She's unfaithful. He Still Tries to Make the Marriage Work. Classic Book, Classic Movie.

Embed from Getty Images

Buy it from Amazon

A film like, say, “Dodsworth.”

Here’s a checklist of elements you’d never see in a movie financed by an American studio today:
— A middle-aged love story.
— With infidelity on the part of the wife.
— Oh, and she isn’t a despicable slut.
— Oh, and her husband keeps trying to make the marriage work.

“Dodsworth” is adapted from a 1929 novel by the underrated Sinclair Lewis. [To buy the DVD from Amazon, click here. To buy the paperback of the terrific, vivid, fast-paced, deeply satisfying novel from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Lewis and playwright Sidney Howard (who’d go on to win an Academy Award for his adaptation of “Gone with the Wind”) collaborated on the screenplay. The other collaboration — their first — was between producer Sam Goldwyn and director William Wyler, perhaps the greatest Hollywood director of the 1930s and 1940s, and certainly the most underrated. (Wyler directed “Ben-Hur,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “Roman Holiday,” “The Letter,” “Wuthering Heights” and “Funny Girl” — get the idea?)

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

“Dodsworth” was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1937, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay. It only won for Art Direction. If you will devote an hour and a half to this film, you will be outraged on its behalf — at the Oscars, it wuz robbed. But even more, you’ll be delighted to have had that hardest-to-find experience: entertainment so brilliantly accomplished you might as well call it Art.

The story is a simple one: Samuel Dodsworth (Walter Huston) is a rich Midwestern industrialist who sells his business and sets out to “enjoy life.” His wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) couldn’t agree more — her daughter is just married, and the thought of growing old appalls her. She wants to be chic, she wants “to live.” She is, in short, a bomb waiting to explode.

Off the Dodsworths sail to Europe. They have barely waved goodbye to New York when Fran befriends her first suitor. She leads him on, then is shocked when he makes advances — she’s really not very good at this game. And she doesn’t get better; she has a knack for falling “in love” with any Count of No Account who crosses her path.

Through it all Sam endures. Paul Lukas, David Niven, Gregory Gaye — he abides Fran’s suitors, as he tolerates her escalating insults. But Sam is no wimp. When he snaps, he is firm and manly and smart all at once.

There’s a confrontation scene in a Paris hotel room. Watch it closely. Sam. Fran. A lover. The oldest, saddest triangle. It could have been shot to reflect the tension. Instead, Wyler’s camera circles the threesome. It’s dazzling filmmaking.

But then, every element of the film dazzles. Especially the acting. These are complicated, sophisticated roles — the characters aren’t cardboard saints and demons, but conflicted, well-meaning people who remind us of ourselves (or, at least, People We Know). Every actor, even the young and callow, suggests a complexity we rarely see in movies today. And Sam Dodsworth’s speech at the breaking point — “ Love has to stop short of suicide” — strikes just the right note of determination and poignancy.

How does a film about the end of a marriage have a happy ending that is also grounded in realism? Credit great writing. And credit also Mary Astor, an American widow living in Italy.

It’s the rare film that, as the credits roll, makes you feel smarter. “Dodsworth” is one. Which is why it is, now and forever, on my ten best list.
—
Previously published on The Head Butler.