More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that.
Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from the very beginning.
Du Skal Ære din Hustru is the original title, translating as Thou Shalt Honour Thy Wife, a story about an abusive husband who treats his wife as a skivvy but learns to value her after she disappears from his life.
Dreyer makes sure we get the message in a long opening section. Viktor (Johannes Meyer) wakes late. His wife Ida (Astrid Holm) and daughter (Karin Nellemose) have already been up for a good while, lighting the fire, preparing the breakfast, making sure the house is in shape. Swinging his legs over the bed, Viktor calls for his slippers. Daughter Karen runs to his room, bends to the cupboard right by the side of her father’s bed, lifts them up and hands them to him. He could easily have grabbed them himself.
Why do I have holes in my shoes? Why isn’t there enough butter on my bread. Why is dinner cold when I asked for hot, the ever-complaining Viktor is the picture of the bad-tempered, entitled patriarch. The fact that he’s throwing his weight around with his family because he’s lost his livelihood is offered as some sort of excuse for his behaviour, but that only goes so far.
And then the pivot. Two old dears, the man’s childhood nanny, Mads (Mathilde Nielsen) and Ida’s mother (Clara Schønfeld), decide that Viktor has gone far enough and that Ida is in danger. They send her away and install Mads as the woman of the house, the old childhood authority figure having no problem bending Viktor to her will, in scenes that replay all his earlier brutishnesses, except this time he’s at the rough end.
A modern movie would do a lot of the set-up and the development in montages. Instead Dreyer gives it to us longhand. But as he moves on to the next bit – the resolution – the interest mostly comes from the now-unfashionable belief in the cleansing power of punishment. “It hurts to thrash someone we love,” Mads explains to daughter Karen halfway through the schedule of bringing Viktor to heel. But also in Dreyer’s naked ability as a film-maker. The close-ups on faces expressively frozen, the swift edits suddenly giving pace to a film relying for the most part on static shots, actors who barely blink, their performances speaking to a much later style of acting.
Incidentally, Dreyer shows us that the system reproduces itself. While Karen the daughter is a drudge in training, her brother is being helped to learn his mathematical tables.
For all the fine performances by top-billed Meyer and Holm, it’s Mathilde Nielsen who is the star – Mads’s wily, determined, puckish face often adorns the DVD box.
Does the man learn his lesson? Of course he does. And the reconciliation between husband and wife, when it comes, is tender and plausible. Viktor is a changed man not just a man changing tack to suit the new wind direction. Thou shalt honour they wife because she is the heart of the home he eventually realises. It’s not exactly a modern feminist rallying cry but honour is at least a start.
Master of the House – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
