Diary of A Chamber Maid – 1946*

Diary of A Chamber Maid – 1946*

What if you were famed director Jean Renoir and you were making an adaptation of a play that is based upon a 1900 novel Le Journal d’une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau, and as this has a historical setting for your two main stars, Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith (in fact Meredith helps write the adaptation!) and because you're, well, French, you handle some of this film in a breezy, light European way that emphasizes the comedy that is in human foibles. In fact, Burgess (and Reginald Owen and Florence Bates) help this along with a slapstick-like showcase of jumping, running and leaping as if the Keystone Kops choreographed this section of the film. The French and Americans love physical comedy, so what's the harm in giving it to them?

But, wait a second, there are some very serious topics within Diary of A Chambermaid, such as murder, madness, class conflict, and the struggle of weak young men against dominating mothers (and thoughts of suicide!) not to mention the lingering atmosphere of postrevolutionary France in which the ex-aristocracy is still fuming over how the country was turned upside down in pursuit of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité".** This is where you let heavyweight actors Francis Lederer, Hurd Hatfield and Judith Anderson take over, in fact Lederer plays his part of the pathologically scheming valet Joseph in such a dark way you'd think Diary of A Chambermaid is a noir film. Well, maybe his part of it is!

But, wait, there's more! Goddard's beautiful blonde chambermaid is trying to convince herself the only way out of the drudgery of being on the low-end of the social scale is to use her obvious beauty to seduce a man with money and then to insulate herself behind a wall of wealth to eliminate the terror of being mistreated, sexually assaulted, starving or simply being hastily fired from a job.

And fired at a moments notice is a very real threat. When Diary of A Chambermaid begins, scullery maid Louise (Irene Ryan) actually is being fired, and before she has officially even been hired. She and Celestine (Goddard) have travelled from Paris for jobs in the countryside where the Lanlaire estate is, but because the Lanlaire's valet Joseph (Lederer), who has come to pick them up at the train station, thinks Louise is "too ugly" for the job, she is summarily dismissed. This leaves Louise stranded in the French countryside, friendless and penniless, without the means to obtain a return ticket back to the city. Celestine intrudes (the valet looked her over and found no physical fault), tells the valet to go tell the Lanlaires that if they don't take on Louise as the new scullery maid, then they also don't get Celestine for the new chambermaid. Celestine then dismisses Joseph as if she is his superior (something we're already agreeing with and we're only a few minutes into the film) and Joseph marches off to a waiting horse-drawn wagon to leave the station. Celestine and Louise, in full panic, with their backs to him, mumble to each about what to do now, both of them shocked at Celestine's courage. But, instead of exiting back to the Lanlaire estate, Joseph calls for them both to come and thus the two relieved women join the Lanlaire staff.

And this is the whole film in miniature. Celestine's growing confidence to command the decisions to run her own life, and to see through the pretensions of the people around her, whether they are wealthy or just the other servants around her "who have plans" (some quite criminal), finally to the point she can see through her own phantasy of wealth, too.

But before that epiphany she is first bent upon selecting a wealthy man (married or not) to seduce, and so we see her going after the half-crazy Lanlaire neighbor, Captain Mauger (Burgess Meredith). Unfortunately, Renoir (or the script) really don't have enough room for this activity of seduction, though the advertising drawn up for the movie in 1946 is certainly emphasizing this aspect. Instead, at its core, the movie is really a romance, with the Lanlair's son Georges (Hatfield) sulkily in love with the perky, brave chambermaid.

Unfortunately, Georges is completely compromised emotionally, mentally, and apparently physically. I kept thinking he had tuberculoses or some other terminal physical illness ("I've had a cold for six years" he claims at one point) that explains his long absences to other geographic locations away from the Lanlaire home. But, nowhere does the script actually claim any of this, instead we finally realize its all in his head because the young man won't confront his doting, domineering mother who babies him like he actually has a debilitating illness.

A few years later Hollywood would churn out plenty of films about angst-ridden, distraught youth confronting smothering parents, raging and tearing up in front of the cameras as if they're being eaten alive by emotional fire ants, but in this film, Hatfield handles the task of aimless youth and smoldering rage by lazily slouching on a couch or chair, reading a book, doing not much of anything and simply being sad.

With enough mood changes to fill out a much longer epic tale, Diary of A Chambermaid compacts too much into too short a space. It's a romantic comedy, it's a noir, its slapstick and its a political and sociological study. But Goddard, who is probably a few years too old for this role, has the powers of a glamorous movie star and balances all of these fragmented ideas upon her character, and for the most part it works.

The Travis Banton costuming is another main feature of the film and really takes flight once the plot has fixed upon what we're really up to: the Lanlaire mom and dad wanting Celestine to lure their son Georges out of his funk and to engage with something besides laying around (although the film hints at just laying around being acceptable, too, in a very 1946 kind of way, with Judith Anderson's Madame Lanlaire doing her best to doll-up Goddard's chambermaid with the right clothing "to make the household a little more gay," and insisting on the right perfume because "cheap perfume is unforgiveable." Renoir's direction shows Madame Lanlaire's instruction and remodeling of Celestine underscoring a manipulative perversity, and the schism in this movie shows up the most between Judith Anderson's serious portrait of a claustrophobic overbearing parent and Goddard's cheerful, hopeful house servant.

Though there are twists in Diary of A Chambermaid with murders, Burgess Meredith's madman character killing a squirrel ala' Lenny from Mice and Men, and a mini-revolution in the village along with a heist sub-story, its all too much to really flesh out with only a 1:26 runtime. We stick with Paulette Goddard moving through situations, getting steadily smarter about what's going on around her, and voicing the often-time good dialogue and wearing the gorgeous Banton costumes which maps her transformation: she is dressed like a lowly scullery maid cleaning floorstones, a maid in an outfit suitable for doing laundry, and then a classic black silk chambermaid outfit with lace epaulets (and this is the major selling point in the film's original advertising), and then she is in finer and finer finery as her character has gone from servant to coquette to.... Well, somehow her own person, though, unlike the original story that seems to indicate a collapse of hope at the end with the sinister, plotting and lusting Joseph being the chambermaid's consolation "prize," there's no such problem in the film version. With part of the cast cleared from the boards, so to speak, wealth no longer the mesmerizing allure it once was, and the rejuvenated and self-confidant Georges on his own two feet finally after he fought Joseph, got beaten, came back with "the more I'm beaten the stronger I get" and launched into fighting Lederer's vicious valet like he is Popeye on spinach, we're on the precipice of an all-American Hollywood ending.

But Renoir the director is French and this isn't a friendly John Ford Donnybrook when a large-scale fight breaks out in the local village. Renoir's brief, lethal mob scene at the end of Diary of A Chambermaid has a coldness that presages Julien Duvivier's Panique (also from 1946, but released later in the year) and depicts the comeuppance of Joseph the Valet in a brutal, but carefully obscured way that makes the film seem like it wasn't really about exposing the emptiness of wealth, or the stupidity of lust, or the self-delusions of social status, but escaping, or avoiding, or punishing the cruelty of humans against humans, and of course, finding true love.

*has a 1945 credit on the title, though

** "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

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Original Page May 2025