Review of Housewife, 49

When one has at hand an ostensibly honest diary of domestic life under trying conditions, a screenwriter might feel the obligation to mine it for some moral or psychological truth. But that would be work and not for today's screenwriters, most of whom seem to have signed a contract to insert gratuitous homosexuality, infidelity, feminism, and hyperbole into every story they adapt. They rewrite history as a kind of affirmative action to advertise their social values. Someone should tell them that beauty doesn't have to be meretricious and truth doesn't have to be juicy. Thus Nella Last's Diary is ravaged in being brought to the screen. The recent Miss Marple movies, among other recent adaptations to the screen, suffer from the same contrivances of the screenwriters. I can't wait until these hacks get hold of Dickens - Miss Havisham will be a heroic madame pimping out Estella to lesbians and to a married Pip. In the case of Housewife 49 the magnitude of the sin is squared because history, which should be sacred, is what is being falsified.