At various turns, Abraham Lincoln(1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.
In an email exchange this week with John Damer-a regular FilmCouch listener–he mentioned a movie calledGabriel Over the White House. Just go to this movie’s Wikipedia page, and a movie-dork acid will start to fill your stomach. William Randolph Hearst made a movie where there’s a gangster driveby of the White House and the President predicts last week’s bailout plan?!?!?! You must see it.
You start searching for the DVD and, probably, wind up at Amazon.com. There you’ll find a few secondary vendors selling VHS copies of the movie for over $100. Your heart sinks. A little more digging reveals there’s no copy at the local library. For the more Internet immersed, you may try Archive.org hoping the copyright expired and it’s now in the public domain. No luck. MGM still holds the rights. But there’s a guerrilla spirit of VHS movie collectors out there who won’t let baby be put in the corner.
Any combination of William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Huston amounts to a classic. Period. Dodsworth endures because it’s a sophisticated piece with a lot going on beneath the surface. A retired automaker goes on a European voyage with his wife of twenty years who’s going through her own midlife crisis. It’s 100 minutes of snappy, intelligent dialogue injecting humor into mature themes of infidelity and marriage.
Dodsworth is a man ready to leap into the chapter of old age and enjoying the fruit of his labor. His wife is terrified of old age and runs into the arms of any man who takes an interest in her. After this film was screened at Telluride 2006, Sam Goldwyn Jr. did the Q&A. When asked why remakes of Dodsworth have been picked up and dropped so many times, he replied there’s little sympathy for this film. We can’t help but view movies from the time we live in. Dodsworth’s wife is unsympathetic for cheating on him. Dodsworth is unsympathetic because, today, nobody understands why he doesn’t just drop her and move on.
Therein lies the beauty of Dodsworth. Much like The Secret Lives of Dentists, underpinning this darkly comic story is a man trying to endure a chapter in his marriage and hang on to the history he and his wife built together. It’s not a decision most couples make today. But it’s a mature and calculated decision reflecting incredible endurance in the man who makes it.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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In an email exchange this week with John Damer-a regular FilmCouch listener–he mentioned a movie called Gabriel Over the White House. Just go to this movie’s Wikipedia page, and a movie-dork acid will start to fill your stomach. William Randolph Hearst made a movie where there’s a gangster driveby of the White House and the President predicts last week’s bailout plan?!?!?! You must see it.
