William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  Sam's car pulls up to a mansion that is every bit as impressive as Julie Marsden's estate in New Orleans. Like Julie, Sam is greeted by his butler, but he does not command his own space as Julie does. Instead, Wyler cuts to Fran, who is clearly in charge on the domestic front, and when she greets her husband, he dejectedly announces that the company has been sold and twenty years of his life are now over. Fran walks Sam into the study, encouraging him not to be “too mournful.” They talk about their future and their upcoming trip to Europe, and then Fran recedes to the background of the frame as she prepares a drink for him. When Sam declares, “I'm just as keen on this trip as you are, Fran. I'm rarin’ to go! I've always wanted to see London and Paris,” Wyler cuts to Sam at a modified low angle, accentuating his self-assurance and purpose.

  As Fran announces her high expectations for their journey—“[I want more] than a trip out of this…I want a new life!”—Wyler makes her prominent in the frame, while Sam's back is to the camera. It is here that the film script makes an important change in dialogue from the play, adding Fran's argument that they have done their job, brought up their child and married her off, and been dedicated citizens. Fran feels that they have earned a new start. In Howard's play, Fran talks not about parenting but of her desire to sell the house and be free of Zenith altogether. By legitimizing her place in the frame and making her rationale more sympathetic, Wyler is trying to humanize Fran, which Howard neglects to do in his play. Unfortunately, Chatterton's cold performance works against Wyler's attempt, and the sympathetic perspective is not sustained throughout the film.

  The film eliminates the Dodsworths’ time in London, dramatizing Fran's flirtation with Lockert on board the Queen Mary instead. Here, Wyler introduces a visual narrative strategy that he employs throughout the remainder of the film. Sam is shown mostly alone—on deck admiring the view, looking at nautical maps with the ship's officers, or sighting Bishop's Light, which signals their imminent arrival in London. Fran, in contrast, is pictured enjoying the ship's social life—dancing in the ballroom and imagining a sophisticated romance. The film also introduces Edith Cortwright on the ship, where Sam meets her while taking one of his solitary evening walks on deck. As they exchange pleasantries, she surmises that what Sam is looking for in Europe is “the education of an American.”

  On the Queen Mary, this “education” consists largely of observing Fran in the throes of her first flirtation. After Sam's introduction to Edith, Wyler dissolves to a scene of Fran and Lockert in the Dodsworths’ stateroom. Fran is seen combing her hair in the mirror, her face framed within a frame. She is denigrating Sam's bourgeois attitude, but Wyler's framing device comments on her own naïveté, which will soon be exposed. After fixing her hair, Fran moves toward Lockert, who is preparing drinks at the left. Most of the frame is devoted to a view of the ocean through the window, which serves as a reminder of Sam's space and also of Fran's dangerous indulgence in freedom without knowledge. They both cross to the window, where Fran tells Lockert that Sam “has all the old-fashioned virtues except jealousy.” The camera then cuts from the stateroom to the bar, where Sam continues his talk with Edith. Fran's private flirtation is thus contrasted with Sam's more public and proper social encounter. Sam tells Edith that traveling is not bad, but he might not like it for an extended period. He adds, “For a steady thing, give me America. For Americans, that is.” Edith then tells him that “drifting is not so pleasant as it looks”—surely an indirect comment on Fran's ambitions.

  The scene then shifts back to the Dodsworths’ stateroom, where Lockert kisses Fran and she reacts with annoyance that the flirtation has gone too far. Again, Wyler shifts this confrontation to the left of the frame, with the ocean view in the center. He then dramatizes their breakup in a series of shot–reverse shots, whereas earlier they were framed together. Lockert insults Fran by pointing out that she is unsuited to the role she is trying to play: “You think you're a woman of the world. You're nothing of the sort. And I'm awfully afraid you never will be.” As he finishes, Sam enters, forming one of Wyler's many triangular framings.

  After Lockert departs, leaving the Dodsworths alone, Fran starts weeping and lies facedown on her bed. Sam, dominating the frame, then echoes Lockert's put-down, telling Fran that they are out of their depth and that Fran's behavior “makes us look like the hicks we are”—which only infuriates her further. Her sudden announcement that she wants to skip London and go directly to Paris precipitates the couple's first fight, during which Wyler again shifts to shot–reverse shot framing. As Fran flirts with Sam in an attempt to get her way, Wyler concludes the scene with another mirrored framing, imprisoning Fran in the foreground with Sam in profile behind her. The tight composition, featuring figures divided in space and turned in different directions, strongly hints that their marriage is doomed.

  This suggestion is reinforced in the Paris section, where Fran, undaunted by her previous experience, takes up with Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas), a sophisticated banker. They meet at a club, and Wyler again cuts between Sam, sitting alone at an outdoor café, and his wife, hobnobbing with her new beau.

  After attending a party, the Dodsworths return to their hotel suite, where they argue again over their travel plans. This scene demonstrates Wyler's realistic visual approach at its most assured; he maintains the integrity of space by integrating movement and image while carefully orchestrating the balance between moving and fixed shots. His use of space masks the scene's stage origins by emphasizing long shots and shots in depth with minimal cutting. The scene begins in the sitting room, where Sam is unbuttoning Fran's gown. He suggests that they have had enough of Paris and should start thinking about going home. Meanwhile, he walks toward the bedroom, leaving Fran visible in background; the open bedroom door cuts the frame in the middle, seeming to enclose each of them in a separate space. As Sam continues to talk about the other cities he wants to see before returning home, he sits on the bed, still foregrounded in the frame, and begins to undress. Fran follows him, and they both undress and get into their pajamas—a display of intimacy that was highly unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film. The scene even continues into the bathroom, as Sam fetches Fran's face cream. As she applies the cream and he removes his shirt, the effects of aging are clearly apparent, even as the couple's antagonism is magnified.

  Fran, intent on pursuing her relationship with Iselin, does not want to leave Paris. She rejects Sam's plans, and Wyler finally cuts to Fran as she suggests that Sam go home without her. As their argument builds, Wyler maintains the spatial integrity of the scene by having the estranged couple speak from different sides of the room. Sam demeans Fran's friends, contending, “Do you think the real thing in Paris would hang out with a couple of hicks like us?” He adds, “I'm just an ordinary American businessman and I married the daughter of a Zenith brewer.” Wyler cuts to Fran's face, covered with cream, thus highlighting her chagrin at the truth of this statement.

  Insisting again that they go their separate ways, Fran moves to the rear of the frame, leaving Sam in the foreground. But when she argues that she has been a good wife and deserves her fling because Sam is “rushing at old age,” the camera centers on her. Wyler again seems to be trying to elicit some sympathy for the character, but the momentum quickly shifts as Sam walks back to the sitting room, his shadow preceding him into the dark room. As he goes to check the ship's departure schedule, he is, once again, front and center, while Fran remains in the background, framed by the bedroom doors.

  Fran's flirtation with Iselin then continues in Montreux, while Sam returns home to discover that his daughter is settled and no longer needs his financial assistance. Iselin's wooing of Fran, set on the balcony of a villa overlooking mountains and a lake, partially echoes the scene with Lockert on the ship. As Fran and her paramour are shown sitting at a table, she at frame left and he on the right, their positions parallel those of Sam and his daughter in the car in the previous scene. Fran receives a letter from Sam and she moves to the rear of the fr
ame to read it, while Iselin remains seated in the foreground—thereby duplicating the dominant separate framing of Sam and Fran in their Paris hotel room. Fran is dressed, ironically, in a white chiffon gown with a white headband, looking rather like a Roman vestal virgin. When she finishes the letter, she walks toward Iselin, complaining that reading about life in Zenith has spoiled her fun. As she expresses her unhappiness, Wyler again switches to a shot–reverse shot until the two are together in the frame. Claiming that he is “making love to her,” Iselin moves closer and declares, “If your husband saved for you some of the love he's lavished on carburetors, my dear, innocent Fran….” Fran's back is to the camera as she hears this remark, but she abruptly turns around and defends her husband, asserting that he does love her. “And whatever Sam lacks,” she concludes, “I've always been able to trust him.” For the moment, dressed in white and romantically lit, Fran again appears to be a sympathetic figure. Iselin replies that he lives in the present and that the letter is the past. When Fran claims that the letter is the future too, Iselin replies, “Then let's get rid of both past and future.” Wyler's careful editing and staging—including Rudolph Maté's suggestive lighting, which plays effectively off Chatterton's gown—add to the seductive, romantic quality of the scene.

  The play's equivalent scene is wordier, requiring Iselin (Israel in the play) to deliver a long speech about how people in love should give of themselves to each other and to promise, finally, that he will remain faithful “as long as the thing may last.” Playwright Howard thus emphasizes the rather dissolute morals of this European roué. Wyler, however, plays it like a love scene: as Fran grapples with her own fading morals and debates whether to give herself over to the moment, Iselin solves her dilemma by setting the letter on fire, holding it for a moment while it flickers. He then lets it go, and the breeze wafts it across the terrace—a stunning cinematic image that announces the consummation of their affair and, by implication, the end of the Dodsworths’ marriage. This suggestive image also alludes to the illusory nature of dreams and of Fran's foolish attempt to turn back time, as reflected in her virginal costume and her desire to escape the past and the future.

  Mary Astor wrote that Wyler spent an entire afternoon shooting the burning letter's symbolic progress: “He wanted it to go slowly for a way, then stop, and then flutter along a little farther.”30 Wyler's perfectionism is not wasted here, as he pulls off an effect that beautifully encapsulates one of the film's most insistent themes.

  Suspecting his wife's involvement with Iselin, Sam returns to Paris to confront the situation. As the Dodsworths travel from the train station to the hotel, Wyler reverses Sam's position in the car in the two earlier framings—Dodsworth's drive home after selling his company, and the ride with his daughter during his recent return home—placing Fran at the left and Sam to the right. Visually, Sam has been displaced.

  Back in their suite, Sam is again placed at the center of the frame, while Fran's back is to the camera. Unbeknownst to Fran, Sam has summoned Iselin, and the subsequent confrontation is one of Wyler's most effective compositions. When Iselin arrives, Wyler frames him in a curtained entrance, emphasizing the theatrical air of the proceedings as choreographed by Sam. Iselin enters the room in the center of the frame, while Sam is in the upper left and Fran's back is to the right—the three figures forming a triangle. As the confrontation continues, Wyler lines the three actors up so that Fran and her lover are looking away from the camera, their position corresponding in profile to an antique bust (representing the Old World) located between them. As Sam continues to direct and dominate the proceedings, he moves to center frame, with Fran at left and Iselin at right. When Sam remarks, “the old triangle stuff,” the group again suggests a visual triangle. At length, Iselin leaves, and Fran is defeated. She apologizes to Sam, as she did earlier on the ship. But as the ensuing action—the film's final movement—shows, she has learned nothing.

  Fran's last romantic adventure takes place in Vienna, where she agrees to marry Kurt von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye), a nobleman with a title but no money who is considerably younger than Fran. They go out for an evening of dancing (Wyler is one of the violinists in the orchestra), and their solo waltz anticipates Julie and Preston's famous dance at the Olympus Ball in Jezebel. All eyes are on the pair, and although the spectators approve of the exhibition in this case, it spells the end of Fran's marriage. As he does in Jezebel, Wyler sometimes frames the dance from behind the orchestra.

  Later, in the Dodsworths’ suite, Fran's image is again reflected in a mirror as she goes to check on Sam. And when Kurt proposes, exclaiming, “Why are you not free!” Wyler repeats the mirrored framing of Fran, her back to the camera. She then turns toward the camera, and the camera frames both lovers in the mirror. As Kurt is about to leave, they kiss passionately; this is the first time she has been shown willingly kissing another man. Then, as Fran retires to her bedroom, the camera lingers in the sitting room, centering on Sam's door and silently invoking his presence.

  Later that evening, Sam and Fran fight again, and she informs him that she wants a divorce so she can marry Kurt. Sam tells Fran they need to go home where they belong, but Wyler's composition indicates that he will lose the argument: Fran is seen facing the camera, her partially open door cutting the frame in half. Defeated, Sam agrees to stay in Europe until the divorce is finalized.

  Fran's meeting with Kurt's mother (Maria Ouspenskaya) completes her humiliation. The baroness frankly declares her disapproval; as a Catholic, she will not countenance her son's marriage to a divorced woman. The unkindest cut to Fran, however, comes when she is told that she is too old to give Kurt an heir. Like the earlier confrontation with Iselin, this meeting is staged as a triangle, with Kurt standing between the two seated women, and this positioning gives the proceedings an ominous feel. Wyler edits the face-off between the two women primarily as a shot–reverse shot, concentrating on the baroness's necklace, a crucifix that alternately goes bright and dark, and on the flower between Fran's breasts, signifying her hope, which is clearly out of sync with the snow falling in the background.

  Fran's defeat is contrasted with Sam's reunion with Edith Cortwright in Milan. She invites him to stay at her villa, where he regains his enthusiasm for life. He even decides to start a new business, initiating an airline route between Moscow and Seattle. This promising love affair is interrupted, however, when Fran calls to tell Sam that she has dropped the divorce. Sam feels obligated to go back to Fran, despite Edith's pleas for him to stay. He meets his wife on the ship, but as it is about to sail, he is so appalled by her selfishness that he leaves abruptly, telling Fran that “love has to stop somewhere short of suicide.” Realizing that her husband has left her, she wails, “He's going ashore!” and the scream, punctuated by the ship's whistle, dramatically captures her sense of abandonment and desperation. The film's final moments show Sam returning to Edith on a small boat; he waves to her as Edith's joyful face fills the screen. This explicit denouement revises the ending of the play, whose curtain falls on Fran's piercing cry. Wyler and Howard have given the film a “Hollywood” ending, focusing on Sam's release rather than Fran's despair.

  In Sam Dodsworth, Wyler and Howard affirm their faith in the basic dignity of the American character. Despite his wealth and success, Sam represents the average American as a reasonable, decent, and tolerant human being. He is open to new ideas, observant of his changing environment, and able to see through Fran's shallow friends. His commitment to growth, experimentation, and progress makes him a more vibrant figure than the antiquated Europeans, who are seen as mere devotees of what is old and comfortable. Sam's embrace of “education” allows him to triumph in the end. It is this spirit that the American in Wyler wanted to embrace as well—the underlying strength that would allow the United States to withstand the emerging threat of fascism in Europe.

  The film would also be an artistic triumph for Wyler, a clear demonstration of the realistic style that would mark his best work. Dods
worth shows its director in full command of the spatial design that is the hallmark of his most significant social films. It is important to note that Wyler made this film without Gregg Toland, who was then working on Come and Get It with Howard Hawks. Rudolph Maté did the camera work in his absence. Although based on a play, Dodsworth rarely displays its stage origins; the expansive interior sets allow Wyler's camera to explore the space so effectively that the viewer becomes immersed in the realism of the characters’ world. Even the rear-screen projections of European locales are melded effectively into the outdoor sequences, maintaining the realistic feel.

  Wyler's purposeful use of space allows his characters to express themselves at any given moment both in relationship to their environment and with respect to the other characters they interact with. Rather than requiring his actors to indulge in extended psychological musings, he articulates the emotional tensions between them by means of spatial structures that encapsulate a scene's meaning. Beginning with Counsellor-at-Law, he demonstrates an ability to remain essentially faithful to a dramatic text while freeing it from its stage origins by letting the camera capture nuances—of character, emotion, and space—that are simply unavailable to a playwright.

  Dodsworth previewed at the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theater for a select group of invited guests and then opened a week later, on September 23, 1936, at the Rivoli Theatre in New York. Sinclair Lewis loved the film. He sent an effusive telegram to Goldwyn: “I do not see how a better motion picture could have been made from the play and the novel than you have made Stop I am so delighted with it that I don't need the feebleness of adjectives to express my pleasure.”31 The critics also loved the film, honoring Walter Huston with the New York Film Critics Award for his performance; he also received an Oscar nomination. Wyler himself received his first Oscar nomination, among seven nominations for the film overall.