Cheap Dodsworth (DVD) (Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Paul Lukas) (William Wyler) Price

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Customer Reviews of Dodsworth

A movie for adults--in the best sense of the term.
It is a stinging indictment of today's Hollywood that a movie like Dodsworth probably couldn't get made today. In its emotional richness and complexity, it demands an audience that doesn't expect an explosion or a poopoo joke every ten seconds. Walter Huston gives one of the all-time great performances as Sam Dodsworth, a self-made millionaire who goes to Europe searching for his roots. Unfortunately, his neurotic wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton, an unjustly forgotten actress) goes with him searching for something else entirely, and the movie is largely about the suffering her emotional games-playing causes him. Add Mary Astor as an elegant American divorcee, Paul Lukas and David Niven as shady Europeans, and Maria Ouspenskaya as a wise old Austrian baroness, and you have a great cast giving life to a screenplay of uncommon literacy and wisdom. Dodsworth is a movie for people who are willing to pay attention, who don't want everything spelled out in huge letters, and who agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald that action is character.

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Splendid Movie
Actors build up their characters at very close perfection in this outstanding film, which deals with the conflicts of a middleaged married american couple in an european-second-honeymoon trip. One wonders how such a poignant, adult film, could be made under the strictures of the Production Code, which reigned supreme from 1934.

The cast is uniformly flawless: Walter Huston, as industrialist Sam Dodsworth, gives one of the most sincere and unaffected performances ever achieved by an actor on the american screen (he deserved an Academy Award for this role); lovely and very pretty Mary Astor, in a most sympatthetic role, as an american widow living in Naples, Italy, who falls in love with Huston, realizing they're soulmates; Ruth Chatterton, as Fran Dodsworth, the self-centered, snobbish, selfish, spoiled, manipulative, unnerving & ultimately flirtatious wife of Huston, who cannot cope with growing old and ends looking down on her husband, hometown friends, way of life, etc....yearning for the "european"chic & sophisticated ways of its idle upper classes; Paul Lukas, as the suave, continental man who uses his charms on Chatterton; David Niven, as one of Chatterton's suitors; a very young John Payne, as the Dodsworths' son-in-law; and character actress Madame Maria Ouspenskaya, making her american debut, as the old baroness who spoils Chatterton's wedding plans to her much younger son Kurt (played by Gregory Gaye), who not only is an impoverished nobleman, but cannot make decisions of his very own!

Samuel Goldwyn, the legendary and indomitable Hollywood producer, must be given the praise for making the decision to film such a delicate and sensitive movie, with an "A" class treatment, in spite of its lack of commercial punch for regular '30s moviegoers.

Really one of the best Hollywood movies of all time, and a truly timeless 1930s classic. Buying this dvd has been one of the smartest investments of my adult life.

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Oh, for the good old days of films!
Ruth Chatterton, William Wyler, Walter Huston - how could you go wrong with these film greats involved? I loved every minute of it. It was romantic, touching, funny -- black and white and I wouldn't have it any other way. Such a great film -- please, do yourself a favor and buy this NOW! It's how movies should be!