 |
|
|
Walter Huston, Dodsworth by Michael Atkinson William Wyler's effortlessly restrained 1936 film of the Sinclair Lewis novel Dodsworth is a portrait of a simple-hearted, can-do American guy at a pivotal moment of his life--just as he's retired early from the business that made him a millionaire and is on his first trip to Europe, his 20-year marriage fails and his life begins to crumble. Standing at the center of golden-age Hollywood's most mature melodrama is Walter Huston, arguably the only actor of his day who could have pulled off this role's balancing act between Roosevelt-era optimism and knotted marital anxiety. As Dodsworth, he carries the weight of an authentic man in his life-worn carriage and deep-set eyes, a man whose desires, feelings and actions fit like a square peg into the round hole of Hollywood formulas. From the outset of Dodsworth, we as an audience weaned on Tinseltown image-making are immediately disoriented--is this the film's protagonist? This average, unpretty, clay-faced actor with the heavy brow and beginner's-slope nose? Still over a decade away from his craggy, Oscar-winning character riff in his son John's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston hardly has a movie star's face. That Wyler didn't cast a more attractive or distinctive-looking actor like William Powell or Raymond Massey is half the point: Samuel Dodsworth is the archetypal man of the people, an unglamorous, hard-working industrialist who has created an automobile empire from naked sweat and Yankee ingenuity. (The other half of the point is that Huston had played Dodsworth on Broadway.) PAGE 1 | 2 |
 |
|
|
The Dodsworths' autumn years are to be ushered in by a cruise to Europe, and that's when the cracks in the mortar begin to appear. As played by Ruth Chatterton, Fran Dodsworth is a youth-obsessed, nouveau riche flibbertigibbet with a menopausal horror of grandparenthood. As she gradually launches herself into snobbish self-absorption and expatriate decadence, Huston is preoccupied by the giddy good times of touring. Chatterton's insistence on dressing to impress for dinner attracts sleazeball smoothie David Niven like a fly to fudge; while she's tallying with Mr. Amorality, Huston harmlessly bonds with expatriate homegirl Mary Astor and spends time poring over the captain's maps. Tolerant of his wife, naively trusting of a life that has so far been dependable and unswerving, Huston's self-made rube abroad is a patient study in vulnerability--once they arrive in Paris and Chatterton becomes smitten by Eurostud Paul Lukas, we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does. When Huston discovers he's been betrayed, his born-again boyishness turns like old milk, graduating to confusion and glowering frustration. Huston limns the emotional education of the introverted American male with a diamond-cutter's precision. In all that happens to Dodsworth, Huston never projects his character's tumultuous inner life--he's a simple man in tight control of himself--and yet we read him like a book. Shuttling back and forth between continents at the whim of his unfaithful wife, Dodsworth is less a cuckold than a man who believes the best of the world; only after Chatterton declares her intention to marry yet another slick lover does he give up the ghost and satisfy his retirement-age wanderlust alone, sitting by himself at cafes throughout the Old World. That he should meet up again with Astor and bloom anew is just reward to the faithful. Like nearly every other aspect of the film, Huston was Oscar-nominated for Dodsworth, and indeed there isn't a single other Hollywood performance, or role, to touch its maturity and truth. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |