Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dodsworth

September 23, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

The Beautiful American

Why isn’t Dodsworth better known, even among film buffs? It premiered in 1936 — a great year for movies — and it was nominated for the best picture Academy Award. Maybe if it had won, as it deserved to, more people would be aware of it. The actual winner, an endless, tedious “musical” biography called The Great Ziegfeld, would almost certainly be forgotten today without the dubious distinction of a best picture Oscar. Dodsworth’s other unrewarded nominations were for actor, screenplay, direction, supporting actress, and sound recording, and it should have won the first three as well. The only Oscar it did receive was for Richard Day’s outstanding art direction, which conjures up a trip across Europe on a series of Los Angeles sound stages, subtly echoing and intensifying the emotional states of the characters in any given scene.

The story is about Sam Dodsworth, an auto tycoon who has just sold the company that bears his name. We first see him as he stands alone in his office looking out over his factory, with a newspaper announcing the sale…and then as he walks through a crowd of employees who offer their thanks and goodbyes. Due to the immense skill of the director William Wyler, we learn a great deal about Sam in these brief, wordless moments. In the first shot, his slightly slumped and motionless posture expresses his regret, and the fact that he has his back to us makes him seem remote and slightly larger than life. His back is still to us in the next scene, but the camera is tracking close behind, so we experience his point of view as the huge group of blue collar auto workers parts slowly and respectfully. We understand that Sam is a good and beloved man, a leader, who is on the cusp of a major life change and full of mixed feelings about it. We like him and identify with him before we’ve even met him.

He’s driven home, taking a last look at the factory receding behind him. At his big, luxurious but cavernously impersonal house, he’s greeted by Fran, his wife. Fran, at least, has no regrets about Sam’s retirement. She tells him that they’re free to start life over from the beginning and she’s eager to go to Europe and leave behind “this half-baked Middle West town.” She’s spent the past 20 years raising their daughter and being a dutiful wife, belonging to dull women’s clubs and keeping up appearances. It’s supposed to be a pep talk for Sam’s sake, but there’s an edge of self pity and resentment in her voice; she brightens up when he calls her on it. She wants to start enjoying life, that’s all, while she still can. After all, she says, “no one takes me for over 32 — 30 even.” And in Europe, a woman such as her is just getting to the age when a man starts taking a serious interest in her. Sam reacts to this ludicrous assertion with a blend of incredulity, awareness and affection, but he doesn’t challenge it. He adores Fran and he’s ready to indulge her and learn more about Europe while he’s at it.

And so the stage is set. You can feel what’s about to happen. The Dodsworths are a happy, devoted couple, but for 20 years that happiness has depended on their roles — he’s had his company and his career, she’s had their daughter and social position. Now, in middle age, the differences are starting to show. He’s open-minded, curious, action oriented, plain spoken and direct, and the giver in their relationship. She’s judgmental, superficial, deeply unhappy with herself and taking it out on others. The movie shows the fissures in their relationship widening sharply and alarmingly, with his patience and affection tested by her deluded and increasingly reckless behavior. She starts out by flirting with gigolos and ends up in full-blown affairs with wildly inappropriate men, subtly and then openly blaming Sam for it all because he’s middle-aged and unsophisticated.

On the surface, Dodsworth is a calm, decorous drama about the troubles of two rich white people, but just below the surface, it’s an emotional horror story. Fran isn’t the monster, exactly. It’s her selfishness that’s the beast — and it does as much damage to her as to Sam. “I’m ashamed deep down inside me,” she tells him after her first shipboard flirtation leads her into deeper waters faster than she’d expected. “I don’t trust myself. I’m afraid of myself.” Ruth Chatterton, who plays Fran, gives these lines a harrowing urgency and truth, as she lets us see the baffled, suffering person beneath the foolish, phony-baloney surface. A serious, somewhat upper-crust and “dignified” actress, she achieved greatness just once, with this performance. Not that it helped. Chatterton was 43, a shade too plump, and fiercely intelligent. Three strikes and you’re out—this was her last appearance in an American film. She didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar, probably because her dead-on portrait of vanity and self-deception made a lot of people in Hollywood very uncomfortable.

Walter Huston, as Sam, did get nominated, and won the New York Film Critics’ award for best actor. He’d played the role on stage and was legendary in it, but there’s no trace of staginess in his film performance. It’s not all that easy to play a virtuous character, and Sam isn’t just virtuous but a wealthy captain of industry without a trace of greed, ruthlessness or ego. Unlikely, to say the least. Huston disarms us and draws us in by showing the eager young boy who still lives inside the 52-year old man. Sam’s enthusiasms are sudden and unguarded, and so is his vulnerability. He’s not a fool — he has a shrewd understanding of other people, and nothing much gets past him. There have been lots of movies about the Ugly American, but Dodsworth is the Beautiful American encountering corrupt, cynical, decadent old Europe. He’s the idealized American of a vanished age, the sort of guy Ronald Reagan was playing when he acted the part of the president: tolerant, wryly humorous, deceptively tough and patient with the failings of others…to a point. Except that Sam actually begins to crack under the unrelenting pressure of his wife’s emotional abuse, and as played beautifully and sensitively by Huston, he goes through some very convincing stages of grief.

The third great actor in Dodsworth is Mary Astor, playing Edith Cortright, whom the Dodsworths meet on the boat to Europe. Divorced and rootless, she lives in Italy because, she says frankly, it’s cheap. Like Fran, she has reasons to be bitter…but unlike her, she has accepted life’s inevitable disappointments and found a way to live with them. She’s open and direct like Sam, and becomes a friend to him as Fran begins to pull away. By the end of the film, the movie is all Astor’s, and you just want to be rid of Chatterton. In her memoirs, she noted that Chatterton was unhappy with her role, and fought with Wyler, because like Fran, she was faced with losing her youth. Interestingly, both actresses turned to writing novels when their acting careers dried up. In contrast to Chatterton, of course, Astor got the chance to prove her immense talent in dozens of movies over four decades, usually as a very complicated woman: Red Dust, The Palm Beach Story, The Great Lie, The Maltese Falcon, Desert Fury, Act of Violence, A Kiss Before Dying, and Return to Peyton Place (no, really) among them. Here, like Huston, she pulls off the difficult task of making decency interesting. She has a wonderful moment when she accidentally catches Fran murmuring sweet nothings with Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas), a Eurotrash “financier” and ladies’ man. Edith, who really does have the old-world sophistication Fran tries to fake, sizes up the situation immediately. “My dear,” she says softly and gravely, looking Fran in the eyes, “don’t.” Astor gives this single word of girl-talk warning all the impact of a sudden smack in the face.

In real life, Astor was undergoing a personal ordeal during the filming of Dodsworth: her divorce and custody battle were getting ugly and a purported diary full of lurid sexual details was leaked to the press. Years later, she said that playing Edith Cortright saved her — that she drew on Edith’s serenity and groundedness throughout the court case and its screaming headlines (Chatterton sat with her in court for support). Among other things, Astor underwent the humiliating experience of being called to producer Samuel Goldwyn’s office and being grilled about it by all the major studio heads, for whom she was a popular free-lancer. To his credit, Goldwyn kept her on the picture. In fact, the whole movie — a courageous exploration of serious themes without big stars or any other box-office concession — is to his credit. It wasn’t a financial success, but it was an artistic one; in a career full of tripe and misfires, this film and The Best Years of Our Lives are Goldwyn’s monuments.

Dodsworth could have been made today, except for the sad fact that movies this beautifully written, directed and acted are even rarer now than they were then.

My Man Godfrey

September 6, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

Games With Human Beings as Objects

The opening of My Man Godfrey constitutes a little movie in itself — a perfectly balanced mixture of satire, wit, anger, and glamour that may be the greatest single scene in 1930s cinema. It starts with the credits, which are integral to its meaning. We see the Manhattan skyline at night, and to a fanfare the names of the cast and crew light up in neon signs that flash on and off, reflected in the East River below. The camera pans across buildings that slowly become less grand, more industrial, more forgotten and squalid, and finally it comes to rest at the city dump underneath the end of the Queensboro Bridge. The brash music subsides into the first few plaintive notes of the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” The camera moves in and we see a lonely shanty, a hobo tending a fire, a dog sniffing through the trash. A dump truck backs up and adds more garbage to the pile, a cascade of cans and rubbish that glitter like diamonds in the moonlight. And then we see him. The hobo tending the fire, we discover, is William Powell.

Even today, it’s a bit of a shock to see this actor playing a bum. Powell, the epitome of class, the man about town who wore clothes beautifully, smoked and drank cocktails with peerless elegance, and spoke with impeccable clipped diction. With one twitch of his pencil-line moustache, William Powell could register infinite degrees of skepticism and wry sophistication. And here he is, bearded and shabby, speaking in a low, hushed, defeated tone of voice. He trades a few bitter observations with another bum as a couple of snazzy cars pull up at the edge of the dump. Three well-dressed people rush out: two women and a man. The women are sisters, played by raven-haired Gail Patrick and blonde Carole Lombard. The darker one, Patrick, gets to Powell first. How’d you like to make five dollars? she asks. Powell doesn’t quite get it. Brusquely, she offers the money again and tells him all he has to do for it is go with her to the Waldorf Ritz hotel where she’ll show him off to some people. She’s on a scavenger hunt and her next item is a Forgotten Man — the evocative, accusatory Depression-era term for a homeless person. Do you want the money or don’t you? she snaps at him. That’s enough. He advances on her with barely controlled aggression, his voice quiet but vibrating with resentment. She falls back and lands on her ass, then runs off in fear with her escort. Powell, still furious, strides in the other direction and runs smack into the blonde.

Her name is Irene, she tells him, and that was her sister Cornelia and she’s always wanted to do what he just did — push Cornelia into a pile of ashes. He offers to push her in too, and now she’s the one to decline the offer, but not angrily. She’s a ditz, rattling off disconnected observations and thoughts a mile a minute. The moonlight illuminating her fluffy head of hair and shimmering satin gown, she’s like an angel come to rest on the dump. Powell’s irritation turns to curiosity. Would you mind telling me just what a scavenger hunt is? he asks. She takes a deep breath. “Well, a scavenger hunt is exactly like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you try to find something you want and in a scavenger hunt you try to find something you don’t want.” Like a Forgotten Man, he says. “That’s right, and the one who wins gets a prize, only there really isn’t any prize, it’s just the honor of winning, because all the money goes to charity, that is if there’s any money left over, but then there never is.”

With this and her other long screwball speeches in this movie, Lombard plays a subtle trick, her voice trailing off at the end as her character becomes vaguely aware that something is wrong. It isn’t that she’s dumb. She’s infantile. She has grown up in a bubble, insulated from the world by her wealth. Ease and luxury have stunted and stupefied her. Confronted with Powell’s steady gaze, her voice begins to wobble and her scattered attention focuses on him, like a baby seeing its parent and calming down. So they sit and talk, the rich girl and the bum becoming interested in each other. It even makes her philosophical. “You know,” she says, “I’ve decided I don’t want to play any more games with human beings as objects. It’s kind of sordid when you think of it, I mean when you think it over.”

This little quip goes by in a flash, but it’s amazing when you think of it. I mean when you think it over. Like the whole scene, it expresses a bristling sense of moral outrage. The Forgotten Men come out of the shadows after Powell threatens to punch Cornelia’s top-hatted escort, asking if he needs any help. They’re a little society, watching out for each other, keeping their dignity despite being literally at the bottom of the heap. In an era and an industry in which conservative values dominated (don’t they always?), here is a full-throated cry of humanism and populism. The movie makes us vaguely, uncomfortably aware that we’re tourists, just like the three rich people. We’re drawn to Powell by his toughness, his intelligence, and his irony, but we’re also a little appalled. He looks like shit. He lives on a garbage heap. How did he get here? And how can he — and we — get out?

The rest of the movie is the answer to those questions, and it’s not an entirely satisfying answer. Lombard takes Powell back to the scavenger hunt, wins the prize, and hires him to be her family’s butler in their Park Avenue mansion. It’s a screwball comedy out of P.G. Wodehouse: the level-headed servant civilizes the house full of wacky rich people, and the boy and girl fall in love. Although the rich are satirized and vilified, and the value of good honest work is celebrated, the movie can’t sustain the brilliance of its beginning. It’s well acted by a team of expert farceurs including Eugene Pallette, Alice Brady, and Mischa Auer. It looks great, with its sleek art deco sets and sparkling cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. And it sounds great, with its flow of wisecracks by Marx Brothers writer Morrie Ryskind, but in the attempt to create a box-office romance, something goes awry with the plot. We learn that Godfrey, Powell’s character, is actually from a wealthy family himself, but a broken love affair left him devastated and he fell into poverty and homelessness because he didn’t care what happened.

This is a major letdown — we’re supposed to be soothed by this reassurance that Powell is “respectable,” but in fact we were much more on his side when he was a bitter bum of ambiguous origins. The romance between Godfrey and Irene works only because Powell and Lombard, real life ex-spouses and good friends, have genuine chemistry. Unlike most comedies of its era, in this movie the man is much smarter than the woman, and just like in real life, that’s not very romantic or particularly funny. On Park Avenue, the movie is pleasant and enjoyably proficient, but back on the city dump it was, briefly, extraordinary.