Dodsworth (film)

Dodsworth is a 1936 American drama film directed by William Wyler and starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton and Mary Astor. Sidney Howard based the screenplay on his 1934 stage adaptation of the 1929 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis. Huston reprised his stage role.

The center of the film is a study of a marriage in crisis. Recently retired auto magnate Samuel Dodsworth and his wife Fran, while on a grand European tour, discover that they want very different things out of life, straining their marriage.

The film was critically praised and nominated for several Academy Awards. Dodsworth was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies in 1997 and 2007.

Plot

Samuel "Sam" Dodsworth (Walter Huston) is the successful, self-made and unsophisticated head of Dodsworth Motor Company, an American automobile parts manufacturing firm, based in the small Midwestern town of Zenith (also the setting for Lewis' Babbitt). His wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton), feeling trapped by the boring social life of their small-town existence, convinces her spouse to sell his interest in the company and take her to Europe. Sam disregards the warning of Tubby Pearson, his banker and friend, that men like them are only happy when they are working.

Dodsworth

Dodsworth may refer to:

Film

A film, also called a movie, motion picture or photoplay, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to the phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to the industry of films and filmmaking or to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations.

The process of filmmaking is both an art and an industry.