Wednesday | November 3, 1999 6:30 pm

Craig's Wife

Screening on Film

Directed by Dorothy Arzner .
With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke.
US, 1936, 35mm, black & white, 75 min.

Rosalind Russell’s wild performance dominates Dorothy Arzner’s adaptation of George Kelly’s play about a woman’s struggle to control every inch of her home. By assuming the housewife’s perspective and confining plot and conflict to discreet moments within the home, Craig’s Wife takes the cult of domesticity to a strange extreme. Through the director’s subtle yet subversive treatment of domestic space, a remarkably sympathetic portrait emerges of a housewife who walls herself up, brick by brick, in a pathological tomb of her own creation.