True story! My personal copy of Dodsworth was bought from a local video store (remember them!?) that went out of business. When I arrived at the sale, the ‘Classics’ shelf had been picked clean. I mean, every single film was gone — except for Dodsworth.
– film blogger “Mildred Fierce”
In the first installment of “Movies for Grown-ups,” I beseached you to watch Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a movie about two old people nobody cares about.
If you read a typical TV Guide-type description of Dodsworth (1936), I doubt you’d find it any more enticing:
“Two rich Midwestern Americans go to Europe for the first time.”
Great. Who wants to endure two hours of archaic, sarcastic Continental snide about “ugly Americans” and “innocents abroad”? Don’t tell me: the Yankee hicks wonder why somebody doesn’t “fix” Venice, then order hot dogs at Maxim’s.
Actually, no.
That’s what I thought on the rare occasions Dodsworth (heralded by some equally off-putting synopsis) popped up on the small screen. I was all for watching “a fearlessly mature drama” about a disintegrating marriage as long as it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or something similarly “daring” and drunken, with plenty of shattering glass.
But a homely middle-aged couple in stiff evening clothes — on a steamship? I’d stick with yet another broadcast of Die Hard.
Yet as I explained in the first installment of this series, my tastes in movies evolved once I hit middle age. Many “boring” movies suddenly made sense. Dodsworth became one of those films for me when Turner Classic Movies aired it as one of their “Essentials” about three years ago.
Theories abound as to why this movie remains “unjustly neglected” decades after cinephiles first started calling it a masterpiece. TCM’s main article about the film speculates:
It may have been simply too serious, too subtle, and too sophisticated for the taste of the general public.
Certainly, it flopped at the box office. (“I lost my goddam shirt” on Dodsworth said producer Sam Goldwyn. “I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine picture. It was a great picture, but nobody wanted to see it. In droves.”)
I first watched Dodsworth on TCM a few years ago starting in the middle, and what drew me in was Mary Astor’s character, Edith, and her beauty, which seemed to be in the service of her character. Ms. Astor was not flashy in this movie, although she had been a star for years and would be flashy a few years later in Maltese Falcon. Instead, she had a calm and quiet kind of radiance that illuminated her character, and drew me into the story. It was easy to understand Sam being drawn to her. But Ruth Chatterton was wonderful, too, in a less sympathetic role. If acting involves searching for your character then I think that she really found Fran.
And while Walter Huston was a capable Sam, I wonder what someone else might have done with the role – say William Powell, who would I think have found layers within the role that Huston didn’t. Huston was not a one-note performer but in this film he was a one-note-at-a-time actor, switching notes visibly along the way. Powell would have shown us a more complex Sam.
Nice the way Walter Huston, in the last clip, lays down his long fishing rod and reel—i.e., a none-too-subtle phallic symbol—as he leaves Mary Astor to take the phone call from Ruth Chatterton. And, of course, comes back to Mary Astor on a fishing boat, which subtly references his restored manhood.
BTW, Arnold “Iselin” in the film was Arnold Israel in the Sinclair Lewis novel; quite clearly Jewish. And, while Lewis was nominally sympathetic towards Jews in the darkling ’30s, Fran Dodsworth betraying her husband with a Jew was, to Lewis’s readers, an indication of how far she’d fallen.
Another aspect of Dodsworth is the depiction of capitalism and of wealth earned through commerce and industry; it’s not portrayed as selfish or evil. Even in the middle of the Great Depression there’s no hatred of the 1%. Inherent in the screenplay is the fact that if you build a successful automobile manufacturing company you are going to earn money.
Saw Dodsworth over the weekend. What a terrific film. Thought the same thing: why don’t they make movies for grownups anymore. Sometimes it appears that Hollywood would rather continue to corrupt the culture that make money.
As Sam Goldwyn said, ” I lost my shirt! on this movie. People didn’t pay to see it in droves.”
Hyper… apparently, Chatterton was dealing with similar problems/feelings in real life and Astor said that carried over into her performance.
And maybe Sam isn’t meant to be “complex”? Not sure.
Thanks for all your feedback everyone! I had no idea about the Iselin/Israel thing!
Whenever I see a film based on a book, I always try and read the book to get an idea of what was added or elided, and why.
The film of “Dodsworth” certainly manages to do justice to the central theme of Lewis’s book, and necessarily drops a lot of it by the wayside—it’s a long book, Lewis is a talky and repetitive writer, and some things, like Lewis’s observations on Prohibition, had already become moot by the time the film was made. But there is a lot in the book about the strengths and weaknesses of America and of Europe, separately and in relation to each other, over and above what the book has to say about personal relationships and marriage, that makes it well worth reading.
My husband and I saw this movies recently. A bit depressing, but I can see why it is a great movie and a life lesson.
What a great last line
Mary Astor was a babe.
Also, it doesn’t surprise me that David Mamet likes this movie. In Mamet’s Heist there’s a scene with Gene Hackman and Rebecca Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet in real life, I believe), where they’re talking, the subject changes and Hackman’s character says,
“What’s the other part?” referring to something Pidgeon had said before the subject changed. The backstory is that Pidgeon was Hackman’s old lady but she ended up staying with the petty gangster that she was supposed to seduce.
Hackman says, “what’s the other part?” just like Walter Huston says, “All right, go on, you were saying?” at ~5:50 of the last video. It’s sort of a similar scene. After Pidgeon and her new boyfriend drive off with what they think is the gold from a heist, Hackman leaves by himself just like Huston leaves the boat.
loved the book, would love to see the film, but Netflix doesn’t have it. What now?
Try the Amazon link in the article.
It’s all on YouTube, in about 9 or 10 segments.
Wow, 2 people who thought Astor was a babe. I never could figure out her being cast in “The Maltese Falcon” as a woman men would fall for as she looked like hell to me. Veronica Lake, sure, Becall sure.
See now, I thought Bacall was and is overrated as a screen siren. Veronica Lake yes, OMG yes! Mary Astor is one of those women who when taken as a complete package is not amazing but her eyes would make me walk over hot coals to get there…
Both Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall were far too young to have been cast in the Huston version of The Maltese Falcon. Bebe Daniels was cast as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the original 1931 film, opposite Ricardo Cortez; Bette Davis had the same role opposite Warren William in the loopy Satan Met a Lady, a film which is more or less contemporaneous to Dodsworth. The Bogart film came later.
Mary Astor was indeed a hot babe. Her film career was destroyed by a lurid sex scandal; I forget the details, but it involved a fairly steamy diary she had kept. She made something of a comeback in a small way playing bit parts in lesser films noir.
And be sure to check out Mary Astor in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Totally hot!
“What will become of me?”
I think all of us at one time or another have heard these words or uttered them. Or at the very least, thought them.
Being 61 years old (or “of age”), I thought I had seen the last good movie in the sixties or early seventies. After that, the actors became “stars”. Kind of like the character of Peter O’Toole in “My Favorite Year”. It seems that movies around that time became loud and pointless, almost frenetic. Of course, that was also the time of newer technology that allowed for more stunts and later, computer graphic generated scenes.
Good hardworking actors were what I saw in the clips of this film. People who worked at their craft. Huston was perfect in this role, hard charging and driven. But, I wonder, what would a Kirk Douglas or even better Gary Cooper, have done with this role.
This review made me realize that there’s a lot of film out there that I need to catch up with. Oh, and Mary Astor. What an actress! and a beautiful woman. Hot coals indeed.