Criterion Collection: Master of the House | Blu-ray Review

While he’ll always be best known for his 1928 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan Arc (or for his atmospheric 1932 horror film, Vampyr), Danish auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer had a rich and varied filmography that ranged from 1919-1964. Criterion has remastered a 1925 comedy from the director, Master of the House, the first of his films to be adapted from a play (Tyrant’s Fall by Sven Rindom) rather than a novel. A prescient treatise on domestic issues, the film was enormously popular upon release, but it would be the last comedic venture for Dreyer (the only other being 1920’s The Parson’s Widow). Known to enthusiasts of Dreyer, it’s a title that’s been overshadowed by the director’s notoriously somber works, therefore making it ripe for rediscovery.

A harried yet unquestionably doting wife, Ida Frandsen (Astrid Holm) waits hand and foot on her three children as she goes about her daily routine of running a household. Upon waking, her husband Viktor (Johannes Meyer), is shown to be a rude curmudgeon, constantly critical of his wife’s every move, each minute birthing a new harangue pertaining to some finicky detail such as there not being enough butter on his bread, or the fact that clothes are hanged to dry in the middle of the living room. But when Mads (Mathilde Neilsen), Viktor’s wet nurse from when he was a child, pays the Frandsen’s a visit, she is deeply displeased at his mistreatment of Ida. Mads goes to fetch Mrs. Kryger (Clara Schonfeld), Ida’s mother, to help her to remedy the situation. The two women decide something has to be done, and travel back to Ida’s to turn the tables on Viktor. While’s he out of the house, Ida’s mother takes her daughter off to the countryside to recover from the months of Viktor’s verbal abuse, leaving Mads to look after the household. Greatly displeased to see that his wife has disappeared, Viktor and Mads engage in a clash of wills that soon has the grumpy husband realizing just what kind of way his wife must have been made to feel.

Disc Review

Criterion’s 2K digital restoration gives the film a pronounced dash of luster, an expertly reconstructed score enhancing the ability to dig into its rather drab beginnings in the cramped Frandsen apartment. Restoration and digital enhancement is often imperative when it comes to consuming silent cinema, and this release gloriously presents this nimble comedy as it should be seen. Two interviews are included in the supplements, including a new interview with Dreyer historian Casper Tybjerg, and a visual essay on Dreyer’s innovations from film historian David Bordwell. The Bordwell segment is especially informative and engaging and those moved to know more about this astounding filmmaker should definitely take a look.

Final Thoughts

To many, Master of the House is certain to feel dated. Several decades later would see the landscape of domestic duties change in many ways, for example, and it’s a dramatic conflict of the sexes that’s been honed considerably in countless modern examples. However, one cannot ignore the fact that Dreyer’s film is years ahead of its time. First and foremost, it’s a call for men to realize the soul deadening cycle that is the role of a housewife, a perspective that was much less commonly explored, as an assumed responsibility of the housewife, historically, was to withstand whatever abuses a husband may unleash on her. But here, we have her elders advising her that her current living situation must not continue and she must leave her husband (More common exchanges between unhappy wives wishing to leave their husbands generally sound something like that between Norma Shearer and her mother in 1939’s The Women; insistent on leaving her philandering husband, she’s advised to stay and avoid a scandal).

A whole slew of references come to mind as we’re made privy to Viktor’s monstrous bitchiness, everything from Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” to wishing for Ida to engage in revenge tactics a la Kate Nelligan’s nifty dog food flambé in The Prince of Tides. Yet, Dreyer meticulously pulls back from the mounting tension to show us a more complex situation, revealing that as much as an ogre as Viktor seems, he’s also a deeply unhappy and disappointed man. And thus, the second half of the film deals with his transformation at the hands of the very entertaining Mathilde Neilsen, who sometimes resembles some mad incarnation of Lon Chaney Sr.

Opening with a title card informing us that this film is about the real ‘heroes’ of the home in today’s modern world, where people wake up in the Big City to go about their days, living on top of one another in layers, Dreyer also does something interesting with the visual tableaux. While the opening moments seem banal, Dreyer is, in fact, incorporating domestic duties into the very fabric of the film, visually crafting a series of images that all come to be revisited in the second half.

His penchant for catching subtle emotions from the actors is also on display here, preceding the miasma of countenances we would come to associate with The Passion of Joan of Arc. Johannes Meyer is imperiously centered in the frame in early scenes, while Holm is often crouched, certainly diminished within hers. But it’s one genuine close-up on Meyer’s teary face toward the finale that really personifies Dreyer’s craft, as well as a subtle nod to that fact that this is much more than a revenge comedy. Even if it ends quite predictably, and has been often regarded as nothing more than a gentle exercise in the annals of revenge, Master of the House is a rare glimpse of Dreyer working in the comedic realm, showcasing a pleasurable turn from Mathilde Neilsen.