Penny Serenade – directed by George Stevens. Women’s Weeper. A married couple try raising a family and are met with internal and external obstacles. 119 minutes Black and white 1941.
★★★★
If you can prepare yourself to suffer through the insufferable Irene Dunne and through this gluey soap opera, there are splendid rewards. Edgar Buchanan as the crusty sidekick and family friend has such perfect timing and governance of his instrument that none of it is noticeable. What a treat he is! And there is the beautiful Beulah Bondi as the adoption official. She hardly moves a muscle, but boy does that project itself as the truth of movement of each situation her character is in. Finally there is Cary Grant in another of his skillful light hearted rapscallion roles. There are movies Grant has not been particularly notable in, but this certainly isn’t one of them. He carries the film on the shoulders of his believability. You go along with it because he brings validity to every scene, a validity already in him. A true cinema actor, whose instrument defined screen acting for his era, modest in its effects, attentive, and personal. He plays in this film probably the greatest scene he ever played in movies. We do not think of Grant as an emotional actor, but it is a long scene, of great emotional power. Despite the fact the writing is banal, his sustainment and modulation of the emotion of this scene, which culminates in an enormously long speech is one of the greatest I have ever seen in film. Watch his body. It scarcely moves. Think of how Sean Penn would have over-miked it, good as he is an actor. In his life, Grant never won an Oscar, but was nominated twice; this was one of those two times. Dunne is 6 years older than Grant, and isn’t convincing as a 20 or even 30 year old. Grant and she had had two big successes together before this, and it must have been hard for her. She was at this moment in her career at the peak of her popularity, as a result of those two hit comedies. In her day the age of certain actresses did not necessarily count as determining their casting, once their hold on the public was secure. Dunne was never a jeune fille; she was a woman, in the way that Susan Sarandon always was a woman and Julia Roberts never has been. So, she was already a grown-up and could be cast as one, her real age being irrelevant. There is something to be said for her as a screen presence. Not having much of sense of humor helped her in being a foil for the rapscallions playing opposite her. She sometimes condescended to be lady, which was both ghastly and futile: Greer Garson had seized the throne. But, as here, she was one of the few stars who could actually play a good woman; Colbert could do it too. Loretta Young could not. Think about it. Meryl Streep could do it; Glenn Close could not. But Glenn Close could play a saint, and so could Loretta Young. If you want to see Irene Dunne at her best, see Showboat or, another George Stevens film the wonderful I Remember Mama, a perfect role for her, suitable to her age and stolidity, a part in which she is simply superb. She is a very good example of a hard-working actress who took her craft seriously and was sometimes moved by the tides of studio casting into waters where she could barely swim. If in this film she suffers too daintily, that may be as a corrective to the lugubrious nature of the material, a weeper, like her famous one with Charles Boyer, remade many years later with Grant and that other lady actress Deborah Kerr.