Classic Movie Review: 'Diary of a Mad Housewife'

I love finding hidden gem movies. You know, those old movies that you missed over the years that people don’t talk much about anymore and are secretly brilliant. That’s what I have found in the new Kino Lorber Blu Ray release of the 1970 Frank Perry directed black comedy, Diary of a Mad Housewife. This is a secretly biting satire about an unsatisfied wife in an unsatisfying marriage to a wholly unsatisfying man.

Diary of a Mad Housewife stars Carrie Snodgrass as Tina Balser, the wife of the single most insufferable man on the planet, Jonathan Balser, played by Richard Benjamin. I kid you not dear reader, I’ve never wanted to personally murder anyone but Richard Benjamin’s Jonathan had me dreaming of his demise within minutes of his first line of dialogue. The sheer pomposity of this character is stunning.

The first words you hear in Diary of a Mad Housewife are Jonathan’s as he urges Tina to get out of bed. After making several demands of his desire for breakfast and for the house to be cleaned, he has the gall to call his wife lazy for sleeping a little late and criticizes her for being too skinny as she changes clothes to go start his breakfast and dress their children. All of this with this smarmy tone that would make the Dalai Lama want to beat the smug out of him.

During breakfast, Jonathan continues to demonstrate himself as the most hateable man imaginable as he criticizes his wife’s cooking, criticizes how long it takes to serve him and does so in front of their two daughters who are invited to laugh at mom for being so terrible at being a doting wife, which they do with a spoiled child’s fearsome glee. So not only is Jonathan insufferable, he’s raising two insufferable little kids.

One of the best scenes in Diary of a Mad Housewife features a bit of comic relief so simple that I could not help but marvel at its genius. At Jonathan’s command, Tina joins him in the elevator of their apartment building so that he can dictate his commands to her for preparing his bags for his business trip. The scene lasts no more than a minute and if you don’t already want Jonathan dead based off of what you’ve already read in this review, wait until you hear his instructions for packing.

The elevator scene has Jonathan going on about each item that his wife is to pack for him. He has specific demands about the color of each shirt and sock. Each shirt must be a specific blend, not the blue but the specific shade of blue. The gray socks but not those gray socks, the other gray socks. My God, I was so mad listening to this, I wanted to scream. Then, as the family exited the elevator, an elderly elevator operator leans his head out of the door, his face telling a picture perfect story, a mixture of exasperation, exhaustion and relief.

The comic perfection of this moment cannot be understated. It’s pure genius. All of this that I have described is merely the first 5 minutes of Diary of a Mad Housewife. That’s how amazing this movie is. In five minutes, director Frank Perry and his screenwriter wife, Eleanor Perry, have created a perfect unconventional villain, a beloved heroine and punctuated the set up with a big laugh. It’s masterful filmmaking.

How do I illustrate this, I hate Jonathan Belser, the character, more than perhaps any character in movie history. This character is such a loathsome, self-involved prat that I hate him more than most horror movie villains. At least they do you the favor of killing you, you don’t have to listen to them be smug for days on end. At one point, Jonathan looks at his wife who has cleaned his house, made his breakfast and dinner, cleaned up after their kids and generally stage managed his entire, miserable, life and says, because she forgot one thing on his list of things, “Is there anything you CAN do?”

Jonathan is so awful that he ruins waving. Waving! As in waving goodbye. As he leaves in a cab to go to work, he waves daintily with the back of his hand and with this oblivious grin and I nearly broke down in tears at how much I wanted to break that hand. This is a man who uses a shoe buffer. This is a man who says to his wife when seeking sex, ‘how about a roll in the hay’ and I hear him say it and I want to roll him up in a carpet and drop him in the ocean.

This is all just to say that Richard Benjamin is a genius and this role deserved an Academy Award. The effortlessness with which Richard Benjamin affects obliviousness is astonishing. How he renders this character so perfectly insufferable is an acting feat that very few actors could pull off. It is a symphony conducted by a master. This is one of the greatest villain performances ever in a movie that has no need of a villain.

I haven’t even gotten to the plot yet but, as you can imagine, Tina is going to cheat. How could she not and how could we ever possibly blame her. At a party, Tina meets yet another, equally pompous, self involved jerk named George Prager (Frank Langella). George is an award winning author whom Jonathan loves because on top of being awful, he also obsesses over celebrities. Just by not being Jonathan, George is automatically a better choice.

I will leave you to discover the rest, dear reader. It involves a complex relationship between Tina and George. He’s a chauvinist pig, a complete ass, who claims to not be interested in anything more than sex. The brilliant performance by Carrie Snodgrass shows Tina prove herself to be incredibly smart and savvy at seeing right through to the little boy that George truly is. There is no victory lap for Tina in the end but the genuine, organic growth she shows as she gets stronger and more self-aware makes for a wonderful story.

Diary of a Mad Housewife is being released on Blu Ray for the first time by Kino Lorber on December 15th.