Irene Dunne

Penny Serenade (1941)

Penny Serenade (1941)

(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)

(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)

(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.