the great tyrant
by
Douglas Messerli
Carl Theodor Dreyer
and Sven Rindom (writers, based on Rindom’s play), Carl Theodor Dreyer
(director) Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House) / 1925
Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s sly 1925 silent film, Master
of the House is a story about a great tyrant, Viktor Frandsen (Johannes
Meyer), who narcissistically rules over his domain with total disdain for those
who live within—his wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), his children, Karen (Karin
Nellemose), Dreng and Barnet and his former nanny, “Mads” (Mathilde Nielsen),
who volunteers to help out his wife from time to time—until finally, in one way
or another, they all are in psychological duress, the youngest crying endlessly
as the “howler monkey” spits out his orders, Dreng forced to stand in the
corner while the family eats their frugal supper (even butter is scraped away
from their sandwiches in order to slather more of the tyrant’s bread) simply
because he has dared play in the streets with friends a bit beyond his allotted
time, and Karen being terrified of not meeting his strict demands. When the
hard-working Ida is finally sent away to a place to rest—part of a plot that Mads
has hatched with Ida’s mother, Alvilda Kryer (Clara Schønfeld), his wife has a nervous breakdown. Sound
familiar?
Unlike that grand tyrant of our times,
however, Viktor, at least according to Ida’s testimony, is not truly a bad man,
but, having lost his business to bankruptcy, has simply transferred his anger
to his devoted and now suffering family. And the wise Mads (as the family members
have renamed Mathilde), who has watched this monster with a smoldering sense of
horror for some time, has plotted out his authoritarian demise. Having safely
transplanted Ida to a safe and hidden location, she begins to run the house in
a way that forces the tyrant to realize the errors of his ways.
Unlike Ida, she forces him to participate
in the daily care of house and family members, which Viktor, recalling her sometimes
harsh penalties for misbehavior in his youth, reluctantly obeys. Dreyer
brilliantly portrays an increasing series of daily upbraids and orders as she
forces him to help with the laundry, now hanging in the kitchen where he has
previously forbidden Ida to place it, to help with food preparation, and to
light his own fires, fetch his own shoes, and even care for the children he is
rearing. Such an exhausting schedule not only does not permit his frequent visits
to a local pub, but gradually helps him to realize just how much work his wife
has endured previously alone.
“Mads” is indeed a more than a bit “mad,”
but underneath it all, the director helps us realize, she does have a heart of
gold, and realizes that it has become necessary to retrain her early pupil. And
when he truly shows signs of breaking because he sorely misses his loving wife,
she summons the girl home, forcing her to hide in a cabinet for a brief period so
that she might witness Viktor’s transformations.
It the entire shift in behavior seems a
bit unlikely, and if we wonder whether it might represent a more permanent psychological
change, Dreyer’s deft handling of this domestic satire is, nonetheless, entertaining
and, more importantly, educational. Beware you male chauvinists, he seems to be
claiming in a day when few other males had arrived at this conclusion, the day of
reckoning will soon arrive! Ida’s mother even suggests a new career for the
baffled tyrant, writing out a check so that he might purchase an available optometrist's
shop—perhaps since he has simply come to better see how things are.
Coming just after Dreyer’s masterful study
of a homosexual behavior, Michael,
and only 3 years before his significant portrait of Joan of Arc, Master of the House seems purposefully
like the lighter piece it is. Yet, the Danes certainly seemed to comprehend its
metaphorical implications in the manner of the nearby Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen’s
earlier play, A Doll’s House. The
film was well-received in Denmark, and is now recognized as a gem of
silent-film productions.
If nothing else, in its straight-forward
and spare direction, much like the determinedly level-headed Mads, Dreyer’s
film makes it point almost immediately. In just the first 7 minutes of the
film, we, like Mads, perceive what’s truly amiss in the Frandsen household,
which the rest of the film demonstrates how to solve. If most of Dreyer’s films
do not have such seemingly easy solutions, shifting as they do between deep
religious and personal compulsions, Master
of the House, nevertheless, explores the boundaries between explicit expressions
of authority and individual needs and desires, which ultimately can and do
trump superficial ideas of power.
Los Angeles,
December 6, 2017
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2017).
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