Sinclair Lewis Best Seller Novels on TCM

TCM will be showing movies based on the novels by author Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). He was the first American to win a Nobel Prize, and also copped a Pulitzer (which he refused) for “Main Street.” Here are Sinclair Lewis’ best seller novels made into movies.

Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis’s celebrated novel Babbitt, published in 1922, has inspired two screen adaptations, which is impressive for a novel that barely has a plot. The first movie arrived in 1924, directed by Harry Beaumont and starring Willard Louis and Mary Alden as the eponymous protagonist and his wife. The second, directed by William Keighley, premiered ten years later, with Guy Kibbee and Aline MacMahon as the middle-class, middle-aged, middle-everything Midwestern couple. No fewer than four writers are credited with the script, which strays conspicuously from the book on which it’s based. This may disappoint Lewis’s many admirers, but the flavor of the novel remains intact at least part of the time, and while Kibbee is too distinctive an actor to convey the full blandness of his utterly unremarkable character, it’s fun to see him starring in a role more sustained and challenging than most of the character parts that dominated his career.

Ann Vickers
Budgeted at a cost of $317,476, Ann Vickers was a remarkably frank film for 1933, one that featured two out-of-wedlock pregnancies and a remarkably independent, almost feminist heroine by today’s standards. The film was adapted from a novel by the socially progressive writer Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Elmer Gantry), the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lewis was known for his anti-capitalist messages, strong working woman characters and treatment of race in his work.

Dodsworth
The story follows the break-up of the marriage of a respectable middle-class Midwestern couple, Sam and Fran Dodsworth. Financially well off and their children grown, the wife seeks a little adventure in middle age and talks her husband into an extended trip to Europe. Flighty and snobbish, Fran begins to consider her husband a stuffed shirt and soon takes up with a Continental Lothario. Sam tries desperately to salvage his marriage but the damage is done and he eventually begins a new life with another woman.

Arrowsmith
Dr. Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is a freshly minted doctor who longs to work in research in the engrossing medical drama Arrowsmith (1931), directed by John Ford. As the story unfolds, Arrowsmith forsakes his dream to work as a country doctor in the Minnesota hometown of his new wife Leora (Helen Hayes). Restless and ill suited to family medicine, he turns back to his original love of research. He discovers a serum to cure a breakout of Black Leg disease in the local cattle. And his methods attract the notice of a former mentor, Dr. Max Gottlieb (A.E. Anson) who offers him a research job at New York’s McGurk Institute.

Cass Timberlane
The ads heralded Cass Timberlane (1947) as “TNT, Tracy ‘n’ Turner.” It wasn’t their first pairing, of course. She had played Tracy’s fiance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde six years earlier, during which she called him “her champion” for defending her from director Victor Fleming’s abuse. It wasn’t even the first time the slogan had been used. MGM had heralded Turner’s pairing with Robert Taylor in 1941’s Johnny Eager the same way.

I Married a Doctor
I Married a Doctor (1936) is not a madcap comedy, as the title might have you think. It’s an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ dramatic 1920 novel Main Street, which had previously been brought to the screen, under its original title, in 1923. For this new version, Warner Brothers changed the title apparently for the lame-brained reason that movies with doctors were good box-office at this time.

The story is about a sophisticated Chicago woman (Josephine Hutchinson) who marries a small-town doctor (Pat O’Brien) and moves to that town, where she has trouble fitting in and is subjected to all sorts of petty gossip and resentment, leading to tragedy and threatening the marriage. The New York Times found it “compactly written, expertly performed, and much more than one has any right to expect from its title” — until the “regrettable” cop-out of an ending, which was changed 180 degrees from that of the novel.