Craig's Wife
Screening on Film
Directed by Dorothy Arzner.
With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke.
US, 1936, 16mm, black & white, 75 min.
With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke.
US, 1936, 16mm, 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 discrete 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 fascinating portrait emerges of a housewife who walls herself up, brick by brick, in a pathological tomb of her own creation.