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Dodsworth1936 US Dir William Wyler Cast Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor, David Niven, Maria Ouspenskaya, Paul Lukas IMDb |
A couple months after I first fell in love with it, this film has the same power over me. It’s just so smart, the combined effort of class-A talent in every department all at the top of their game. Every scene in this film is inventively blocked and choreographed; Wyler uses space and movement to greater effect than perhaps any of his contemporaries, and I really ought to give his work a close look sometime soon. And next to its contemporaries, the film is utterly mature in every sense of the word, giving voice to real human emotions and predicaments, specifically those experienced by that marginalized set in 30s Hollywood: the late-middle-aged.
The three protagonists are creations almost unparalleled in films of this kind, from the sparkling page to the intelligent and nuanced realization by three of the greatest and most underrated actors of the Golden Age. Walter Huston’s Sam Dodsworth, a self-made auto magnate and self-described hick, is newly retired and rather at a loss, equally so in facing the years before him as the customs of European society. He is taking his wife on a tour abroad, hoping to get to know both her and the world better now that he has the time to, and with a child’s dogged enthusiasm that invariably turns to an old man’s resignation, he learns much more about both than he bargained for. “I’ll have to get used to that idea now,” he muses, with chilling acceptance of a hard blow. “I guess I can.”
As his wife Fran, Ruth Chatterton gets probably the most complex assignment of her career, playing a woman who is pathologically afraid of growing old. Clinging to the notion that she was “just a child” when they married and hiding from the lines of age and her new role of grandmother, she embarks upon at least two very public affairs with continental charmers. In many ways a frivolous and petty woman, it is nevertheless clear that she has lost the best years of her life to Sam’s career, that she has been neglected and has seen her own life’s desires go unfulfilled, so that it’s difficult not to sympathize with her when in a moment of desperation she yells, “I’m fighting for life — you can’t bring me back!” Mary Astor has been similarly wearied by life’s disappointments, an American expatriate divorced and settled into an isolated existence in a lovely Italian villa, but her experience has instead led her to become wise and unselfish, and thoroughly a realist. The triangles formed between them, and between the Dodsworths and Fran’s revolving door of men, are as well-choreographed as everything else in the film.
There are shocking elements in this film, but they don’t register as carry-over from ribald pre-Code naughtiness, nor as the *nudge nudge wink wink* look-what-we-got-past-the-censors! impression one gets from the best comedies of the period; rather, what’s shocking is the same as what’s terrifyingly, almost mundanely normal in the film. The first scene that made me perk up and notice Wyler’s staging and choreography is just a perfectly normal event: husband and wife, alone at the end of the day, undressing nonchalantly in front of one another, the camera moving deftly just to miss real nudity. This is shocking only in context, because you don’t expect to see it in a 1936 American film, but really what a breath of fresh air it is to see such an everyday event handled as such, and without the usual pretensions of separate sleeping arrangements, the illusion of always being dressed, the false glamor of going to bed with one’s make-up on and so forth. Then there is Fran’s frank pursuit of her lovers, and Sam’s equally frank discussion of it. None of this is intended to shock, but it does. It’s intended to reveal more and more about the characters’ psychology, and it does that, too.
On second viewing, I’ve lost none of my original feeling that this is a film set far apart from most of its contemporaries, and far above them, too. What it moves away from are things I will never fault old Hollywood for: the pure style, the sly or inadvertent commentary on society, the absolute joy of 90 minutes in that lovely other world. But just the same, I can’t help but praise something like Dodsworth for going a different route, for being something manifestly and thoroughly lifelike, for revealing without jokes or coded meanings some deeply affecting insight into the human condition.
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David Niven is in Dodsworth? I don’t remember him…
Comment by Mango — 3 August 2008 @ 3 August 2008He’s the guy on the ship early in the film who first tries to seduce Mrs Dodsworth. Too bad they didn’t meet later in the film once she started giving it to everyone. That would have been hot. May have been his first major role — on IMDb it looks like most everything before this either did not credit him or misspelled his name.
Comment by Lauren — 4 August 2008 @ 4 August 2008He can be “glimpsed” in “There Goes the Bride” as
Comment by diane — 20 September 2008 @ 20 September 2008one of the young men in the nightclub trying to
coax Jessie Matthews to sing - not that she needs
much persuasion.