DODSWORTH (1936)

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, having built his rep skewering an American businessman, turns tables to profile & celebrate an admirable one, Sam Dodsworth, a MidWest automobile mogul who sells the company to take early retirement and get to know himself.  Turns out he knows himself pretty well, honest, curious, unpretentious, interested in the world as he finds it.  What he doesn’t know so well is his adored wife, a class-conscious snob from a ‘hick’ town who thinks she’s meant for more sophisticated things.  Neatly adapted to the stage, and then just as neatly opened-up for the screen, by Sidney Howard, the film all but perfectly cast and the first of 12 Oscar-noms for director William Wyler.  (Wyler, with more prestige-play to quality-film adaptations then anyone but George Cukor, had an uncanny nose for knowing when to, and when not to, ‘open up’ a play in transferring from stage to screen.*)  As Dodsworth, Walter Huston (along with Harlan Briggs the only stage repeater) turns Sinclair’s unlikely role-model capitalist into a real human being.*  As his flirtatious age-conscious wife, Ruth Chatterton gets the worst of it, though she nails the age factor desperation.  (Fay Bainter might have been more subtle on B’way, but the main fault lies with Sinclair.)  Her three suitors (David Niven, Paul Lukas, Gregory Gaye) neatly fileted.  Best of all is Mary Astor as an independent divorcée living in Italy (‘Because it’s cheap!’) who offers a possible out for Huston and an ignored lifeline to Chatterton with a devastating word of advice.  (One of the great line readings in cinema.  Knowing Wyler, he probably made Astor repeat the single word in 26 takes.)  The film is immensely satisfying.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Huston did much the same in Frank Capra’s pivotal AMERICAN MADNESS/’32, confounding expectations by making a hero out of a Bank Manger who staves off a Depression Era bank run.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/american-madness-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Wyler stage adaptations from just this period; COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW/’33, trimmed but not opened; THE GOOD FAIRY/’35, modestly opened; THESE THREE/’36, modestly opened and not so modestly tweaked; DODSWORTH, considerably opened; DEAD END’37, not opened enough.