Word: zenith
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Dodsworth (adapted from the Sinclair Lewis novel by Sidney Howard; produced by Max Gordon). Motorcar Manufacturer Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston) sells his business in bustling little Zenith so that he and his wife Fran (Fay Bainter) can enjoy leisure after 20 years of marriage. They go abroad, where Sam is excited by historic sights, Fran by the attentions of other men. She apologizes for Sam to her glassy continental friends, frankly tells him to go home and let her have her fling...
...Back in Zenith he tells his married daughter that Fran ran the house better than she. He returns to Europe to find his wife slipping from the arms of a sleek diplomat into those of an Austrian blue-blood whom, in a flare of temper, she determines to marry. Wandering around Italy waiting for his divorce, Sam finds a woman with whom he is happy (Mrs. Walter Huston). Fran's romance crashes and she calls him back, but Sam gets off the boat in time...
Dodsworth's dramatic impact is cerebral rather than physical. Some of Designer Jo Mielziner's eight crafty settings are repeated to mount 14 scenes on shipboard, in Zenith, Paris, Berlin, Naples, London, Switzerland. Occasional lack of restraint in the direction is well covered by the acting of Fay Bainter and Walter...
Fannie Hurst would have choired the paean with more gusto. Horatio Alger would have awarded his hero a more thoroughgoing financial success. But not even Zenith's Chamber of Commerce could have done a more wholehearted job of boosting than this onetime Babbitt-baiter has done...
...Pulitzer Prize judges, Maxwell Anderson's Both Your Houses might be called Play of the Year. However, it developed early trouble at the boxoffice. George M. Cohan's performances in Pigeons & People and Ah Wilderness ranked high at both ends of the season, but represented no zenith to that talented actor's career...