Dodsworth

This film was buried deep in my Netflix queue but got bumped up when Time mag recently did a promo on the 100 Best Films, and chose to highlight this as the best of the Thirties. Well, it’s a prestige production all around, and it does still have some life in it, notably in the acclaimed portrayal of Walter Huston as the title character (quite a revelation if you only think of him only as the crazy but wise old coot in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) He’s a benevolent auto magnate who sells his company in order to grand tour in Europe with his younger (and determined to stay so) wife, played with authenticity by Ruth Chatterton. Her idea of the broadening effect of travel is to flirt with an Englishman (David Niven), canoodle with a sophisticated Frenchman, and pledge herself to a younger dancing Austrian, anything to keep from returning to grandmotherhood in Zenith. Huston as Dodsworth is natural, thoughtful, accomodating, powerful yet yielding, thoroughly American abroad, till he finds his own solace with an expatriot divorcee in Naples, played by Mary Astor. Sidney Howard adapted Sinclair Lewis’s novel into a play, and then transposed it to a screenplay, just as Huston was transposed from Broadway. Sam Goldwyn hired William Wyler to direct with his usual impeccable craftsmanship, though there lingers a sense of stagebound blackouts between scenes. It’s all unusually mature, perhaps revelatory, but there are definitely Thirties films that are more alive today than this. (1936, dvd, n.) *7*