Dodsworth (1936) review - This old marriage drama still hurts

If you are tired of modern movies where couples just scream at each other for two hours without any real reason, you need to watch Dodsworth tonight. Its easily one of the best dramas about growing old and realizing you married the wrong person.

If you only like fast cars and CGI explosions, you will probably fall asleep in ten minutes. But anyone who has ever felt a relationship slowly drift away will find this almost too real to watch.

Sam Dodsworth (played by Walter Huston) has spent his whole life building a massive car company in Michigan. He finally sells it because his wife, Fran, wants to go to Europe and "live" before they get too old.

But "living" for Fran mostly means flirting with cheap European guys who have fancy titles and zero money. 🙄

Honestly, Fran is one of the most frustrating characters I have seen in a long time. Ruth Chatterton plays her with this shaky, desperate energy that makes you want to crawl under your couch.

She is so terrified of getting wrinkles that she treats her husband like an embarrassing old shoe. You can almost feel her sweating through her expensive dresses trying to pretend she is still twenty-five.

There is this great scene on the cruise ship where she flirts with a very young David Niven. Yes, that David Niven, looking about twelve years old here! She tries so hard to sound sophisticated, but you can see right through it.

Sam just stands there looking like a big, sad dog who got kicked out into the rain. He just wants to look at some historic buildings and maybe talk about how they paved the roads.

Unlike some other silent or early talkie films from this era, like The Lost Romance, the drama here does not feel dusty or fake. It actually feels like a real marriage falling apart in slow motion.

Small things I wrote down:

• The background music sometimes gets so loud it feels like a truck is driving through the living room.
• Walter Huston has the absolute best "I am trying not to scream" face in cinema history.
• The sets for "Paris" definitely look like they were built in a parking lot in California. 🌴
• There is a guy named John Payne who shows up near the end and I swear he has no idea what movie he is in.

The whole movie changes when Sam meets Edith, played by Mary Astor. She is living alone in Italy, and she just radiates peace.

When Sam starts hanging out with her, the movie finally lets you take a deep breath. They sit on her balcony, drink some wine, and just exist. You realize how exhausting Fran was because suddenly everything is quiet and nice.

But the absolute best scene in the entire film belongs to Maria Ouspenskaya. She plays the mother of one of the young guys Fran is trying to marry.

She is on screen for maybe three minutes, but she absolutely destroys Fran's entire life with about five sentences. She tells Fran she is too old to have babies and should go home to her husband. The look on Fran's face is pure horror. I had to rewind it twice because it was so brutal. 😲

It is not a perfect movie, some of the pacing in the middle gets a bit slow when they keep traveling to different hotels. But the ending is so incredibly satisfying that I literally cheered at my TV.

If you want a classic film that actually has some real teeth, give this one a shot. It is way better than most of the stuff they make now about divorce.