Appreciating a beleaguered wife (Silence is Golden write-off)
Sep 28 '04
The Bottom Line Though the lessons have not been universally learned, the silent-movie "comedy" is mind-numbing.
A comedy from the director of such harrowing films as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, and Vampyr? The prospect was hard for me to visualize. Having somehow made it all the way through watching Du skalære din hustru (Master of the House, 1925), his second comedy, I can vouch that Carl Theodor Dreyer was as inadept at comedy as I suspected.
Du skal ære din hustru has the lightness of a pile-driver. It took 45 minutes to produce the first smile (a sardonic one), when Ida Frandsen (Astrid Holm), the beaten-down wife of a domestic tyrant (Johannes Meyer) is reading to her son, Viktor Junior (Byril Harvig) a story that has a word that is new to him: "tyrant." The family retainer (Mathilde Nielsen) looks up, but Ida breaks down and is unable to define the word for her son. The audience that makes it this far has been oppressed by a ponderously portrayal devoid of any subtlety of a failing businessman who is taking out his frustrations on a wife who desperately is desperately trying to make ends meet and to satisfy his unreasonable demands, She is signally unable to do anything to protect their son, who is seen cowering from the unrelenting nastiness of his father.
In this heavy-handed piece of first-wave feminist agit-prop, the tyrant is about to embark on a lengthy come-uppance. The affluent mother of the emotionally battered wife, played by Karin Nellemose, removes her daughter and places her in a nursing home to recuperate. Ida's exhaustion stems not only from the demands of raising two young children with very little money and unreasonable demands from a very callous and totally egocentric husband, but from doing sewing in the night to make some money for treats for her man. (There is not the slightest indication of any erotic chemistry between them, and every indication in their scenes together that she fears him as much as their son does.)
The Frandsen family retainer, credited as"Old Viktor's wetnurse,"> is not intimidated and makes a point of doing everything for which Viktor castigated Ida. It takes roughly an hour of screen time for her to break down his obliviousness about domestic labor and to train him to share in it. Before she will allow Ida to return, she decrees that (old) Viktor will have to stand in the corner the way he used to make his son (young Viktor) do.
Thoroughly chastened and desperate to have his wife back, Viktor accepts this indignity (which I'd label regression to being a child under discipline rather than emasculation, though the sadomasochism of both halves of the movie are completely lacking in the playfulness of eroticized domination) and there is the fairy tale implication that everyone is now going to live happily ever after at the end.
The pace of the movie (also released under the appropriately didactic title "Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife," is slower than ponderous. None of the great American silent-screen comedies I can think of dragged on for 107 minutes, and a lot more happened in them than in Du skalære din hustru. Moreover, Du skal ære din hustru is visually quite static. Nearly the entire film takes place in the cramped, multi-purpose front room of the Frandsen apartment. There is intercutting, but the camera is as stationery as the heavy early sound-film cameras. (Static setups characterize Dreyer's sound films, too, especially Gertrud, his last one, made forty years later). Many of the intertitles are lengthy and they all remain up long enough for me to read them three or four or more times. (In general, think that silent-film in intertitles should be reworked as subtitles during the scenes of characters speaking. This would speed things up, which in the case of Dreyer's glacial-paced comedy would be all to the good.)
The one good thing about Du skalære din hustru is that its success in Paris led to Dreyer making his great Passion of Joan of Arc.
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Not being on video in the US, this movie is not in the epinions database. The review is intended as a contribution for St.Patrick's "Silence is Golden" writeoff (and seems especially apt while Old Viktor's wetnurse is forbidden comment, and even after that, she shows him the error of his ways rather than telling him.
Dreyer only directed thirteen feature films. The other one I've written about is Day of Wrath (1942).
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