Irene Dunne

  • Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

    Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) A slight but amusing comedy, Theodora Goes Wild introduces Irene Dunne to comedy, a field in which she’d encounter considerable success in the following years. The plot, rich in lies, half-trues and misunderstandings, has to do with a small-town Sunday School teacher who moonlights as the writer of a salacious novel that has all the town’s busybodies clutching their pearls. (There’s probably some commentary about the Hays Code in there.) The fun escalates once someone from Manhattan discovers her double identity and follows her back home to make her life difficult — especially when she has no other choice but to introduce the stranger as her gardener. The expected romance ensues, even when the action moves back to Manhattan for much of the third act. It’s all a bit silly, sometimes quite arbitrary, and Melvyn Douglas isn’t always the best as the male lead… but Dunne is quite good in an Oscar-nominated performance. If you’re looking for a better-than-average 1930s comedy with some good set-pieces and a solid lead performance, Theodora Goes Wild is a really good choice.

  • I Remember Mama (1948)

    I Remember Mama (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) A bunch of likable episodes chronicling a period of time in the life of a Norwegian immigrant family in early 20th-century San Francisco, I Remember Mama adopts a familiar framing device — the writer protagonist reminiscing about growing up—in order to serve its short stories and affectionate reminiscences. Clearly meant for comfort viewing, the film is most successful when it relies on its actors: Barbara Bel Geddes as the narrator, an aged Irene Dunne as the titular Mama and especially Oscar Homolka as the grander-than-life uncle who ends up being the focus of many scenes. The black-and-white cinematography portrays scenes of 1900s San Francisco as best as it could in a pre-CGI era — still, the sense of place is evocative. You have to have a tolerance for episodic narratives, but like films such as Meet Me in St. Louis, it all adds up into a portrait of a close-knit family, meant to create a nostalgic view of the narrator’s childhood. The material does have a universal quality, and its impact is still perceptible even today.

  • The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)

    The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Well, I suppose you had to be there: MGM going wild to produce an Anglophile weepy drama adaptation of a book, doubling as propaganda picture hailing the courage of those sturdy British. It’s certainly worth noting that The White Cliffs of Dover was produced during the height of WW2, after the Americans joined the fight but before the invasion of Normandy—in other words, at a time when the fate of the war was still very much in the balance, and an extra dollop of home-front propaganda meant something. For modern viewers, it can be more interesting to note Irene Dunne’s performance, or that a very young Elizabeth Taylor shows up in a supporting role. The rest… is a slog. While The White Cliffs of Dover is not necessarily a bad film (MGM’s production values ensure that, if nothing else, the budget is shown on screen), but it is a plodding one with propagandist aims that aren’t so acceptable today. (Is dying for the country really that much better than going back home to Mom?)

  • Life with Father (1947)

    Life with Father (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) When the point of an old film’s popularity is that it’s old-fashioned, I suppose it’s natural to react with very mixed feelings to the result. Life with Father is a film of the past in many ways—a 1947 adaptation of a long-running 1939 Broadway play looking nostalgically upon life in 1880s Manhattan, it’s triple-piled-up nostalgia even before we begin digging into it. As the patriarchal title suggests, it’s an examination of a family with a strong-willed father at the helm, a role that would have been unbearable without the considerable charm of William Powell, completely in his element here. He’s hard-headed, unwilling to listen and impervious to the damage he causes, but the saving grace of the film is how it shows the rest of the family subtly manipulating him into serving their own objectives, taking advantage of his own bluster in order to get what they want. Still, much of Life with Father is subservient to the 1880s and 1940s, all the way to a baptism subplot that seems inconsequential today, but somewhat harms the free-thinking nature of the protagonist. (Significantly enough, film historians tell us that the film’s final line, “I’m going to get baptized,” is a bowdlerization of the Broadway play’s punchline, “I’m going to get baptized, damn it.”) If you’re willing to let slide those things slide, the film does have its charms. In addition to Powell’s performance, we have smaller roles for silent film veteran ZaSu Pitts, a charming turn by a very young Elizabeth Taylor, great matrimonial dialogue between Powell and Irene Dunne, and a few comic set-pieces that still work well. There are times where a film’s appreciation hinges on how much you can surrender to an earlier era’s idea of feel-good movies, and Life with Father is definitely one of those.

  • Love Affair (1939)

    Love Affair (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) By sheer happenstance, I happened to have Love Affair waiting on my DVR after watching An Affair to Remember and finding out that it was a remake of this film. Watching both at a few days’ interval only highlighted the similarities between both versions and what it takes to make it work. Both movies are easier than most pairs to analyze: after all, both are (co-)written and directed by Leo McCarey, and both share a structure that is almost scene-per-scene identical. Love Affair is in black-and-white, whereas An Affair to Remember is in Technicolor, but that’s not the most significant difference: Stars Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne are in the lead roles and while they’re certainly not bad or unlikable actors, they simply can’t compare to Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, who shoulders almost all of the remake’s added interest over its progenitor. Perhaps the best example of this difference can be found in the weepy last scene—a bit silly and melodramatic with good actors, but somehow almost convincing with superior ones. Oh, I liked Love Affair well enough, despite thinking that the first half isn’t as funny as the remake’s first half. It’s more even and less frustrating in parts when compared to the melodramatic remake. But even if the remake is flawed, it’s still far more memorable than the first movie. So it goes—Hollywood alchemy, unpredictable and striking at once.

  • Penny Serenade (1941)

    Penny Serenade (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) I didn’t think it was possible to dislike a Cary Grant film, but here I am, looking at Penny Serenade. Oh, it’s not virulent hatred, nor wall-to-wall dislike. It’s just … not that enjoyable. Part of it has to be that in trying to show the first few years of a marriage, the film becomes an episodic melodrama, meant to make people sob and then rebuild them back into happiness even if it doesn’t quite make sense. It could have worked had it been executed well, but it’s not: instead, there’s a jerky-jerky rhythm to the plot that stops and goes and throws in tragedy instead of plot development and then caps it off with a cheap resolution that doesn’t actually resolve anything. Some of the early moments showing the courtship between our male lead (Grant, in a role with more serious moments and emotional range than many of his other roles—he was nominated for an Oscar for it) and our female lead (the beautiful Irene Dunne, at ease playing Grant’s on-screen wife for the third time but limited by a very traditional script) base their courtship on vinyl records. But the cavalcade of misery that awaits our characters at every turn gets increasingly ludicrous. Raking my brain for a way to make it make sense, the best I came up with was having a secondary character (played by Beulah Bondi) being an actually supernatural fairy godmother—at that point, Penny Serenade makes some kind of plotting sense rather than a collection of drama. Alas, I’m sure that this wasn’t the intended meaning of this melodrama. Unfortunately, that means that the ending (in which a new baby is meant to make everything all right) is hollow and unconvincing: It feels as if Penny Serenade had lasted twenty more minutes, the new kid would have died, some other tragedy would have tested our protagonist (place your bets on WW2!) and we’d be back at the starting point with yet another kid on the way. There are a few good moments along the way—and a few good bits of direction from George Stevens, as ham-fisted and obvious as they may seem to us. But Penny Serenade was never meant to be an audacious film—it’s old-school Hollywood mawkishness, and it’s not unusual that it would feel too broad, too on-the-nose for twenty-first century audiences.

  • The Awful Truth (1937)

    The Awful Truth (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2018) Considering that The Awful Truth is the movie that created Cary Grant’s comic persona, we should be grateful for its existence and for director Leo McCarey’s instincts in guiding Grant toward his vision of the role. This is a late-thirties screwball comedy that practically exemplifies the sophisticated and urbane “Comedy of remarriage” so characteristic to the years following the introduction of the Hays Code: Here we’ve got Grand and co-star Irene Dunne as an unhappily married couple that decides to divorce, then sabotage each other’s new affairs before realizing that they are each other’s best partners. (Try not to think too much about the liberties allowed to only the very rich people in the 1930s.) It’s decently funny—maybe not as much as other later efforts from Grant, but still amusing, and Dunne has good timing as well. (Plus Skippy the dog!) Divorce has rarely been so much fun. The comedy isn’t just about the lines, but the physical performances of the actors and their interactions—read up on the improvisational making-of imposed by McCarey to learn more about how the picture was shaped by on-set ideas and follow-up. If I didn’t already know how much I love screwball comedy, The Awful Truth would have taught me.

  • Cimarron (1931)

    Cimarron (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) As one of the earliest Best Picture Oscar winners, Cimarron remains a quasi-mandatory viewing experience for film buffs, and comparative lists are quick to bury it to the bottom of the Best Picture winners. I went into the film with low expectations, and was surprised to find out that I rather liked much of the movie. My appreciation has its limits, of course—the film is casually racist, long, lopsided in its structure by accelerating toward the end and making the motivations of its characters increasingly nebulous … and so on. But there is a sweep and a scope to the film’s central premise (adapted from an epic novel): the development of a place (and a family) from the initial land rush to a then-modern city. It does start with an impressive sequence, a re-creation of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush in all of its crazy glory. Then we’re off to understand our putative protagonist, who ends up becoming a pillar of the community after being beaten to the plot of land he wanted for himself. Various episodic shenanigans take place until, in a bizarre third act, the protagonist disappears from the story and leaves his wife to fend off for herself. Spanning forty years, Cimarron is at its best when it portrays its characters civilizing their own community, banding together to create some peace and order. Alas, even in that most noble portrait, the film has some serious issues in bringing everything together and tightening up its story. At least the wild-west visuals are interesting, Richard Dix is fine as the protagonist, Estelle Taylor is still eye-catching decades later and Irene Dunne makes an impression as the dramatic burden of the film falls on her shoulders toward the end. Watching old movies can turn into an anthropologic expedition—especially during the tumultuous thirties, as movies acquired more or less the same basic cinematographic grammar used today but to portray a significantly different time. So it is that I’m rather happy to have seen Cimarron—It’s memorable, was made with high production values for the time and carries to the present day a time capsule of things both admirable and reprehensible about how American saw themselves back then.