I saw the 2010 remake of The Housemaid before the original, which was made in 1960 and is available on YouTube. The viewing order probably affected my enjoyment of the original. The stories in both movies are completely different. The Housemaid deals with a precariously upwardly mobile middle class family helmed by a piano teacher and his seamstress wife. Sexual danger lurks everywhere, but takes hold in an unexpected moment of weakness. Think Fatal Attraction, but even more unhinged. The Housemaid then becomes a domestic hostage situation with no negotiator. Even the kids are awful.
If the remake was concerned with class warfare and its affect on gender, the original was troubled by the influx of unsupervised young girls leaving the country and becoming loose women in the city. Sparked by a news article, The Housemaid stems from the wife’s imagination, which indicates a similar sense of destabilizing social anxiety depicted in the remake.
The original is framed like a social guidance film with a word of caution for every viewer except single men. Wives, be satisfied with you’re your husband can give you, don’t let women enter your house to do work or else they will do more than that. Husbands, don’t ever let your guard down for a second because these bitches be crazy. Single ladies, focus on your work, don’t smoke or have crushes on married men.
The Housemaid is provocative in the same way that classic Hollywood movies frankly addressed sex, but could not depict anything. Rubbing feet and smoking become euphemisms for permissible and illicit sex. Even the weather, normally portends the fate of gods and great men, sends warnings to the doomed family. The film reaches hysterical levels rather rapidly and soon everything culminates into a melodramatic denouement that seemed a bit much for my tastes. Even the house’s appearance, the pests and the daughter’s illness seem to indicate an unseen problem within the family. The ending can be seen as a complete punkout and/or terrifying if you are working for that wife and minding your own business. Everyone is so pressed.
I enjoyed the original, but just thought that the film’s events escalated so rapidly that it was ridiculous. Also was the piano teacher hot or were there not enough men to go around so he was hot in the same way that Jonathan Frid was hot? Call me a Philistine, but while I appreciated The Housemaid and would consider it required viewing if you plan to watch the remake so you can compare and contrast what concerns society at different time periods, I did think that the levels of madness and hysteria from the opening scenes indicated a film noir tone that was dissonant with the setting.