The George Stevens Seminar – Part 8 – Penny Serenade
Imagine Irene Dunne, the epitome of the suburban, playing opposite Cary Grant who is entirely without class restriction of any kind, save that the one thing he is not is suburban.
How did the audiences of the time accept it? Yet as soon as they appear together on the screen they do. And it has nothing to do with any particular sexual chemistry between them. She does not get to Hollywood until she is thirty-four, and here she is 45; Grant is 8 years younger than she, and how is it possible the audience accepted her playing someone 25? But they do. She was 40 when she played eighteen year-old Magnolia Hawks in Showboat? No one was bothered.
The camera does not tell the truth; it selects the truth it desires to tell. And audiences tell the truth to the film that it wishes to see there. Audiences set aside whatever interferes with their desire to be entertained. Penny Serenade is a case in point.
The film starts and the audience says, “Oh, she’s married to him. Okay, Why not? And – oh, he’s married too. All right, I’ll buy it –” despite the fact that the one thing obvious about Cary Grant from first glance to last was that he was not the marring kind. (That he was married five times proves it.) But the audience knows these two people and likes them and is resolved to get as much for their ticket as they can. The audience has also grown up along side them; the contemporaneity of their own lives coincides with them.
Looking at this film now, this is no longer the case. The entertainment we seek from such films is no longer as personal in its partnership with these two. What we find is the craft of two actors to beguile us through a piece over which we may no longer shed the tears their contemporaries shed. Indeed, another reason for the acceptability of these two is the sensation of surprise the audience may have felt when confronting these two renowned comedians in a film with the title of a comedy suddenly playing a heavy melodrama. Such a surprise can be offensive, or, as in this case, pleasingly collusive. The film was a big hit.
As you watch it just pay attention to the opening scene and how the director handles it. Set the story aside, set the acting aside. Just pay attention to how the camera moves, or doesn’t move, what the director allows to pass before it as Irene Dunne and Edgar Buchannan play it out. The director is always the narrator. He does not write the story, but he does tell it. “And then…and then…and then…” is his job, the task of liaison, of linking story parts, and of extending them or shrinking them, and of exploring diversions, and of meeting the audience half-way. This last was one of George Stevens’ chief interests and intentions and his conscious craft. Watch how he strikes a balance with this material to keep the weeper it is in the audience and out of the picture itself. He is the one who holds us. Take a look at yourself as you watch this picture and watch how he does it.