Dodsworth is a reminder what a great actor Walter Huston was. The father of John, grandfather of Danny, great-grandfather of Jack trumps them all with a superbly relaxed and natural performance as an America car magnate being given the runaround by his silly wife. Ruth Chatterton in the thankless role as wife Fran is pretty good too.
It’s a tale of solid, reliable, self-made Americans being led astray by workshy, corrupt old-money Europeans and it opens with scenes of Sam Dodsworth (Huston), an American motor manufacturing magnate much loved by his workforce selling up his business and departing for Europe with his wife for the holiday of a lifetime.
Sam doesn’t really understand what all this travel business is about, has no appetite for foreign food or foreign attitudes but in his role as the doting husband who’ll do anything for his wife goes along as the genial companion.
What looks like a negative – Sam’s stodginess – is re-assessed when we see what effect European attitudes (and men) have on wife Fran, who has a dire fear of getting old and can be played like a fiddle by any passing smoothie.
First up, playing a lounge lizard on the Queen Mary, David Niven. It’s an early credited role for him but he’s already every inch the suave Niven he’d later always play. Later Paul Lukas as a moneyed, stiff Italian (or something) who makes a little more headway with Mrs D. Eventually prissy aristo Kurt Von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye) gets all the way and persuades Fran to divorce her husband and marry him.
The Europeans are all gigolo-adjacent while Dodsworth could not be more the decent, meat-and-potatoes guy. He’s also rich beyond the realm of imagination, but we’re reminded several times that he has worked for his money and actually loves nothing better than to get his hands dirty tinkering with something mechanical. Maybe if he’d spent more time tinkering with his wife…
It’s a comedy of manners done with screwball energy (this is 1936 so the right period) and unusual for a couple of reasons. It’s impossible to imagine anyone setting out to make a sympathetic drama about the romantic woes of the super-rich these days. The midlife crisis being hers not his is also unusual, especially the way the story eventually heads. Nowadays, it would play out as an Eat Pray Love-style washy, feelgoody, journey of self-discovery. In Dodsworth, Fran learns the hard way about the perils of having it her way and it isn’t pretty.
The casting is perfect. Huston is in another league compared to everyone else on screen, lean and loose-limbed and with an understanding that screen acting is different from being on stage. Chatterton is also particularly well cast, playing a woman fearful of ageing, as Chatterton was herself. Director William Wyler and Chatterton argued about how to present Mrs D (he wanted redeeming features; she didn’t), and from the evidence on display she was right. Niven, Lukas and Gaye are ciphers, though well sketched ones, while Mary Astor, who could be a bit stuffy and tended to overact (stepping forward whenever she had a line), relaxes into the role as Edith Cortright, the bright and attractive expat American who is everything that Dodsworth’s wife isn’t.
The mid-1930s were the era of the “remarriage comedy” (The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife etc) but that’s not what’s going on here. In the end Dodsworth becomes a bit of a revenge drama, with poor Fran Dodsworth getting the worst of it and realising too late that she’s taken her husband’s decency for weakness. Sam, meanwhile, is rewarded for his selflessness and for having played the patsy in a terribly one-sided relationship for so long.
It’s virtuous America versus corrupt Europe, new money versus old and – in late scenes that remind us what a live topic this still was at the time – Protestant versus Catholic, with no shock in any of those oppositions which comes out on top.
David Mamet has described Dodsworth as one of four “perfect” movies and it’s easy to agree that it’s brilliant. On top of unusual themes worked through remorselessly it’s beautiful to look at, with scenes lit in the classic Hollywood style (keylights, hairlights and what have you) by the great Rudolph Maté. The 2019 restoration done with Star Wars money by the George Lucas Foundation is the one to go for. Accept no substitute.
Dodsworth – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
