La mentira de mentiras

One of Joan Crawford's best roles. She plays a possessive domineering perfectionist housewife who tries to control everyone in her life, particularly her exceptionally nice husband (Wendell Corey). A lot has been said about the similarities between the character of Harriet Craig and Joan herself. Perhaps that's why Joan's performance is so superb. She plays the character of Harriet so effortlessly. Wendell Corey is terrific as her husband. Through most of the movie he's a pushover but when he finally realizes who his wife really is and what she's capable of, look out! It's a very good drama but also some funny parts. Moves along at a crisp pace. Unlike most dramas from the period (and today, really) it doesn't overstay its welcome and pad the length for another twenty minutes. Definitely recommended.

Joan Crawford shines as George Kelly's Craig's Wife, which had been made as a film some years earlier with Rosalind Russell, hence the title change. Joan is far better suited to the role, and closer to the right age. As a controlling, materialistic, unfeeling housewife, she is perfect, and is better than I've ever seen her. Crawford clearly understands this woman and doesn't play for sympathy. Yet we can sense her identification with the character, which is complete. SHE has sympathy for the monstrous Harriet, and we can feel it. There is a touch of Pirandello-ish identification here, and it comes through loud and clear; and yet for all this, Miss Crawford is never hammy. She is a thorough pro, and gives us a Craig's Wife that Harriet Craig would herself heartily approve of.

What a movie, starring Joan Crawford at her most imperious. She demands everything in her house, including her servants, her relatives, and her good-natured husband, Wendell Corey, who barely escapes becoming Richard Cory, be exactly the way she wants it. Crawford is She Who Must Be Obeyed. She's devious. She lies to everyone shamelessly, blasphemously. She browbeats subordinates. She's as convincing as a psychopath. I would have laughed all the way through but my mirth was subdued by the activation of latent memories of my own marriage.

Crawford is perfect in the part. She was at an age at which she was given dark eyebrows the width of a highway dividing line and a severe hair do that brought out the chrome steel of her unforgiving features. It's her best performance, although not in the way she or director Vincent Sherman intended.

I wonder if it would ever have been made if "Leave Her To Heaven", a much more subtle film, hadn't been such a success. And I think Crawford's performance here may have been the dam that begat "Mommie Dearest." In these kinds of movies, Crawford was always either the victim of spite and contempt, as in "Mildred Pierce", or the purveyor of it. She purveys it magnificently.

Harriet Craig (1950)

*** (out of 4)

Forgotten Columbia film about a wife (Joan Crawford) who cares only about her possessions, her way of life and anything that involves her. Her blind husband (Wendell Corey) soon starts to realize that he's not married to the type of woman he thought he was. HARRIET CRAIG is a film that doesn't get talked about too often when it comes to Crawford but when you step back and look at the work she did starting with MILDRED PIERCE you can't help but call this another winner. As I go through these post-MGM Crawford films I must say that my respect for her continues to grow because she took on all sorts of roles and did a wonderful job at all of them. There's just something so evil and cold about her character here and it's something that perhaps lived inside of the actress. If MOMMIE DEAREST had been written like this film it would have been a masterpiece. If Faye Dunaway's performance was as great as what Crawford delivers here then I think she would have been willing to talk about it. I mention that film because the type of character that film portrays Crawford as is pretty much the type she's playing here. The coldness of this character is something that you'll certainly hate but the constantly lying and the way she puts herself before anything else just makes this one of the most memorable characters out there. What I loved about Crawford's performance is this bubbling evilness that you can feel with her character and you just get the feeling at any second she's willing to make something worse just to benefit herself. Corey also deserves a lot of credit as the husband as he makes for a very sympathetic character. The sequence when everything finally breaks and the two go at it is rather priceless in regards to the brilliance of the acting. The supporting cast includes good performances by Lucile Watson, K.T. Stevens, William Bishop, Ellen Corby and Viola Roache. HARRIET CRAIG is a film that's not often talked about, which is a real shame because Crawford's performance certainly deserves more attention.

"Harriet Craig" started out as a stage success – obviously, it struck familiar chords – and saw at least one previous film version (Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell). Remade in 1950 with Joan Crawford commandeering the part of the domestic despot, the movie takes on a dimension that helped define camp. It also offers an unadulterated middle-period glimpse of the controlling monsters she had begun (Mildred Pierce, Humoresque) and continued (Torch Song, Johnny Guitar, Queen Bee) to play on film. (And, if there is a sliver of verity in her adopted daughter Cristina's report from the front lines, such roles paralleled her off-screen personality).

It's a parable about the dangers of social ascendancy, an illustration of Thorstein Veblen's view of the affluent wife as agent of conspicuous consumption. Joan Crawford's Harriet Craig has it all: a husband in a grey flannel suit on his way up the corporate ladder (Wendell Corey), and so can buy her what she most desires: property and position. She's obsessed with who does and does not fit in with what she refers to as `our set' as she strikes poses in her perfect (and perfectly dull) upper-middle-class abode.

That her only interest in her husband is as a meal ticket is revealed by her avoiding her wifely obligations under the pretext that bearing children would be dangerous. But she's not content to leave him be, maybe to enjoy a little action on the side; what might the other members of their `set' think? She craves total control. When he's about to go out of town on a business trip, thus slithering out at least temporarily from under her oppressive thumb, she intervenes, lying to his boss that he's a compulsive gambler. Finally, of course, the worm turns.... But, in the closing shot, when Crawford regally ascends her curved staircase alone among the splendor of her possessions, you wonder who's really won after all.

This soapish melodrama remains surprisingly riveting. Perhaps it's the extra touch of authenticity Crawford brings to her portrayal (Mary Tyler Moore played a later version of this upscale shrew in Ordinary People; then of course there's always Martha Stewart). The movie preserves an uncanny sense of upward mobility in America, circa midcentury, a lugubrious self-importance that has not, alas, vanished from the land.