Dorothy Arzner Double Feature: CRAIG’S WIFE (1936)

(Dorothy Arzner, 1936, 73 min, 35mm)

Running throughout Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 was the first-ever retrospective of the films of Dorothy Arzner, a maverick who challenged stifling gender norms to be the only female studio filmmaker working throughout the 1930s and 40s. Working up from typist to editor to screenwriter to director, Arzner mastered the vocabulary of Classical cinema across more than a dozen features that spanned—and often married—comedy, melodrama, morality and immorality tales. 

CRAIG’S WIFE, made for Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures, stars Rosalind Russell as Harriet Craig, the implacable matron of a beautiful, perfectly kept home…and a crumbling, loveless marriage. The script, from a Pulitzer-winning play by George Kelly, casts Craig as joyless, remote, and casually cruel. But Arzner’s keen direction plays on Russell’s statuesque elegance and the exacting classicism of William Haines’ set design to render a more ambiguous portrait of a woman poisoned by dissatisfaction with a world that offers nothing but false compromise. 

In an essay on Arzner for the Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 program, Karyn Kaye and Gerald Peary wrote: “What is the goal for the ideal Arzner heroine? She is gambling everything for autonomy, a free existence, control over love, freedom, career.” The same desires animate Sharon Hennessy’s WHAT I WANT (1973, 16mm, 10 min), which screens before CRAIG’S WIFE. In the single extended take that comprises this delightful, yet rarely-screened short, the filmmaker reads aloud from a massive scroll of desires, advancing a claim for an eccentric, contradictory, but resolutely emancipatory vision of female empowerment.

CRAIG’S WIFE print courtesy of the Library of Congress; WHAT I WANT print courtesy of the filmmaker. 

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art