HARRIET CRAIG

US, 1950, 94 minutes, Black and White.
Joan Crawford, Wendell Corey, Lucille Watson.
Directed by Vincent Sherman.

Harriet Craig is based on a successful Broadway play, Craig's Wife. It is the story of a good man who marries a beautiful woman who is driven by an enormous urge to control others and have the perfect marriage and home. To further this end, she is relentless and unscrupulous with her husband's and cousin's emotions. This film succeeds in heightening the domestic conflict with spirited dialogue and a frighteningly convincing performance by Joan Crawford. While the drama is melodramatic, it is magnificent melodrama, not only making the audience hate Harriet, but making them realise that in her intensity and paranoiac devotion to husband and home while she inevitably destroys them, she is not unlike many suburban wives with ambition and driving force.

Some of the dialogue and manners are psychologically obvious, but Joan Crawford carries it along so well that we are caught up in it until the inevitable end where, abandoned but arrogant, she sweeps upstairs to her loneliness.

1. How was the situation in the Craig household quickly revealed in the hurried opening sequences of the film?

2. What were your initial impressions of Harriet Craig? Did they change?

3. Was Harriet merely fussy and pedantic or was she neurotic?

4. Did she love her husband, her mother, Clare?

5. How did her childhood experiences - her father with a blonde in the office, leaving her mother and herself when she was 14, poverty, work in a laundry - affect her later behaviour?

6. Her mother escaped responsibility by retreating into a world of fantasy. How did Harriet face responsibility?

7. Harriet said she hated travelling in a train, being driven and controlled by someone else. How did she control other people's lives? Walter's, Clare's?

8. How selfish was she - her reactions to the servants, to Walter's friends, her guests, Walter's promotion, Clare's romance, her neighbours, having children, etc?

9. Why did she lie? Did she think she was right to lie?

10. Walter was prepared to forgive her most things at the end - what was it that finally turned him away?

11. Did Harriet get what she deserved? Did you feel sorry for her at all?

12. What was the point of the neighbour trying to help at the end? How did it finalise Harriet's attitudes?

13. She was left alone at the end with her pride, herself and her home. What future do you see for her?

14. Although the film was melodramatic and many of the devices (especially Harriet's fussiness for tidiness) obvious, why does the film have a strong impact? How responsible is Joan Crawford's performance?

15. Are there many Harriet Craigs?