Babbitt (1934)

The second and surprisingly most recent film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's famed 1922 novel of the same name (the first movie version was a 1924 silent). Staring Guy Kibbee as the titular Babbitt, a successful though thoroughly middle class real estate agent living in the fictional midsized mid-western city of Zenith. Babbitt gets involved in various mis-adventures designed to showcase the vacuity of American middle class conformity, only the film falls something short on that front. Now I haven't read Babbitt, though now having seen this film I genuinely want to and learn what I missed, but I do know that it has a reputation as being a pretty spot on work of social satire, which though it has a few moments, this movie certainly is not. This is due, at least in part, to the way films were made at the time and the shortcomings of the adaptation process. Because Babbitt the book is said to be a work in which nothing much really happens, its more about observations then happenings, the script writers try to play up the more salacious parts of the story, the arrest of a friend of Babbitt's for beating his wife,  and Babbitt's flirting with having an affair with a young client. The problem with this approach is this film was made at the dawn of production code enforcement, if made a year earlier this movie could have been more salacious, but with a production code seal there are a lot of things it can only hint at. This results in a mediocre rendering, a film that feels natured, and an ending that just doesn't feel right, in fact an ending that if anything is an endorsement of middle class conformity, not a condemnation of it. So what was the point. **