DODSWORTH (1936) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★



"Have you ever noticed how transparent people are when you really look at them?" So asks Sam Dodsworth, the retired president of Dodsworth Motors. He's speaking to the man who has been seeing Fran, his wife, behind his back. The affair blossomed after she'd asked her husband if she could spend some alone time in Europe. She'd arrived in Paris with Sam, and he'd gone home without her, but then suspected things were amiss and had a colleague spy on her to confirm her infidelity. Having returned from America to confront them, one thing is now crystal clear: Dodsworth doesn't suffer fools. 

I enjoy this movie's story, but also love it as a character study of Walter Huston's Sam and Ruth Chatterton's Fran. From the very first shot, which is stylistically a precursor to the cinematography of the soon-to-follow Citizen Kane, Sam is portrayed as a living emblem of the American Dream. He and his car manufacturing company, which he ruefully leaves at the beginning of the film, are one and the same. He started out as a working class man who clawed his way to the kind of wealth few live to see. But William Wyler's adaptation of Sidney Howard's 1934 play (itself an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel by the same name) is about the things in life that money can't buy, things like honesty, respect, wisdom, and love. The Dodsworths' post-retirement holiday abroad invites the forces that can erode those values, and explores how two very different people deal with them. 

Samuel Goldwyn Productions put together an excellent cast of characters, including the quintessentially British David Niven as the charming playboy aboard the RMS Queen Mary, who brazenly attempts to steal Fran's heart, and Mary Astor as American expatriate Edith Cortright, who has a fateful conversation with Sam on the same ship. Howard's story is a heartfelt exposition of how people drift apart and come together. Sam is content in life, but Fran isn't. She has wild oats to sow, and intends to sow them with anyone but her faithful husband. Despite his frequently-expressed love for her, she carries on numerous affairs, each one more desperate and reactive in nature than the last. Fran fears time, enough so that when Sam tells her that they've become grandparents, the thought of being an elderly woman who dotes over her baby's baby ruins her excitement, and leads her further astray. Chatterton's performance is brilliant, a lucid depiction of a woman who builds delusional walls of entitlement around her fragile ideals, only to have them crumble before her eyes. 

Huston has some of the best lines of all time, which he delivers better than anyone else could. His attempts to reason with his wife gradually fade into resignation, and when he realizes how much he'll lose if he divorces her, his behavior goes in some surprising directions. Wyler's Dodsworth is a man who is predictable only to the extent that he's human. He's gentle when others might act tough, and dignified when lesser men might succumb to humiliation. The film's source material is great literature, a meaningful story that peers into human weaknesses through the lenses of age and experience, and the screenplay imparts this wisdom. When Fran tries to win over her much younger suitor's mother, she says, "I love your son, and I'm really rather a nice person." Mom begs to differ. "Your husband is living, Mrs. Dodsworth. You will be divorced. It's most serious to us!" In this story, actions have consequences. 

"Dodsworth" reminds me that there was a time when people had scruples. Yes, it was a troubled time, just like all the times before it, and all the ones since. But marriage was a commitment. Infidelity was a crime. And divorce was a moral stain that people of good upbringing worked to avoid. The movie is pretty racy for 1930s Hollywood; it explores life's hard truths fearlessly, and yet it manages to escape the trappings of religion. It's a wonderful film that entertains and edifies, and I'll never tire of watching it. 

                                                                                                                                    --- Bill Fontaine

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