Lights, camera, action!: The living room as a playground in 'A Star is Born' (1954)

"Lights! Camera! Action!" So began the musical number that would be known as the Tour de Force number in 'A Star is Born' (1954). The first time 'A Star is Born' was brought to the screen was in 1937, when William A. Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March as the stars of the...

Damn The Torpedoes: Wartime Housing Shortage in The More The Merrier (1943)

The year is 1943, the location Washington DC; bureaucratic capital for wartime decisions. The film starts with a narrator mockingly welcoming the viewer to hospitable Washington, "eagerly throwing wide her doors," while all we see is shots of "no vacancy"-signs. Although wartime housing shortage was...

"Catastroph!": Faking Domestic Bliss in 'Christmas in Connecticut' (1945)

This is Elizabeth Lane. She has a husband, a baby and a farm in Connecticut. She's the finest home-maker around; knows about raising a baby, can flip a flapjack, owns 36 rocking chairs, is America's best cook and has her own column in Smart Magazine where she writes about all of this. All...

What She Loved Most Was Cleaning: Keeping House with Joan Crawford

There is a great possibility that when I coin the terms "Joan Crawford" and "cleanliness", you will immediately envision a raging Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford (in Mommie Dearest, 1981) shouting "No wire hangers!". This is not the only reference in the film to Crawford's very peculiar way...

There's No Place For Them Here: Home, Order and Independency in Harriet Craig (1950)

In last week's post I mentioned how Rebecca's bedroom (in Hitchcock's Rebecca, 1940) had become a shrine, with a place for everything and everything in its place. This surely counts for the Craig's household as well. Harriet Craig (played by Joan Crawford) is the perfect mistress of the house,...