband.
The script advances this conflict, with none of the leisurely exposition favored by Kelly. A prime example”: the first line and image, with Mrs. Harold crying out in alarm to her fellow housemaid, “Mazie!”—signaling to viewers immediately that the abused household staff remains on edge even without Harriet around to supervise the maintenance of her “holy of holies,” as Mrs. Harold calls it.
Equally helpful, McCall and Arzner actually showed the characters referred to but never shown onstage: the doomed Fergus and Adelaide Passmore. That provided an early opportunity for the great character actor Thomas Mitchell (Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life) to display his skill in a short but crucial role as desperate Fergus.
Though the role of Harriet’s easily manipulated husband Walter was too one-dimensional, other characters fared better under Arzner’s guidance, notably Jane Darwell (Mrs. Harold), who a few years later would the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath; Billie Burke (next-door neighbor Mrs. Frazier), best known as the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; and John Hamilton, who made his mark two decades later as editor Perry White in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman.
Later this year, I hope to write
more about how Joan Crawford played this role, as well as the controversy over
the years involving the play itself. But if you can’t watch the 1936 version on
the big screen, as I was lucky enough to do, I urge you to catch it on YouTube.
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