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.”)
“It might have to do with the fact that the MGM DVD is out of print or the lack of big-name stars,” mused Dan Hofstra of MovieManiacMadness. “It could just be that it stands too close to reality.”
Hofstra adds that, well, the thudding title “Dodsworth” doesn’t help, and he’s right. It’s as poetic as – to steal from W.C. Fields – “a bubble in a bathtub.”
(And the less said about the posters, the better.)
While the movie isn’t at all political, it’s interesting to note that two famous “recovering liberals” count the movie among their favorites: playwright David Mamet, and comedian Dennis Miller, who chose Dodsworth when he served as a TCM “Guest Programmer.”
The story concerns Sam Dodsworth — “surely the most lovable industrialist ever put on film” — and his wife Fran, played by Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton. The couple have spent their whole lives in the same Midwestern city, building a successful business and a happy family. Now with the business sold for millions and the children married off, restless Fran (who fancies herself a sophisticate) wants to see the world. Sam is less enthusiastic, but obliges.
“So from the beginning, you’re shown how this trip will play out. Fran talks a good game about wanting the refinements of Europe. ‘Oh, you’re hopeless. You haven’t the mistiest notion of civilization,’ she snaps at her husband. Retorts Sam, ‘Yeah, well, maybe I don’t think so much of it, though. Maybe clean hospitals, concrete highways, and no soldiers along the Canadian border come near my idea of civilization.’
“Yet Dodsworth, not a man to putter around enthusing over cathedrals and graves, still will find much in his travels to fire his imagination.”
Indeed, as the ship approaches the English coastline, Sam finds himself overcome with excitement, which he shares with Edith Cortwright (Mary Astor), an ex-pat divorcee he meets on deck:
The meeting proves a fateful one. Alone and away from home for the first time since their honeymoon, the voyage jostles open fault lines in the marriage that were previously papered over by routine and familial duty.
Sam considers the trip a second honeymoon, but Fran treats it more like a last-ditch, pre-menopausal “spring break.”
News that Fran is about to become a grandmother for the first time doesn’t help, as you might guess:
Being “a woman of a certain age,” I felt embarrassed for Fran, and myself, as I watched her trying her new “self” on for size: dying her hair blonde, putting on airs (along with fussy, flashy clothing she’s too old to pull off), fishing for compliments, and, eventually, taking flirtations too far.
When the Dodsworths meet up again with Edith in their travels, the difference between the two women is jarring. Painfully self-conscious Fran has turned into a pretentious phony, while Edith, her near contemporary, is ethereal and effortlessly elegant.
She’s also wiser and more gracious, first parrying Fran’s insult about her age with a subtle thrust, then trying gently to warn Mrs. Dodsworth – with a single, exquisitely chosen and uttered word — that she’s making a fool of herself.
“Edith has been living in Italy for some time, and projects a world-weary attitude toward the kind of societal glitz that Fran is fascinated by. The contrast between the two women could not be clearer in the first, and only, scene they share. At a party ostensibly for Fran’s birthday, she makes a to-do about feeling old at the ripe age of ‘thirty-five.’ [Note: Fran is in her early 40s].
“Not taken in for a minute, Edith plays along, sympathetically telling her, ‘When you’re my age, you’ll look back at thirty-five as a most agreeable time of life.’ As Edith leaves the party, she catches Fran in an illicit embrace. Without a note of hysteria, she simply tells Fran, ‘Don’t,’ in a voice that is both instructive, yet saddened by a scene she has doubtlessly witnessed many times before.”
Fran ignores Edith’s advice. Her flirtations turn into affairs.
Sam is hurt but stoic. He still loves Fran in his way, but that’s the point: “his way” is no longer enough. Fran wants something Sam, with all his millions, can’t give her – another chance to be young and carefree and desirable again.
It’s easy to mock, and even despise, a woman like Fran, right up until the day you too turn “thirty-five.”
Divorce being a more arduous (and scandalous) affair than it is today, the couple part as they wait for the legal machinery to run its course. When a lonely and dejected Sam miraculously runs into Edith again… well, I won’t ruin Dodsworth for you by rehashing the entire plot.
OK: Here’s the finale anyhow. I can’t resist. I’ve rarely been so thrilled by a movie ending that didn’t involve disarming a ticking bomb or battling zombies:
If you didn’t watch, I’ll just say that the final irony is that it is Sam, not Fran, who gets that “second chance” to “do things” in life – an opportunity he never realized he wanted or needed.
Meanwhile, Edith, who, unlike Fran, was always more or less resigned to middle age, seems transformed back into a young woman, even a child, in the last shot.
Fans of the film are fond of quoting Sam’s last lines to his wife, but they neglect the brutal “couplet” that comes before them:
Fran: What’s going to become of me?
Sam: I don’t know. You’ll have to stop getting younger some day.
Billy Stevenson writes that Dodsworth presents “a series of penetrating emotional observations” on, among other things, “the shame of age.” Perfectly put.
It’s true, as Ed Driscoll noted in early November (linking to “shoe blogger” and PJM contributor The Manolo, who illustrated his post with the old print ad, below) that “46 isn’t what it used to be:”
But that’s only small comfort when, like me, you’re 47.
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.