“Against the darkened image of a solitary house perched on a cliff a woman's voice begins. ‘This is a strange story I'm going to tell. It happened in the happiest home I know. There's always been laughter in that house, and love. But down under the cliff a wild sea pounds. We were safe and snug above it. But suddenly the pounding sea seemed to invade our house. A wild and evil force swept through it. And we were as powerless as if we were being beaten by the wind against the tearing rocks. And I committed a crime.' The year is 1944 when women, waiting anxiously for the war to end, comprise the majority of the filmgoing audience. The issues of family and woman's place in relationship to it surfaced that year in films as different as Meet Me in St. Louis and Double Indemnity. But it was melodrama that foregrounded those issues, providing a moral parable for the reconstitution of family life after the boys came home. Guest in the House chronicles the turmoil attendant upon a woman's sexual designs when the object of her affections is a married man. Into the familiar domestic arena is thrust the spectre of destruction, the family threatened by the power of unrepressed sexuality. The outcome is not hard to predict. But director Brahm's deft creation of the claustrophobia of domestic space (reminiscent of the stifling architecture of Sirk) is a disturbing presense not altogether dissipated by the catharsis of the film's ending.” Kathryn Kalinak
Kathryn Kalinak teaches a UC Berkeley Film Studies course on The Melodrama.