CRAIG'S WIFE (1936)

George Kelly’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the one about an over-controlling wife who cares only about her home and meticulous housekeeping, is now written off as hopelessly dated (it’s not) and all too obvious (it is), but was popular enough to run the season.  Filmed three times: a 1928 silent version now lost; from Dorothy Arzner with Rosalind Russell; then remade in 1950 by Vincent Sherman for Joan Crawford.  This one is opened up thru traditional means by filming incidents only spoken of in the play, which keeps a lot of melodrama (murder/suicide; deathbed hospital meeting; fiancé’s cab ride to the rescue) dropped in 1950.  Yet the real difference comes not from different backstories, but in their approach to the self-delusional Mrs. Craig as she hugs her home close to her breast, sucking the air out of everything else.  One plays neurotic; the other psychotic.  The surprise is Crawford goes for neurotic while Russell’s all in on psychotic.  Not at all what you’d expect.  Born only a year apart, it makes Russell a full 15 years younger when she played the role; and she's as stylishly dressed & handsome as she ever was on film.  (For Crawford, it was 1950.)  And while they’re both painfully transparent (so too both husbands - 1936 John Boles; 1950 Wendell Corey -  and each thick enough on film to sell it), presumably it’s what playwright Kelly wanted.  But only Azner celebrates this artificiality, and in doing so, elevates the film to fable so that even when you laugh at it, the laugh just may stick in your throat.  All in all, with the silent lost to Hollywood’s bottomless oceanic archive, this is surely the best version of the story.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: You’ll find the Crawford version, HARRIET CRAIG, covered here:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/harriet-craig-1950.html    OR: The love-withholding clean-freak character Mary Tyler Moore played in ORDINARY PEOPLE/’80 might well be the child Craig’s Wife never had.