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Four decades before Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, the beast of domesticity in the fortified dollhouse. Marriage as an institution of "honesty" is questioned even before the eponymous protagonist enters, courtesy of a piercing vignette by Thomas Mitchell as the cuckold at the empty poker party, afterwards Rosalind Russell crisply explains the liability of matrimonial love to her aghast niece (Dorothy Wilson). The suburban mausoleum, "rooms that have died and are laid out," the cheerful neighbor bearing roses (Billie Burke) is welcomed with a laser glare. The husband (John Boles) is too busy swooning over the ice queen to notice any of this, in the bleak farce "I can only play a romantic part." Dorothy Arzner and the married state, as sympathetic to its monster as Frankenstein. The hausfrau in her element, unemotional toward her ailing sister and tyrannical toward her servants, a materialistic pursuit thus "the only road to independence." The immaculate living room as "the holiest of holy" presents the onanistic altar of a black vase on a mirrored mantelpiece, the henpecked clod at land smashes it and savors a verboten cigarette. Guilt in a crime before a blemish in the reputation (cf. Ophüls' The Reckless Moment), the crack in the veneer is as ear-splitting as a luggage trunk scratching the polished floor. "It sounded up here as if the whole house fell down." Arzner's astringent camera acknowledges the laceration of her anti-heroine without sparing the society where womanhood is made to warp itself on the road to success—the older lesbian couple (Alma Kruger, Jane Darwell) can escape by leaving the country, but for the missus there's only a tastefully decorated tomb. With Raymond Walburn, Elisabeth Risdon, Robert Allen, Nydia Westman, and Kathleen Burke. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |