..have you ever noticed how transparent people are when you really look at them?

What a beautiful ending!

Walter Huston confused half the time, loves his wife, but somewhere stopped understanding her entirely. Sinclair Lewis survives the transition. Even when the film softens, the story still has his fascination with disillusionment, particularly the collapse of american dream. Sam Dodsworth realizes the life he spent decades building may not contain the fulfillment he imagined. Lewis was so good at exposing the anxieties in American prosperity ("Babbitt" and "Main Street"). His characters achieve the thing society tells them, only to slowly realize they're empty. Sam is one of his more compassionate protagonists, though. Someone like George Babbitt is satirical first and sympathetic…

“He’s gone ashoraaa!!”

Wealthy Americans in Europe working out their shit. An aging wife abreacting to her imagined lost early twenties. Her older husband industrialist, small-town relatable and clever, suffers her with measured understanding. A movie about provincial American Male exceptionalism in general and an American-values delivery machine in whole (except how it settles on marriage as something that can be unsustainable, which is kind of refreshing).

Goes without saying that all fans of classic American movies must contend with more direct parochial and patriarchal attitudes, material obsessions, and capitalist platforming, and this is particularly a product of its time, being between the two World Wars, when the US was even more isolationist and self-centered.

But also, the dialog is…

Do you ever finish a film knowing you aren’t going to rate it 5 stars but also knowing it was basically a perfect movie? That’s Dodsworth for me.

Sidney Howard’s script in particular is so smooth. I guess it makes sense he had such a good handle on the writing for this tale of un-romance for a middle-aged couple; he wrote the stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel as well. On the whole, this is a drama, but the writing is really biting and funny right at the moments it needs to be. 

The production flows like they’ve been doing it in front of an audience everyday for months. Some of the cast does reprise the roles they had on…

Simply one of the best films ever made - no hyperbole here. If you haven't seen it, you're missing out.

It's a powerful look at the fear of growing old and desperately grasping for youth.
Walter Houston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor are all outstanding. (And shoutout to baby John Payne).

Some moments I love:
The first shot as Samuel Dodsworth (Houston) looks out his window on the day he retires. How those first shots are all from behind and we don't see Dodsworth's face until he's in the car riding home.

How the camera angles emphasize the faux pas of Mr. and Mrs. Dodsworth dressed in evening clothes on their first night out on a cruise.

The exuberance on Dodsworth's…

79/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Emblematic moment here has Edith see Fran gearing up for a dalliance and attempt to intervene with a single uncontextualized word: "Don't." Her implicit respect—no need to spell things out; this woman's sharp enough to take my meaning—reflects that of the film itself toward every viewer. here's no pretense that marital dissatisfaction represents some unprecedented breach of decorum, and heavy-flirtations-that-might-well-become-torrid-affairs get handled with an unfussy frankness that still seems quite worldly almost 90 years later. Dodsworth even somehow manages to visually acknowledge, early in the Hays Code era, that a long-married woman wouldn't hesitate before casually stripping to the waist in front of her husband; Fran's back is to the camera, of course (and…

The Wyler Marathon is off to a good start.

Wyler's reputation is as an expert director of actors, and that's exactly what you get here, with the director bringing a striking emotional realism to this tale of a marriage between two people who are just getting to know each other, despite having been married for a couple of decades.

Ruth Chatterton's Fran is hard to sympathize with, but not so difficult to understand. And while Wyler can't rescue her from a storyline that has her as the antagonist to Walter Huston's saintly Dodsworth (and to all Good American Family Values), he also makes us feel her legitimate terror at arriving at middle age without having lived at all.

The scenes…