Master of the House (Palladium Film, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ono February 19 my husband Charles came home relatively early from work and we got to have dinner together, and at 9 15 p.m. we watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1925 film Master of the House. After traveling throughout Europe in search of filmmaking opportunities since he left the pioneering Nordisk studio in 1920, Dreyer returned to his native Denmark and an independent company called Palladium Film for what amounts to a domestic tragi-comedy. The opening title card reads, “In the numerous streets of the Big City, house follows house, and in those houses, people live in layers - like wild birds carving their nests into the rock ... nest above nest … ,” and so on until Dreyer and his co-writer Svend Rindom (who wrote the story originally as either a novel or a play, or both, and then worked with Dreyer on the script) get to the meat of their story. Their argument is that men think they’re the masters of their own homes and families, but it’s rally their wives and the other women in their household who keep the family together/ In some ways it’s a film astonishingly ahead of its time; as the so-called “first wave” of feminism was winding down and women had got the vote in most republican countries, Dreyer and Rindom were already looking ahead to the so-called “second wave.” This film was made 38 years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the pioneering work of second-wave feminism and the one that articulated what Friedan called “the problem that has no name”:the stultifying character of women’s lives and the extent to which they were expected to subordinate their own wishes, desires, interests and talents to those of their husbands.

OThe central characters are Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), a middle-class husband who’s become a tyrannical martinet since the loss of his business some time previously; Ida (Astrid Holm, four years after her remarkable performance in Victor Sjöstrom’s The Phantom Carriage, another c;assoc Scandinavian silent I recently saw on the TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase”), his long-suffering wife; their children, Karen (Karin Nellemose) and Frederik (Aage Hoffman), and two other characters who move in to the Frandsen home and come to domoinate it. One of them is Mads (Mathilde Nielsen), Viktor’s nanny when he was a child, and the other is Ida’s mother, Mrs. Kryger (Clara Schønfeld). Disgusted by the way Viktor is treating Ida, Mads and Mrs. Kryger move into the house and literally turn the tables on him – Dreyer and Rindom include a scene of him putting the tablecloth on the dining table, a job that once was Ida’s – while Ida walks out on the marriage and does heaven knows what. Most films, if anything, over-explain their characters and situationi; Dreyer and Rindom keep things so ambiguous we don’t know how Viktor made his living after he lost his business or what Ida does for a living when she leaves Viktor. Instead they explain in an intertitle that Ida’s life was so ruled by the routine of the house that once she was on her own, she had what amounted to a nervous breakdown.

OThere’s a brief scene in which Ida is shown in what appears to be some sort of residential treatment facility and the four doofuses who are, we presume, her therapists ceremonially burn a letter soe got, presumably from Viktor even though it’s pretty clearly established that Viktor doesn’t know where Ida is and the people in the household who do know her whereabouts aren’t about to tell him. In the end, of course, Ida returns to the house and she and Viktor resume their relationship, we guess on a more equal basis, and Viktor is also able to resume his business because Ida had saved up 10,000 kronor to buy him an ophthalmology practice that just happened to come up for sale. Master of the House was the biggest commercial success Dreyer ever had, and it got him the financing to make the film generally considered his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (which is also about a strong woman and the men who are put off by that, even though in a completely different set of social and historical circumstances)

ODreyer had originally wanted to shoot the film in an actual apartment home, but cinematographer George Schneevoigt (who later became a director himself) protested that the big, bulky cameras of the time couldn’t shoot in such acramped space. So Dreyer, who’s not only credited as director and co-writer but also as editor, production designer and set decorator, did what he considered the next best thing: he had an apartment built into the studio and insisted it be equipped with its own electric and gas connections. Schneevoigt was still unhappy and had to shoot much of the film through open windows or doors, or crouch inside corners with his big old cameras. The final result was a film that makes its points about women’s real role in society rather too didactically, and it also seems padded: Alice Guy-Blaché made the same point more economically in her 1915 short A House Divided (in which a couple legally separate but don’t have the money to live apart, so they literally divide their home down the middle and have to ask each other for permission to cross into the other’s space). Guy-Blaché took just 10 minutes to make the same feminist point on which Dreyer and Rindom spent nearly two hours of running time.