Harriet Craig (1950) - film review

Harriet Craig runs her household with an iron grip.  Every last thing must go as she plans it, her authority is absolute, and she makes sure that her servants know it.  Her husband Walter accepts his wife’s domineering ways because he loves her and knows that she loves him.  Harriet is not a bad woman, he believes; she merely wants to give him a comfortable home, and it isn’t her fault that she can’t give him children.  Harriet’s live-in cousin is equally tolerant of the shrewish head of the household and believes her when she says that the man she is in love with is merely toying with her affections.  But Walter begins to see a different side to his wife when she contrives to ruin his chance of promotion...

For an actress known to be a compulsive neurotic and control-freak, Joan Crawford is aptly cast to play the wife from Hell in this bleak melodrama from director Vincent Sherman.   As the vile manipulating Mrs Craig, Crawford plays psychotic villainy with such conviction that you’d think it was about to go out of fashion.  Here is a fire-breathing dragon that would have put the fear of God into St George and had him beating the hastiest of retreats if it had crossed his path.  This is Crawford at her indomitable best.  But as she draws deeply from the well of venality, she comes dangerously close to self-parody.  

And therein lies the problem with this film, the third screen adaptation of George Kelly’s Prize-winning play.  Crawford is just so horrible to her entourage that it is hard to believe not only that her husband still accepts her as his wife but that she has somehow eluded having her head smashed in with her precious Ming vase.  The fault lies not in Crawford’s performance, which is spellbinding in its visceral nastiness, but in the screenplay, which fails to paint Harriet as anything other than an unsympathetic character.

So caricatured is Crawford’s character that at times the film feels more like black comedy than melodrama (although that may have been the intention).  A top notch cast – which includes Ellen Corby of The Waltons fame – give their all in what occasionally seems like a Shakespearean tragedy (with the main protagonist being a strange hybrid of Richard III and Lady Macbeth).  Although the characterisation and plot teeter on the brink of absurdity, the quality of the performances, particularly from Crawford and her co-star Wendell Corey, makes this a compelling and disturbing portrait of marital disharmony.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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