Craig's Missed

Most Pulitzer Prize-winning plays from the 1920s and 1930s are rarely revived.  Partly because they require big casts and expensive sets, but mostly because tastes have changed and a lot of the old-style stuff doesn't hold up that well.  In fact, many of the plays taken so seriously then are all but forgotten.

Take Craig's Wife, winner of the Pultizer in 1926.  It's the story of a woman who lives only for herself--as you might guess, it doesn't end happily.  It ran the season (back when that meant a hit) and was adapted by Hollywood three times.  Maybe if those movies were better, the play would be better remembered.

I was thinking of that while watching the second adaptation from 1936, directed by Dorothy Arzner and starring Rosalind Russell..  It does a decent enough job opening up the play, though you can still feel the act curtains.  And it's reasonably faithful, even as it clocks in at a compact 74 minutes.

The trouble is the central character, Harriet Craig, is pretty one-dimensional.  She's awful and that's that.  Sure, she has her reasons, but the play and the movie are mostly interested in showing the destruction she causes to others and ultimately to herself.  A play about an unhappily married woman who makes others miserable could work--Hedda Gabler comes to mind. But there just isn't enough depth to Craig's Wife.

What I found most memorable was not something they planned.  Getting this role was a big break for Russell, who was still fairly new to film.  She probably thought it was a bigger deal than getting the lead, a few years later, in the frivolous comedy His Girl Friday (1940), though that ended up being perhaps her most memorable turn.

In Craig's Wife, her husband's name is Walter.  In His Girl Friday, her former husband, played by Cary Grant, is also Walter, and she does wonders pronouncing that name.  So in the 1936 film, every time I heard her say "Walter" I perked up a bit, remembering a better film and performance.