The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023. I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne). Here is the second of the two introductions, presented on June 18.
Craig’s Wife (1936) dir. Dorothy Arzner
With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Jane Darwell, Alma Kruger and Billie Burke
"People who live to themselves, are generally left to themselves."
I am pleased to introduce at this inaugural edition of the festival an interesting film from 1936, Craig’s Wife, directed by Dorothy Arzner, adapted from a 1925 play by George Kelly, with Rosalind Russell.
The thought occurred to me that even though most of you are familiar with Dorothy Arzner – the only woman director working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s – we can pretend to be the reporter in Citizen Kane tasked to figure out the puzzle of Charles Foster Kane. Not that Dorothy Arzner proposes an unsolvable mystery, or that there is a Rosebud somewhere to unlock secrets. But the director and her films have been presented as unassailable evidence for critiques of Hollywood; made a cornerstone of feminist criticism; and used as case studies for issues of gender representation, so that these agendas tend to obscure Arzner’s place in commercial cinema and the context in which she produced her films – studio assignments, budget constraints, tight schedules, genre and censorship requirements. Arzner is credited with directing seventeen films from 1927 to 1943.
Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) had a directing career in Hollywood for 15 years, from the late silent era to World War II. She came to directing as an editor and writer with solid experience. Her studio tenure stopped due to ill health, and in her long post-Hollywood years she did training films and commercials, and taught at UCLA, mentoring Francis Coppola in the 1960s.
During Hollywood’s golden age, like contemporaries John Stahl, Mitchell Leisen and George Cukor, she directed movies that focused on women’s perspectives. She went further, in her best work, explicitly examining the place and role of women in American society. Christopher Strong (1933) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) are excellent examples, as is Craig’s Wife, presented in a 35mm print from the Library of Congress.
Her work began to be championed by feminist film critics in the 1970s, as was Ida Lupino’s, the only major female Hollywood feature director of the 1950s. These books and articles saw both directors as Trojan horses in a male-dominated Hollywood. But Arzner’s view of her work in regard to the theory and practice of feminism was complicated. In Directed by Dorothy Arzner, the 1994 study of the filmmaker, Judith Mayne noted that Arzner’s intent was hard to define.
When viewing Arzner’s films, it is obvious that she is deeply interested in women, their roles, careers and the need to be respected by men – as the fiery speech of Maureen O’Hara to the leering male crowd in Dance, Girl, Dance makes explicit.
Craig’s Wife was a big-budget film for low-budget Columbia Pictures; producer Edward Chodorov assembled top talent for the prestige project. Screenwriter Mary C. McCall had established her reputation with Babbitt (1934), The Woman in Red (1934) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); she wrote eight of the ten "Maisie" movies made from 1939 to 1947. In 1942 McCall became the first woman president of the Writers Guild of America. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard had a five-decade career, working under Josef von Sternberg, Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969). Editor Viola Lawrence began at Vitagraph in silents, then became head editor at Columbia. Uncredited, actor and interior designer William Haines shaped the interior of Harriet Craig’s house, giving it a stiffly formal, sterile feeling.
Twenty-eight-year-old Rosalind Russell, in her first solo starring role, plays Craig’s wife, with a solid supporting cast of women character actors, including Billie Burke, Jane Darwell, Alma Kruger, Nydia Westman and Dorothy Wilson. The key male figures are John Boles and Thomas Mitchell.
Arzner’s version is the second of three adaptations of the 1925 Pulitzer-prize winning play by George Kelly (uncle of Grace Kelly). The first one, with the same title, was released in 1928, with Irene Rich as the protagonist and Warner Baxter as her husband. It was directed by William C. de Mille, the older brother of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. The play was adapted a third time, as Harriet Craig, in 1950, with Joan Crawford and Wendell Corey, directed by Vincent Sherman.
Except for toning down the original play’s social critique of a woman’s obsession for material possessions, McCall’s adaptation is faithful to the play: over less than 48 hours and through conversations, we view the downfall of a well-bred shrewish wife, who sacrifices husband, family and loyal servants to hold on the mausoleum house she sees as the ultimate form of social stability. Through unity of time, place and action, this “drama of domestic infelicity”- as Frank Nugent wrote in his review for the New York Times - is more connected to Eugene O’Neill than the conventions of the woman’s film.
The message of the work is telegraphed twice, first through one of the characters noting that “people who live to themselves, are generally left to themselves”, and then repeated in writing at the end of the picture – unnecessarily didactic.
Rosalind Russell does not yet inhabit her vibrant, sharp-tongued signature persona, in place three years later in The Women (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940). Here she is a cold, fussy, calculating narcissist. But it’s Russell’s acting that holds the film together, as each of the characters – different backgrounds and personalities, a great collection of women - interact with her, providing in some cases, welcome comic relief. Frank Nugent – as did other reviewers at the time - wrote that “the entire weight of the drama depends upon the malign effectiveness of its central character and Miss Russell, here enjoying her first opportunity in Hollywood, gives a viciously eloquent performance”.
In a 1974 interview, Arzner told Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary that “I did not want an actress the audience loved. They would hate me for making her Mrs. Craig. Rosalind Russell was a bit player at M-G-M, brilliant, clipped, and unknown to movie audiences. She was what I wanted”.
It is up to the audience to assess Harriet Craig, as shown in Arzner’s version. What does she stand for? Is Harriet a twisted version of Hedda Gabler, suffocated by her dollhouse? Does she suffer false consciousness, as Gramsci described those who could not see the circumstances of their oppression? Is she the vehicle for critiquing a society – 1920s America - in which there are few choices for women like Harriet? Is it a horror story about a monstrous woman, all surface politeness, destroying those who love her? Is she a tragic heroine brought down by a fatal flaw? Or, after all, does she embody Freud’s puzzled question: Was will das Weib? What does the woman want?
This is the conundrum that makes the film resonant today.
List of sources
AFI Catalog of Feature Films (2006): “Craig’s Wife" (1936).
Fuller, Graham, “The Caring, and Ambiguous, Arzner Touch”. New York Times,
February 6, 2000.
Ferrari, “Dorothy Arzner”, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000.
Levy, Emanuel, “Craig’s Wife (1936): Arzner’s Favorite Film, Starring Rosalind
Russell”.
Play, Craig's Wife”. New York Times, October 2, 1936.
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