Dorothy Arzner Double Feature: CRAIG’S WIFE (1936)

Details:

CRAIG’S WIFE

(Dorothy Arzner, 1936, 73 min, 35mm)

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The  Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 festival featured the first-ever retrospective of the films of Dorothy Arzner, a maverick who challenged stifling gender norms to be the only female studio filmmaker working throughout the 1930s and 40s. Working up from typist to editor to screenwriter to director, Arzner mastered the vocabulary of Classical cinema across more than a dozen features that spanned—and often married—comedy, melodrama, morality and immorality tales. 

CRAIG’S WIFE, made for Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures, stars Rosalind Russell as Harriet Craig, the implacable matron of a beautiful, perfectly kept home…and a crumbling, loveless marriage. The script, from a Pulitzer-winning play by George Kelly, casts Craig as joyless, remote, and casually cruel. But Arzner’s keen direction plays on Russell’s statuesque elegance and the exacting classicism of William Haines’ set design to render a more ambiguous portrait of a woman poisoned by dissatisfaction with a world that offers nothing but false compromise. 

In an essay on Arzner for the Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 program, Karyn Kaye and Gerald Peary wrote: “What is the goal for the ideal Arzner heroine? She is gambling everything for autonomy, a free existence, control over love, freedom, career.”

The same desires animate Sharon Hennessey’s WHAT I WANT (1973, 16mm, 10 min), which screens before CRAIG’S WIFE. In the single extended take that comprises this delightful, yet rarely-screened short, the filmmaker reads aloud from a massive scroll of desires, advancing a claim for an eccentric, contradictory, but resolutely emancipatory vision of female empowerment.

CRAIG’S WIFE print courtesy of the Library of Congress; WHAT I WANT print courtesy of the filmmaker. 

About FILMS BY WOMEN/CHICAGO '74:

In September 1974, at the height of the feminist movement, the Film Center hosted Films By Women/Chicago ’74, a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions, drawing 10,000 patrons to over 70 short and feature films by women filmmakers. Organized by an all-woman collective with support from the Chicago Tribune, the festival offered a global survey of cinema from across its 60-year history. From mainstream Hollywood to activist documentary, arthouse to animation, it was the most diverse and expansive American survey of women’s cinema to date. It was also a watershed moment in Chicago cinema culture: according to committee member B. Ruby Rich, “women, for years after, would come up to me in the street to credit [us]—for jumpstarting their careers, ending their marriages, shaping their friendship.” 

This fall, the Gene Siskel Film Center and Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of Films by Women/Chicago ’74. Screening series at both venues. will revisit some of the festival’s most original and daring films and filmmakers, while reflecting on the event’s enduring legacies.

Series:

Films By Women/Chicago ’74

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu