A Film Canon

In the midst of the screwball-inflected '30s, Dodsworth stands out as an extraordinary evocation of adulthood, presenting a couple caught in the vacuum between middle and old age, retirement and renunciation, marriage and companionship, and, above all, America and Europe. The result is a series of penetrating emotional observations, from the shame of age, to the self-consciousness that comes with a reconciled marriage, to the identity crisis produced by both, all of which are fairly foreign to classical Hollywood drama. The melancholy sense of something irretrievably lost is emphasised by deep-focus cinematography, which robs the characters of movement, setting them against a backdrop that is continuously receding. This explains Wyler's taste for point-of-view shots from the back of boats, trains and cars, as well as as for spaces which are entirely darkened apart from a single glowing window or door, as if the life of the party were continuing somewhere forever inaccessible. At its most extreme, this aesthetic gives the impression that Wyler is more interested in the couple's backs than their faces, as they wistfully register the present turning into the past before their very eyes, emphasised by an extremely artful use of mirrors, and most beautifully expressed in their final, futile attempt to halt it. In the end, however, this deep-focus registers a national, rather than merely personal, crisis, drawing on the language of American monumentalism ("clean hospitals, concrete highways") to achieve a strategic (and literal) detachment from America itself, thereby conjuring up the state of simultaneous homelessness and homesickness; that is, the expatriate experience.