Harriet Craig is a 1950 drama film directed by Vincent Sherman and starring Joan Crawford. It is a loose adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1925 play Craig's Wife.
Crawford is Harriet Craig, the middle-aged wife of well-to-do scientist Walter Craig (Wendell Corey). Harriet is a domineering control freak, controlling and manipulating not only her husband but also their houseguest, Harriet's young cousin Claire (K. T. Stevens), while routinely terrorizing the help.
Harriet undermines Claire's budding romance with Walter's young co-worker Wes (William Bishop), because she doesn't want to lose Claire's unpaid labor as a servant. And when she finds out that Walter is getting a promotion that will send him to Japan for three months, and thus he will be three months out from under her thumb, she seeks to undermine that as well—with disastrous consequences.
Tropes:
- Child Hater: Harriet is one. She lied to her husband and said she was infertile. She is clearly very very unhappy when the neighbor boy keeps coming into the house and pestering Walter to fix his radio.
- Control Freak: Harriet is this. She demands everything in the house be just so. She flips her lid when the Ming vase on the mantel is moved a couple of inches. She hates everything that ties Walter to his old pre-Harriet life, which is why she works so hard to prevent him going out with old friend Billy Birkmire.
- Cool Old Lady: When Walter wants to have a party, Harriet undermines him by inviting his boss, which she knows will cause Walter's old friends to not attend. This backfires on her however when Celia Fenwick, Walter's boss's wife, turns out to be an awesome cool old lady, and she and Walter hit it off.
- Does Not Like Men: It becomes clear that Harriet hates men as a group because of how her father abandoned her and her mother and left them in poverty. This is why she's so driven to manipulate Walter, so he can't do that to her.
- Face Framed in Shadow: Harriet is framed this way a lot when she's up to her scheming, and is framed this way again at the end when Walter's figuring her out.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Harriet is pathologically jealous of anything that threatens her mastery over Walter. She is enraged when Mrs. Frazier the widowed neighbor comes by and offers flowers.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: How Walter catches Harriet out in her lie about Mr. Frazier. Harriet says she didn't tell him Mrs. Hudson was quitting because she knew he'd feel bad about not getting the promotion and the trip to Japan—which she was not supposed to know about as he hadn't told her. This proves that Harriet did in fact go to Mr. Frazier and undermine her own husband.
- Lysistrata Gambit: Done very subtly by Harriet to get Walter to do what she wants. When she's mad about Walter having a poker party in the house, she pretends to forgive him, but then she won't give him sex even though he's clearly horny. Later, when she doesn't want him going out golfing with Billy, she dangles an offer of sex in front of him and gets him to stay home.
- Motive Rant: After she's been caught out on all her lies, Harriet finally comes clean, going on a rant about how her father cheated on her mother and abandoned his family, forcing Harriet to drop out of school and work in a laundry to save her and her mother from starvation. She dominated and pushed around Walter as she did to make sure that never happened to her. (The speech was written by Joan Crawford and is an Actor Allusion to how she grew up in poverty.)
- Old Retainer: Mrs. Harold, who has been working for the Craig family since Walter was young. Harriet hates her as she was part of his pre-Harriet life.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The film ditches a subplot from the play about a murder-suicide, ditches the character of Walter's aunt, and adds a scene with Harriet visiting her mother to humanize her.
