Tag Archives: Sinclair Lewis

Mary Astor in ‘Dodsworth’ — Brava!

Poster for Italian release.

Poster for the Italian release. It’s much better than the American poster, but Sinclair is misspelled.

In its first run, William Wyler’s excellent screen adaption of Sinclair Lewis’ novel, “Dodsworth” (Samuel Goldwyn, 1936) was a critical and box office success, and went on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Walter Huston); Richard Day won for his beautiful art direction. Sidney Howard’s screenplay is startlingly frank, sophisticated, intelligent: although no lines from the picture are on the list of the AFI’s 100 Most Memorable Quotes, “Dodsworth” is one of the most scintillating scripts ever to come out of Hollywood: it is full of quotable lines. Here are a few examples, chosen at random:

Sam Dodsworth: All right, I’ll enjoy life now if it kills me, and it probably will.

Sam Dodsworth: Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?

Captain Lockert: Well I must say, for a civilized woman who’s been married as long as you have, you’re making a great deal of a small matter.

Fran Dodsworth: You’re simply rushing at old age, Sam, and I’m not ready for that yet.

Arnold Iselin: Let me remind you, Dodsworth, that Shakespeare’s “Othello” ends badly for the hero.
Sam Dodsworth: Yeah? Well, I’m not Othello, this is not the middle ages, none of us speak blank verse, not even you.

Baroness: Have you thought how little happiness there can be for the . . . old . . . wife of a young husband?

Fran Dodsworth: But what’s to become of me?
Sam Dodsworth: I don’t know. You’ll have to stop getting younger some day.

Sam Dodsworth: Love has got to stop someplace short of suicide.

“Dodsworth” tells the story of Samuel Dodsworth (Walter Huston), a wealthy, recently retired American automobile manufacturer, and his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton), who, in their twentieth year of marriage, set off on a long-anticipated extended tour of Europe. It’s to be a voyage of romantic adventure and self-discovery — or so they hope. “Ah, I love you more than ever, now that I’ve got time for it,” Sam says to her on their first day aboard the Queen Mary. But the mad, bad, decadent Old World has other plans for them. Before they’re halfway across the ocean, Fran is already beginning to affect a pretentious Great Lady manner; Sam refuses to pretend he’s anything but what he is. At home, Fran was proud to be the wife of “the most impressive man in Zenith,” as she calls him, and gladly played the role of the dutiful wife. But now that they’re crossing the Atlantic on a luxury ocean liner and rubbing elbows with the international smart set, her husband’s boisterous tactlessness and lack of refinement exasperate and humiliate her.

On the Dodsworths’ first night at sea, Fran is flattered to receive the flirtatious attentions of a youngish British officer, Captain Clyde Lockert (David Niven), which she makes no attempt to conceal; before long, she takes to ridiculing Sam’s plainspoken vulgarity, his “bourgeois ideas,” his childish “anglomania” and so on. Sam cheerfully refuses to be offended, but seeing that he’s in the way, and believing that the flirtation is innocent enough, he makes himself scarce. It’s all perfectly friendly, but little cracks in the marriage have already begun to appear.

Walter Huston’s performance remains one of the greatest in the history of motion pictures. Unhappily, Ruth Chatterton’s performance has aged badly. To be sure, acting styles change, but it’s hard to believe anyone ever found the histrionics of this chunky harpy acceptable, let alone attractive. Her voice often takes on a metallic edge that reminds me of a buzz saw. Yet, no fewer than four men in the picture fall madly in love with her — it’s completely bewildering. The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent — especially Mary Astor, who’s a perfect match for Huston. Their scenes together are beautifully acted and as enchanting as any I’ve ever seen.

‘Why Don’t You Try Stout, Mr Dodsworth?’

For the rest of the crossing, Sam pokes about the deck by himself and does his best to amuse himself. Fran spends the last night of the voyage dancing with Capt. Lockert. Sam goes out to the port bow to get his first look at Bishop’s Light, a lighthouse off the Cornish coast, as soon as it comes into view.

“Why don’t you try stout, Mr Dodsworth?” Mary Astor makes it sound like a musical phrase. She has a melodious voice that is wonderfully caressing and filled with compassionate understanding (only Deborah Kerr could match her ability to express intelligent kindliness). There’s great refinement in the way she speaks, but not the least trace of primness or stuffiness in her perfect manners — and her imperfectly concealed vulnerability gives her enormous pathos.

While the soul of this drama is unquestionably Samuel Dodsworth, its heart is Mrs Edith Cortright. Mrs Cortright is a part that Mary Astor was born to play — a compassionate, intelligent woman who has been through the mill; experience has left her a little world-weary, but her good nature and common sense have kept her from becoming jaded. She’s not deeply unhappy, but she has been drifting for too long, and it doesn’t agree with her; she’s lonely and time is passing her by. There’s no self-pity in Astor’s portrayal: she’s poised and affable, amused and amusing; but her big, sad eyes and the flutter in her voice hint at the vulnerability that her self-possession cannot entirely conceal. Deep wells of emotion lie beneath her calm surface — she has a lively sense of humor, but it’s rueful; her exquisite politeness is etched by anxiety. Really, I don’t think any other actress could have played the role as superbly as Mary Astor. She is probably best known for her witty and glamorous turn as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in “The Maltese Falcon,” but Edith Cortright is her finest, most appealing performance.

‘You’re Almost Sure to, My Dear’

In this next clip, Mrs Cortright has two beautiful little exchanges with Fran. In both of them, what is said amounts to very few words, and what is left unsaid speaks volumes. The entire picture is full of moments in which a few words and a look express an enormous amount of psychological and emotional information.

Before home video drove revival houses into extinction, I saw “Dodsworth” many times on the big screen. The picture never drew enormous crowds, but even when the audience was a small one, Astor’s delivery of “You’re almost sure to, my dear” always got a big laugh. As delightful as it is to hear the quiet, sophisticated Mrs Cortright stick a knife into the odious Mrs Dodsworth, the deliberate impoliteness of her remark is, I think, significant — precisely because it seems so out of character. Why does she insult her hostess? Well, it seems probable that she wants to warn Fran not to shave quite so many years off her age: nobody will ever believe her. Also, Mrs Cortright has seen enough of Fran to know that she dislikes the way she treats Sam. Her little dig also puts to rest any notion that she’s a saint. Without this little exchange, she might easily have seemed too good to be true. (As a matter of fact, Mary Astor was only thirty when she played Mrs Cortright, who is supposed to be about ten years older; Ruth Chatterton was forty-four. Astor looks younger than Chatterton, but her gravitas gives her the authority of a much older woman.)

I particularly like the look in Mrs Cortright’s eyes when she says, “My dear . . . don’t.” It’s not condemnation, judgment or righteousness she’s expressing; she’s simply doing the wretched woman a favor by offering her a word of sound advice that she herself probably had to learn the hard way. Fran has been barely civil to her, and Mrs Cortright has seen plenty of evidence that Fran treats Sam abominably. But Mrs Cortright is a woman of the world, and she knows that a bounder like Arnold Iselin could easily eat a gullible snob like Mrs Dodsworth alive. And of course she’s also thinking of Sam: “My dear . . . don’t” is her parting act of kindness to him. When Mrs Cortright goes from the Dodsworths’ suite at the end of this scene, she takes with her the only amiable companionship Sam has known for the past several months. With her departure, and until Sam can persuade his wife that it’s time that they “were beating it back home to America,” he is bereft of friends. And we are bereft of her company for the next half hour — a grievous loss.

‘Do Try Not to Be Too Dreadfully Lonely, Will You?’

The marriage continues to fall apart for the next few reels until the inevitable happens. In Vienna, Fran becomes infatuated with a sweet, rather imbecilic young Austrian baron named Kurt Von Obersdorf. (“He may be poor, but he holds one of the oldest titles in Europe!” Fran tells Sam, who remains unimpressed.) Unlike Arnold Iselin, Kurt does not cuckold Sam, whom he considers a friend, but he takes Fran out dancing nearly every evening. Late one night, Kurt heaves a tragic sigh before taking his leave of her: “Ah, why are you not free?” By this point, Fran is barely on speaking terms with her tiresome old husband, who’s snoring in the other room, and the prospect of a title dazzles her. Later that same night, when Sam wakes up and looks in on her, she tells him that she has decided to divorce him just as soon as she can. Here’s their farewell at the train station. True to form, Fran brings Kurt along: her selfishness and thoughtlessness are quite remarkable.

William Wyler said that directing Chatterton was “like pulling teeth.” According to him, “She only wanted to play her as a selfish bitch, and I kept trying to make her see that that Mrs Dodsworth had a very good case for behaving the way she did.” The battles between Wyler and Chatterton were volcanic. In the end, she got her way and the picture suffers for it. Mary Astor said that Chatterton hated the role, and observed, “The character is that of a woman who’s trying to hang onto her youth — which was exactly what Ruth herself was doing. It touched a nerve.”

‘I Don’t Want to Intrude, but I’m Sorry’


“Mrs Cortright! Of course! Well, isn’t this great!” Truer words were never spoken. The sudden reappearance of Edith Cortright always gives me a rush of delight. No matter how often I see this scene, when she begins to walk out of the American Express office, unaware that Sam Dodsworth is standing only a few feet away from her, the suspense is terrible. The pleasure they take in each other’s company — especially after all the misery Sam has just been through — is almost painfully satisfying. Look at how earnestly and sympathetically she hangs onto his every word, and how grateful he is to be talking to this beautiful, intelligent, charming woman! Oh, man, it’s so moving! And the beautifully discreet way she gives comfort: “I don’t want to intrude, but I’m sorry.” “You haven’t said anything you shouldn’t have said.” Everything about her caresses, comforts and seeks to heal his shattered confidence and restore his pride. And on top of it all, she’s FUN.

I’ll let this last clip speak for itself, but will add, only, that despite appearances to the contrary, fewer than ten minutes later, the story comes to what may be fairly described as an ecstatically happy ending.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, “Dodsworth” was a box office success when it first opened. Since then, it has been largely forgotten. For years, I’ve tried to account for its undeserved obscurity: why isn’t it more popular? But recently, it occurred to me that I was missing a more pertinent question: Why was it popular in 1936? Well, I have a theory about this.

The Scandalous Miss Astor and the Gloomy Dean of Broadway

In 1935, Mary Astor was granted a divorce from her husband, Franklyn Thorpe, but he was given custody of their daughter, Marilyn. In 1936, Astor was back in court, suing for custody of Marilyn. Thorpe countered by trying to introduce into evidence, as proof of Astor’s unfitness to raise a small child, her private diary, in which she had written detailed accounts of many of her sexual encounters. The Court ruled the diary inadmissible: it had been tampered with and pages had been torn out (allegedly, by a popular leading man whose disappointing sexual performance Astor described in detail). But some of its contents got leaked to the press, and soon the story became front page news. To complicate matters, copies of a second diary were distributed to reporters across the country. This second diary was eventually proven to be a forgery and a complete fake, but not until after it had kept the scandal on the front page for weeks. And the story broke at exactly the same time that “Dodsworth” began filming. For much of the shoot, Astor spent one part of her day on the set, and the other in court. She was afraid that Sam Goldwyn would invoke the morals clause and have her replaced, but Goldwyn took a more sentimental view: “A mother fighting for her child is good.”

Mary Astor was big news in 1936.

The most explosive passages in Astor’s diary had to do with her ecstatic couplings with a superhuman lover whom she identified as “G.” After weeks of speculation, the identity of this bedroom dynamo was discovered and made public: it was the celebrated playwright and director, George S. Kaufman. As fate would have it, Kaufman was actually in Los Angeles when the scandal broke; he was working with his partner Moss Hart on the first draft of a play that would eventually become their Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, “You Can’t Take It With You.” Kaufman was staying in a bungalow at the Garden of Allah, but once his affair with Astor became public knowledge, he was forced to go into hiding on Irving Thalberg’s yacht, and later in Moss Hart’s home in Beverly Hills. As the trial progressed, Judge Goodwin J. Knight issued a subpoena for Kaufman to appear in court. Kaufman was served, but he ignored it; when he didn’t show up in court, the furious judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. Kaufman holed up at Hart’s place. But when the authorities came looking for him there, he narrowly escaped detection by hiding behind the living room curtains while they searched the place.

After this close call, it became clear that Kaufman needed to get far away from Los Angeles as quickly as possible. Hart also risked jail time for obstructing justice and harboring a fugitive. But getting Kaufman out of town was tricky: the house was surrounded by reporters and private investigators. At length, Hart hired a laundry truck to come to the house. Kaufman hid inside a large laundry hamper (I like to think it was wicker, like the ones used by the Chinese white-slavers in “Thoroughly Modern Millie”), and Hart piled a load of clothes on top of him. Then the driver, who was well paid to keep his mouth shut, drove Kaufman out to the train station in San Bernardino. Unfortunately, he missed his train, and the next one didn’t arrive for another six hours. And it was raining cats and dogs. Kaufman didn’t want to risk waiting at the station, for fear of being recognized, so he ducked into a nearby movie theatre. He sat through the feature two and a half times; it starred Mary Astor. Later, when asked to comment on his flight from Los Angeles justice, Kaufman replied, “My leave-taking from California may have been undignified, but I felt it necessary. I have been in the public eye too long, and I think the public might be glad, and should be glad, to get me out of its eye.”

George S. Kaufman

George S. Kaufman (a/k/a the Gloomy Dean of Broadway)

Walter Huston in ‘Dodsworth’ — Bravo!

Dodsworth Original Poster

Dodsworth Original Poster

And then you think, as these people go . . . these beautiful people go . . . You know, it’s going to be a new world; we’re not gonna have that same sort of person anymore.  Like when Claude Rains died . . . you couldn’t bear it.  You can’t find anybody that has . . . they’re all individuals . . . I’m not gonna sit around and moan for the past, because, you know, it’s past.  And of course, you also say, “Who’s going next?”  . . . This is a terrible thing that happens, because you say, “Maybe it’s I”  . . . it’s so terribly depressing.  Like when Walter Huston died . . . you can’t cast — you can’t get that kind of a man anywhere in the world today again.
— Bette Davis on The Dick Cavett Show, 1971

Walter Huston’s star turn in William Wyler’s “Dodsworth” (Goldwyn, 1936) is one of the great, unsung performances in movie history.  He first played Sam Dodsworth on Broadway (Fay Bainter co-starred as his selfish, straying wife, Fran; in the picture, Ruth Chatterton plays the role). The character — a combination of impulsiveness, innocence and ruthlessness — is so perfectly suited to Huston’s temperament and talents that he hardly seems to be acting — he simply is.  Even when an occasional line reading bears the traces of having been spoken by him many, many times before (the Broadway run lasted more than 300 performances), he never seems less than completely alive in the part.  His voice is immediately recognizable; nobody before or since has sounded anything like Walter Huston — his voice is easy to imitate, but his soulfulness cannot be copied.  Few actors have ever possessed such easy authority, humor and gravitas in equal measure and all at the same time.  There is never any fussiness about his acting, but he’s not perfectly realistic, either.  You always know he’s acting, but it’s hard to believe he’s not exactly like the guy he’s playing.  Yes, Bette Davis was right:  you can’t get that kind of a man anywhere in the world today.  In his time, he was one of the best-liked and most admired actors in America, but he rarely appeared in a major role in a first rate motion picture.  He won the 1949 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” about which James Agee wrote, “I doubt if we shall ever see . . . better acting than Walter Huston’s beautiful performance.”  But as great as he was in that one, “Dodsworth” is, by a long, long chalk, his finest screen performance.  He won that year’s New York Critics’ Circle Award, but lost the Oscar to the odious Paul Muni in “The Story of Louis Pasteur.”  Huston was robbed.  Muni’s performance today is risible — not a believable or human moment in it; Huston’s Samuel Dodsworth was and is one of the high points of screen acting.  He’s among the four or five greatest actors in the history of motion pictures.  Stanislavski himself was one of his greatest admirers.

Walter Huston:  'Son, always give 'em a good show and travel first class.'

Walter Huston: ‘Son, always give ’em a good show and travel first class.’

Based on Sinclair Lewis’ novel, “Dodsworth” is the story of a wealthy automobile manufacturer who sells his company, takes an early retirement and takes his iron butterfly wife on a deluxe tour of the European capitals, where he hopes to rekindle their youthful passion; she has rather different plans of her own.  Things do not work out as either of them planned.  The portrait of a marriage heading for the rocks is one of the shrewdest, most penetrating examinations of marriage ever put on film.  Time has not diminished its effectiveness in the slightest.  Sidney Howard wrote the admirable script, which he based on his play.

The clip below shows the Dodsworths in Paris, entertaining a financier/gigalo, Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas); an Austrian baron (Gregory Gaye — the banker whom Rick won’t let into his casino in “Casablanca”); an haute couture dress designer (Odette Myrtil, who was a designer in real life); and Edith Cortright (Mary Astor), an American divorcee/expatriate whom the Dodsworths met aboard the Queen Mary during their Atlantic crossing.  Mary Astor‘s little exchange with Ruth Chatterton is my idea of perfection, both in the writing and the playing.

I  am still amazed that the scene got past the censors:  Mr and Mrs Dodsworth have separate beds, but they clearly undress in front of each other — and she’s not wearing a bra.  Later on, when the marriage is foundering, Fran takes a separate bedroom for herself and when her husband comes to her room late at night, she demurely covers herself up — but only after she sees him looking at her:  she no longer wants this man to see her naked.  How did Wyler ever get that past Joe Breen’s morality police?

“Dodsworth” is the most adult picture to come out of the 1930s or, indeed, the entire Production Code era.  By “adult,” I don’t mean that it is in any way dirty or prurient or what quaintly used to be called “shocking.”  No, it’s adult because the story is entirely concerned with middle-aged people, with infidelity, fear of growing old, alienation of affections, divorce and even the dreaded subject of menopause.  Here’s an example of what I mean.  In this clip, Fran has taken a place in Montreaux, and she is teetering on the brink of her first infidelity.  (The poetic last shot in this scene took an eternity to shoot before Wyler was satisfied.  It was worth the effort — a real stunner.)

Perhaps even more striking is this:  the story’s central theme is subversive — it flies in the face of the morality the Production Code was specifically put in place to promote.  “Dodsworth” argues that the only possible happy ending is one that ends in divorce — though until the very last shot, you don’t know whether their lives will end happily or miserably.  “Dodsworth” makes a persuasive argument in favor of smashing up a marriage that has ceased to work.  As the great exchange has it near the end of the picture:

Fran:  Do you think you’ll ever get me out of your blood?

Sam:  Maybe not, but love has got to stop someplace short of suicide!

Marriage is suicide . . . !  Is there another picture from the Production Code era that argues this point?  I can’t think of one that even comes close.  At the end of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” there is some question about whether or not Stella will ever forgive Stanley and return to him, but whatever she decides, they are going to be miserable.  “Dodsworth” is the only picture of its time to insist that an unhappy marriage is suicide and should be terminated.  How did they ever get approval from the Breen office?

Walter Huston, Mary Astor: Swell name, Samarkand!

Walter Huston and Mary Astor make plans for a better future: ‘Swell name, Samarkand!’

“Dodsworth” is one of the only first rate pictures Samuel Goldwyn ever made (he had a weakness for sentimental stories and kitsch) and is perhaps the only good looking picture to come from his studio.  The only Oscar win for “Dodsworth” went to Richard Day for his art direction (it was his second win of seven).

Dodsworth:  Walter Huston in opening shot.

Dodsworth: Walter Huston in the opening shot.  What a gorgeous deco set!

There are no bad performances in the picture, and many exceptionally fine ones.  Ruth Chatterton’s Fran has aged less well than all the others.  It’s hard to understand what Sam ever saw in this harpy.  But her performance probably made more sense and seemed less fantastically irritating in 1936 than it does today.  Her character is not a type we recognize anymore.  Selfish wives must surely still be thick on the ground, but they don’t look and sound like Ruth Chatterton, who at times seems a near-grotesque.  (It’s well to remember that Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel shortly after his acrimonious divorce from his first wife.)  The supporting cast is uniformly excellent:  Spring Byington, Harlan Briggs, Odette Myrtil, Mme Maria Ouspenskaya (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her single five minute scene), Paul Lukas and David Niven — they’re all memorably wonderful.  As Edith Cortright, Mary Astor gives her best performance.  Her rapport with Huston is one of the wonders of the silver screen — a perfect match.  

For my money, “Dodsworth” is the best picture of the 1930s, and one of the greatest pictures ever made.

Ruth Chatterton, Huston:  'Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?'

Ruth Chatterton, Huston: ‘Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?’