The most remarkable aspects of the film are its moral complexity and its bittersweet tone. Wyler takes care not to portray Fran wholly as the villain; we are made to understand and sympathize with both husband and wife. Some of the most poignant moments of Dodsworth take place when Fran sees the illusory life that she has been trying to create fall apart around her. Huston, who was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, is pitch perfect in this wide-ranging role. His character transforms from a confident self-made tycoon to a dejected, more thoughtful, older man. Huston registers these changes in an introspective, heart-wrenching performance. Astor, an extremely young and dashing David Niven, and Maria Ouspenskaya are all marvelous in supporting roles. At a time when mainstream American filmmaking all seems to be aimed at the tastes of fourteen-year-old boys, Dodsworth is a welcome reminder that Hollywood once made films for adults. RH
See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
THINGS TO COME (1936)
G.B. (London) 100m BW
Director: William Cameron Menzies
Producer: Alexander Korda
Screenplay: H.G. Wells from his novel The Shape of Things to Come
Photography: Georges Périnal
Music: Arthur Bliss
Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Maurice Braddell, Sophie Stewart, Derrick De Marney, Ann Todd, Pearl Argyle, Kenneth Villiers, Ivan Brandt, Anne McLaren, Patricia Hilliard, Charles Carson
William Cameron Menzies screen version of H.G. Wellss speculations about the worlds future after a disastrous second World War destroys European civilization is perhaps the first true science-fiction film. Only Fritz Langs Metropolis (1926) anticipates its envisioning of the future as a result of technological change and resulting political evolution, but Langs film doesnt offer a similarly detailed analysis of the new course history might take. In fact, few science fiction movies are as concerned as is Things to Come with a rigorously historical approach to fictionalized prophecy, and this is perhaps because Wells himself penned the screenplay, based on ideas found in his popular tome The Outline of History.
Neither Wells nor Menzies took much interest in character-driven narrative (the main characters all represent important ideas), and so the film has seemed distant and uninvolving to many, an effect exacerbated by the fact that the story covers a full
century of history. The second European war lasts twenty-five years and manages to destroy most of the world, which regresses to something like the cutthroat feudalism of the early Middle Ages. But human progress is inevitable, thanks to the fact that the intellectual and rational element in man always proves superior to the innate human urge toward self-destruction. Things to Come thus offers a more optimistic twist on Freuds understanding of the perennial conflict between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, in human affairs.
Like many utopian writers, Wells sees the future as marked significantly by an increased human control over the environment. The films later sequences, as in Metropolis, are dominated by a vision of the city of the future. It was in his handling of these architectural and art-design aspects of the film that Menzies made his most significant and telling contribution. Despite its episodic narrative, Things to Come is visually spectacular, a predecessor of other science fiction films that imagine the urban future, including Ridley Scotts Blade Runner (1982).
Despite the presence of well-known actors (including Raymond Massey, Cedric Hardwicke, and Ralph Richardson), what is most memorable about this unusual film is its engagement with a philosophy of history and of human nature. It captures the anxieties and hopes of 1930s Britain perfectly, chillingly forecasting the blitz that would descend upon London only four years after its release. RBP
See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
LE ROMAN DUN TRICHEUR (1936)
THE STORY OF A CHEAT
France (Cinéas) 85m BW
Language: French
Director: Sacha Guitry
Producer: Serge Sandberg
Screenplay: Sacha Guitry
Photography: Marcel Lucien
Music: Adolphe Borchard
Cast: Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, Roger Duchesne, Rosine Deréan, Elmire Vautier, Serge Grave, Pauline Carton, Fréhel, Pierre Labry, Pierre Assy, Henri Pfeifer, Gaston Dupray
Widely regarded as Sacha Guitrys masterpiece (though it has competition in 1937s Pearls of the Crown), this 1936 tour de force can be regarded as a kind of concerto for the writer-director-performers special brand of brittle cleverness. After a credits sequence that introduces us to the films cast and crew, The Story of a Cheat settles into a flashback account of how the title hero (played by Guitry himself) learned to benefit from cheating over the course of his life.
A notoriously anticinematic moviemaker whose first love was theater, Guitry nevertheless had a flair for cinematic antics when it came to adapting his plays (or in this case his novel Memoires dun Tricheur) to film. The Story of a Cheat registers as a rather lively and stylishly inventive silent movie, with Guitrys character serving as offscreen lecturer. François Truffaut was sufficiently impressed to dub Guitry a French brother of Ernst Lubitsch, though Guitry clearly differs from this master of continental romance in the way his own personality invariably overwhelms that of his characters. JS