Diary of a Mad Housewife

An emblematic example of New Hollywood’s tarrying with stories of women’s dissatisfaction, shrewdly scripted by feminist screenwriter Eleanor Perry.

  • Director

    Frank Perry

  • With

    Carrie Snodgress, Richard Benjamin, Frank Langella

  • USA 1970. 95min

  • Digital

  • Certificate

    15

Based on a 1967 novel by Sue Kaufmann, with a screenplay adapted by Eleanor Perry, this film signalled for film critics an early 1970s micro-cycle of feel-bad dramas about women’s dissatisfaction as wives, lovers and mothers. Constantly hectored and abused by her unbearable lawyer husband, Tina seeks out a lover in a dashing writer, who treats her with his own brand of misogyny and scorn. The film’s satirical bourgeois hyperbole sits just askance of a pressing social reality.