Dodsworth (1936)
On one of the best films about the end of a marriage, and the celebrity scandal that dogged its making
The 1936 film Dodsworth, adapted from a Sinclair Lewis novel and directed by William Wyler, is one of the greatest American films about the ending of a marriage. David Mamet cites it as a “perfect” film, and film critic David Thomson says it offers “the very unusual feeling of a picture about grown-ups.” Indeed, most everyone who sees the film remarks on its “adult” quality.
This has to do in part with the two lead characters. When the film opens, Sam and Fran Dodsworth have been married for over two decades. They have adult children, and a grandchild is born mid-film. Samuel Goldwyn was at first reluctant to buy the rights to the novel. “Who the hell cares about a middle-age love story?” he said.
The film witnesses a husband and wife belatedly thawing out of the familiar, frozen selves they have long inhabited and now finding they can move their limbs. Sam has built a mighty American automobile company, which he has just sold at the film’s start, walking off the premises through a solemn crowd of his former employees. At his wife’s insistence, he has agreed to take his first vacation in twenty years, and an open-ended one, to Europe.
Sam sets off, bewildered at his new purposelessness but open-minded, ready to encounter Europe with honest curiosity. Fran, by contrast, is anxious to pick up the thread of her own youth, put down so long ago in order to be the dutiful wife of a midwestern automobile magnate. “Oh, Sammy, darling, I’m begging for life,” she tells her husband before they embark on their journey. “No, I’m not,” she corrects herself, “I’m demanding it.”
One of the ironies explored by both novel and film is that the seemingly Europhile Fran is actually more provincial than her husband. Fran sees herself in the role of long-suffering sophisticate, martyred to her husband’s career in an American backwater though enjoying his material success.
Now that everything is open to her, we see how much of a superficial tourist she is, a classically insecure American status-seeker, obsessed with knowing the “right people,” especially ones with aristocratic titles. Fran projects onto Europe anxieties about her own youth and desirability that, as she enters her 40s, she feels are slipping away. She chases them through a series of affairs with foreign men she finds more interesting than her stolid husband.
The sense of the film as adult is also due to Walter Huston’s restrained performance as Sam, a character who faces his wife’s restlessness and infidelity with a surprising amount of compassion. Still in love with her, mindful of his obligations, and aware how unhappy the path she is on will make her, Sam attempts to give Fran the freedom she seeks while protecting her from her own worst instincts. Huston conveys a deliberate decency that is stony, not stupid.
Ruth Chatterton brings to the character of Fran the slightly hysterical note of the misbehaving child. Wyler was determined that Fran not be a mere villain, but understandable as a woman seeking an impossible happiness even to the point of self-sabotage. The character may be spoiled and self-deluding, but Wyler lets us witness both spouses coming to terms with their incompatibility despite their best intentions.
We feel for Sam in the extraordinary scene at the train station when Fran sends him away so that she can marry an attractive young Viennese nobleman, just as we feel for Fran when she breaks on the immovable black rock of actress Maria Ouspenskaya, playing the nobleman’s mother who forbids the marriage and reminds Fran of the ineluctable realities of age and death.
When the novel Dodsworth appeared in 1929, Lewis had already published several of the most highly regarded novels of his time, and in 1930 he would become the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Dodsworth became a number one bestseller, and was adapted by Sidney Howard for a successful stage production (with Huston in his later film role) in 1934. Howard also wrote the film screenplay.
The theme of the novel—American self-understanding in comparison with the old world of Europe—was already a well-trod subject in American letters. Lewis’s novel updates the theme for the post-war world of the 1920s. With keen observation and wry humor, Lewis fashions a back-and-forth odyssey in which Sam, the most supremely American of Americans, goes to Europe and struggles with the impact of the experience on his identity, returns to the United States and struggles with the impact of seeing America and himself anew, and then returns to Europe for a grand third act in which the pieces of his national and personal self are further rearranged.
Sam begins the novel as the provincial American who cannot adapt to European ways. Yet the novel deconstructs the very notion of the “provincial” in an age when America is no longer a province. In the dawning American century Europe may be a province of America. From the start of the novel Lewis’s Sam understands going abroad not in terms of the traditional American tour of London and Paris, but rather in truly global terms. (He really wants to go to Asia and Africa.) This is a novel acutely aware that minds can be as colonized, or liberated, as territories.
Fran, like many a pretentious American, is captured by the idea of Europeanness as both everything America is not and superior to everything America is. “I think I am coming to really understand the thickness of European life,” she tells her husband in the novel, mouthing clichés, threadbare hand-me-downs from Henry James. “Our American life is so thin, so without tradition.” Her very name (Frances) indicates her infatuation with the continent, just as Sam’s name (and his college nickname, Sambo) index his Americanness. By the end, Sam’s odyssey marks out—perhaps embodies—America’s in the twentieth century, a launch from the local, not toward the European but to the global, with all the naivety and insecurity, stumbles and self-discovery, such a journeying entails.
This is a lot of material to pack into a 100 minute film, but Sidney Howard’s screenplay, based on his earlier stage adaptation, condenses the novel into marvelously effective dramatic form. The stage play necessarily excises the lengthy novelistic meditations on Americanness, but keeps the ironies of theme alive in part through shipboard scenes in which extras—American tourists, Jewish travellers, and various Europeans—wander across stage speaking their mantras as counterpoint to the speech of the principals. For instance, as Fran and Sam have their final break aboard the ship soon to return to America, Howard’s stage play overlays the following dialogue:
1st JEWISH GENTLEMAN. Boy, when I see that New York skyline!
2nd JEWISH GENTLEMAN. Will I be glad to see the U.S. again!
In the novel, Jews are on Lewis’s mind, part of his fresh consideration of Americanness in the twentieth century. For some characters in the novel they represent an unsavory cosmopolitanism, but overall they are “other” but not alien, a parallel tribe to the American one and similarly trying to figure out their identity and place in the modern world. When Fran tries to announce her sophistication on the steamer to Europe by bad-mouthing her fellow American tourists to the Englishman flirting with her, he berates her:
I know only two classes of people who hate their own race—or tribe or nation or whatever you care to call it—who travel principally to get away from their own people, who never speak of them except with loathing, who are pleased not to be taken as belonging to them. That is, the Americans and the Jews!
Fran’s first affair while abroad is with “a rich American Jew named Arnold Israel” whom she describes to her husband as “about forty and very good-looking in a black-haired, black-eyed, beefy sort of way but a little too gaudily Oriental for my simple taste.” As Sam and Fran are at this point in the novel traveling separately, Fran’s affair with Arnold is conveyed through her letters and Sam’s worries, and we are never introduced directly to the character.
But Lewis’s indirect presentation of the Jewish character and, more significantly, Sam’s response to his wife’s infidelity are not tainted by anything we might call antisemitism. Arnold Israel is instructive for the reader in filling in the sociology of Fran’s social climbing, and instructive for Sam in coming to the realization that Fran is “not in the least a mature and responsible woman […] but simply a clever child, with a child’s confused self-dramatizations.”
Howard’s screenplay turns Arnold from an epistolary reference into a speaking role, and not an unsympathetic one. In the film, the character’s Jewishness is never directly mentioned; the character’s surname is changed from Israel to Iselin. Yet the part is played by the Jewish actor Paul Lukas, and in one scene Sam tells Fran: “this Arnold Iselin may be all he says he is . . . but he certainly is no Barney Baruch.” The reference is to the world famous Jewish American financier and political advisor, Bernard Baruch.
To return to our first theme, the film’s sense of maturity is anchored finally in the splendid performance of Mary Astor. She plays Edith Cortright, a widowed American living abroad in Italy, who becomes haven and new love for Sam by the end of the film. One of Howard’s effective changes is to introduce the character early in the film rather than at the end of the story as the novel has it.
Another displaced American, Cortright both shares and nourishes Sam’s ability to see America and Europe, himself and others, honestly. The clarinet-voiced Astor conveys depth of experience, an apprehension of people and things based on what they really are rather than illusory notions of what they ought to be. One senses she has suffered. She has been through the mill and so can meet Sam as he is, and wait for him with compassion as he proceeds through his own marital mill.
And Mary Astor knew something about going through the mill. While she was filming Dodsworth she was also appearing daily in court in a custody battle at the center of the biggest celebrity scandal of its time.[1]
Astor, a wounded soul who had long sought in sex the fleeting feeling of connection painfully absent in her dysfunctional upbringing, kept a diary that contained details of her extra-marital trysts. Her second husband, Franklyn Thorpe, originally Astor’s physician and who engaged in his own extensive adulteries, stole the diary in an attempt to control Astor.
Astor’s torrid affair with the brilliant playwright George Kaufman, who like Astor had an open marriage albeit a far more peaceful one, seems to have particularly exercised Thorpe. Thorpe threatened to expose the diaries and destroy the reputations of Astor, Kaufman, and others, in order to impose on Astor a divorce settlement that Thorpe’s own lawyer thought absurdly unfair, and which would give him full custody of their young daughter Marylyn.
The vicious tactic worked initially. Astor feared becoming unemployable, as well as the damage that would be done to Kaufman and others named in the diary, and she capitulated. But as Thorpe continued to attempt to control Astor during the times he allowed her to see their daughter, she decided to challenge him for custody, charging that he had effectively blackmailed her.
As the case became public, Thorpe’s lawyers leaked tidbits from the diaries to an ecstatic press, while Astor’s lawyers surfaced Thorpe’s own adventures, including a heretofore undisclosed common-law wife and various ongoing entanglements, and sometimes drunken and violent episodes with aspiring Hollywood starlets. Kaufman went into hiding as court officers chased him with subpoenas and threatened to arrest him for contempt of court.
This was all going on during the making of Dodsworth. Astor traveled back and forth between set and courtroom. At one point hearings were delayed a week at the request of Samuel Goldwyn, so that Astor could complete part of the shooting. Studio executives were uneasy about Astor’s case, fearing the damage it might do to the industry, and they urged her to drop the case and try to settle out of court. But she was determined to get custody of her daughter, and so moguls such as Goldwyn and Thalberg quietly supported her.
As Joseph Egan notes in his comprehensive account of the case, Astor was not only a Hollywood property. She was also something of a family relation. Astor’s first husband, who died in a plane crash, was the film producer and director Kenneth Hawks, brother of director Howard Hawks and producer William Hawks, the latter the husband of Norma Shearer’s sister. Whether this means that the executives genuinely wanted to support Astor, or feared personal secrets coming out from the diaries, is unclear, but the fact is that no move was made to dismiss or distance Astor.
One Hollywood figure supported Astor not only behind the scenes, but in front of the cameras too. This was Ruth Chatterton, the actress playing Fran. Chatterton had not been a close friend of Astor, but she became one when she saw Astor one day heading from the set to the court and asked to accompany her. She ardently took up Astor’s case, attending court most every day that Astor was there, and sending her own mother in her stead when she could not.
While in Dodsworth Astor and Chatterton played rivals, in real life Chatterton threw her support entirely behind her co-star. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom one day, Chatterton said: “It is no little thing for Mary to put aside her pride and modesty to fight for the thing she loves best—her child. I admire Mary very much for her courage. I am with her all the way.”
The outcome of the case was a fairer custody arrangement imposed by the court, which also impounded and sealed the diary until 1952 when it was destroyed at Astor’s request. The court case made Astor more sympathetic to the public. She went on to acclaimed performances in such films as The Maltese Falcon, and soon transitioned into a series of motherly roles in MGM pictures. Tempers cooled; ex-husband Thorpe even remained Astor’s doctor.
Dodsworth turned out to be a critical success, undamaged by the scandal that hung over its making. Astor received a long standing ovation at the premiere. Reviews were celebratory, and the film received seven Oscar nominations. (The best supporting actress nomination was not Astor’s but Ouspenskaya’s for her single scene.)
Goldwyn’s pleasure was diluted by what he saw as a poor box office. “I lost my goddamn shirt,” he complained. “It was a great picture, but nobody wanted to see it. In droves.” Yet it remains, as Daniel Eagan says, “one of the most intelligent, if rueful, depictions of marriage ever committed to film.”
[1] I rely on the account of the case in Joseph Egan’s 2016 The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s.