In the most recent (Oct. 2003) of American Heritage annual overrated/underrated listings, Richard Schickel argued that the 1936 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's last major novel, Dodsworth, directed by William Wyler, starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor, Paul Lukas, David Niven, and Maria Ouspenskaya is the most underrated American movie.* Epinions already has a passionate advocacy for the movie by primo Walter Huston fan
George Chabot. George's "con" is that it "needs to be recognized as one of THE great films, and Schickel calls it "one of the great American social comedies, as well as one of its greatest romances."

I think that "Dodsworth" remains a very impressive movie, though I am not as enthusiastic about it as those two. For me it is a very painful spectacle that goes on a bit too long, but has compelling restrained performances all around, including from the really formidable hams Huston and Ouspenskaya (from Niven, one expects deft underplaying).

Starting a movie with "Auld Lang Syne" seems a daring touch. The opening scene shows Sam Dodsworth staring out at a gigantic "Dodsworth Auto" sign the day he has sold the company he built up. He walks out through a mass of workers (who seem to adore him in a very false Hollywood touch).

In the library of his mansion in Zenith (the fictional city that also contained the ultra-booster Babbitt), Sam's wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is quivering with anticipation at a new life and "all the lovely things I have a right to." She does not explain why she has a right to anything(s), but announces the key to her character, her unreadiness to be a middle-aged woman in a land where middle-aged women are not considered interesting or attractive. She has heard that European men appreciate/admire mature and experienced women.

It is immediately obvious that although Fran is roughly 40, she is not mature, and it becomes obvious that she is not the experienced woman of the world she believes herself to be. This is first shown in the shipboard romance Captain Lockert (David Niven), who eventually laughs at her and warns her against starting what she can't finish. Fran has been so long indulged in a small American city that his laughing at her makes her insist on skipping London and proceeding to Paris.

There she takes up with a courtly, hand-kissing gigolo (Paul Lukas). Sam puts up with her silly pretensions, silly flirtations, and steady belittling comments as he tries to look around at the larger, older world, free of the expectations of American business success. Fran insists on having a fling, and Sam goes home without her.

After a time being irritable at home with his daughter (Kathryn Marlowe) and son-in-law (John Payne), Sam returns and offers Fran a divorce if Arnold Iselin (Lukas) wants to marry her. He doesn't, but an Austrian aristocrat, Kurt Von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye), does. Or says he does. However, his mother (Maria Ouspenskaya) has three objections. She does not want her son marrying a divorcée who is too old to bear him the sons to carry on the family name. Her age is a very fraught subject for Fran, and the Baroness Von Obersdorf coolly twists the knife with a warning of the unhappiness in store for the wife of a young husband. The baroness does all this without malice, appearing sincerely pained at having to point out things that should have been obvious. Until this scene, Fran seemed too oblivious to be hurt, but she visibly wilts, and briefly inspires audience sympathy.

Meanwhile, her husband has found happiness with a genuine soul-mate, the expatriate divorcée Edith Cortright (a very lovely Mary Astor) who is encouraging Sam to start a new enterprise (making airplanes). Sam feels that he has to go back to America with Fran to save her face. As in almost all post-Production Code movies, it seems that marriage however unsound must be preserved. The rendez-vous on the ocean-liner that will carry the Dodsworths back to America is painful to watch not only because Sam has given up his new life and true love, but because Fran has learned nothing at all from her adventures. She explicitly says she does not blame herself for the disaster of her amours. Her chatter pushes Sam to proclaim "Love has got to stop somewhere short of suicide" and gets off the boat and return to Edith. (Sinclair Lewis's novel has a less dramatic path to the same uncoupling and recoupling with Sam announcing "I didn't used to mind your embarrassing me and continually putting me in my place [belittled]. Didn't even know you were doing it. But I do now, and won't stand for it!")

The ending is romantic, in the jettisoning of marital vows sense (Dennis de Rougemont once wrote that western literature is almost all about adultery, but living happily ever after leaving a spouse is not as common as doomed love, and was all but forbidden being shown in Hollywood movies made after mid-1934). I don't think the movie is much of a romance, however, because the romances are either delusional (Fran's) or leapt over quickly near the end (Sam's and Edith's).

The movie is a social comedy, though one lacking in laughs. Given Sinclair Lewis's reputation rested on satirizing small-town America and that in his most famous book, Main Street, Lewis showed considerable sympathy for a woman who felt stifled in American conventionalities and longed to escape them, it is surprising that in Dodsworth he satirized the pretensions of a woman who succeeded in escaping the small-town mindset of Zenith (the home, as I already noted of George Babbitt) and reserved his sympathies for a successful and self-confident businessman who recognized that he was a "hick." Despite her (unquiet!) desperation, the movie Fran is very unsympathetic. (Chatterton wanted to make her even less sympathetic, fighting Wyler as Bette Davis would later; both women acknowledged they had been wrong and Wyler had been right. There is, nonetheless, something unsettling and misogynist about the merciless caricaturing of a woman yearning for more life than she's had and resisting being shelved at forty. And, surely, some of the blame for the monster of selfishness she is must attach to the husband of twenty years who at least tolerated and presumably reinforced her illusions.)

The turnabout is not quite what it seems, however, because, with her multiple pretensions to sophistication she lacks, Fran is the real provincial ("hick") and, therefore, grist for Lewis's satiric mill. Sam is far more tolerant and more realistic, not nearly as judgmental as his wife, and open to different ways of life. In eventually rejecting the narrow roles his family and hometown provide him, is a Lewis hero, aware of his own limitations. Walter Huston (who had played the part in a Broadway adaptation opposite Fay Bainter) is splendid. He is a bit too stereotypically crotchety during his return home, but in humoring a very spoiled, very difficult wife he is perfect. Also as the remittance man Edith runs into in the Naples American Express office.

The part of Edith does not demand much from Mary Astor, but she plays the part with great aplomb. Not least because Fran is so full of herself, the scenes in which she is annihilated (first by David Niven, then by Maria Ouspenskaya) are sadistic fun to watch (in part because neither has to be sadistic within the scenes; just getting Fran's attention momentarily to face facts is enough). Given that Spring Byington's career mostly consisted of giddy obliviousness like Fran's, the scene in which she cuts through Sam's armor to bolster his morale during his return to Zenith while Fran remains in Europe is also impressive.

I'm not convinced that "Dodsworth" should be on top-100 lists of American comedies, romances, or films. (There are half a dozen later Wyler movies I prefer to it.) I think that "Dodsworth" drags a bit with a lot of setting-up, then posits more than develops the romance between Sam and Edith. (The novel also dawdles around Europe providing dull stretches of mediocre travelogue and then rushes to a close.) Although the acting is cinematic (not relying entirely on the delivery of lines), the movie is stagy (almost all shot indoors and with a set that doesn't seem right to me for the Zenith home scenes). Rudolph Maté's cinematography is more than serviceable, if not as impressive as that Gregg Toland delivered to some Wyler movies soon after "Dodsworth."


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* Schickel's choice for overrated was John Ford's "The Searchers," a choice with which I do not concur (though I do agree that the ending of that movie backs down. My choice for most overrated (to the tune of eleven Oscars) would be "Ben-Hur" (which was also directed by William Wyler).


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Sinclair Lewis was born 7 February 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (on I-94 west of Minneapolis, see Jiahong's epinion on our visit there at http://www.epinions.com/content_110926663300). Lewis's birthday is the occasion of a writeoff about Minnesota and Minnesota natives. Links to other contributions are listed on my profile page.

I have also written about the 1931 movie adaptation of Lewis's novel Arrowsmith and the 1947 movie adaptation of Cass Timberlane. Moses76 has written about the 1960 movie adaptation of Elmer Gantry in the Minnesota writeoff (see my profile page for all the contribitions). Two and a half good movies is more than the total good movies derived from novels by (Minnesota-native) F. Scott Fitzgerald and fellow Nobel literature laureate (Midwestern-born) Ernest Hemingway combined, though less than the total for novels by John Steinbeck (born in my adopted state).


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age