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I’m not really sure what to say or make of The Diary of a Chambermaid. What an utterly bizarre and strange movie this is. It seems to be stitched together from three disparate films and unleashed upon the world to confound it at every turn. Equal parts cynical treatise against opportunism, a frothy romance between a brooding rich man and a gold-digging maid, a melodrama about class warfare and if it had stuck to any of these parts and widely varying tones, or more smoothly integrated them into the overall film, Chambermaid would have emerged a much better product.
Paulette Goddard is game for anything that the script throws at her, but the drastic tonal shifts and imbalances in emotional heft render her performance more than a little wobbly. She’s eternally a delightful presence, a mixture of good looks, an almost tomboyish approach to physical comedy and an elemental spark in her eyes that comes alive onscreen. Chaplin brought out the best of her in Modern Times and The Great Dictator, but Jean Renoir can’t seem to decide if he wants our sympathies with or against her. Yes, she’s a scheming gold-digger, but Howard Hawks made us love his two scheming gold-diggers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, so it’s not a question of likable character or not. It’s an uncertainty over who is the main character, our rooting interest in the film.
If it’s not Goddard’s titular chambermaid, then it’s either the stone-faced but menacing valet (Francis Lederer) or the handsome but distant son of the wealthy family she works for (Hurd Hatfield). They each fall for the chambermaid and seek to liberate her from the life of subservience, but neither seems to realize that she’s perfectly capable of doing it on her own terms. No matter, they come to represent the film’s complicated look at the class-warfare struggles and the complicity of all involved. The first chunk’s sub-Preston Sturges romanticism stands in stark contrast to the complete 180 the latter half takes. Frankly, I think the latter half is a more interesting film to make with these characters. As it stands, The Diary of a Chambermaid is a deeply weird film, unable to decide what its identity is, but not entirely unworthy of a glance. If only to be slapped around by Renoir working in Hollywood – which should have been a big tip off to the hallucinatory strangeness that followed.
