On the Wikipedia page for Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens), there's a short section detailing a recent "AI colorization" of the film. Curious, I took a look. It looks about the same as colorization has looked for a couple of decades, now, which is to say it doesn't look very good at all except for in fleeting moments. It's in the wrong aspect ratio, too. This particular film is a prime victim for this sort of noodling because when the copyright came up for renewal 28 years after its release, Columbia Pictures neglected to renew it. Thus, it fell into the public domain. As a result, its presentation on home video usually has been awful, with countless editions available from fly by night video companies. Public domain is invaluable and necessary, but it is often a haven for philistines and grifters. Most PD versions of Penny Serenade are short five minutes of movie in addition to the usual defects. It's a shabby fate for a film that contains Cary Grant's first Oscar-nominated performance and a performance from co-star Irene Dunne that the actress herself felt was her very best. For what it's worth, the edition from Olive Films is excellent, sourced from primary materials and restoring the entire film. My screen caps for this post come from the Olive disc.
The story one finds in Penny Serenade follows the marriage of Julie Gardiner (Dunne) and Roger Adams (Grant), from their first meeting through tragedy after tragedy in which Julie loses her unborn child in an earthquake in Tokyo and becomes unable to bear another child. They adopt an infant daughter after a close inspection by the state, only to have her die of a fever. Roger loses the newspaper he owns, and the law refuses to allow them to adopt another child due to Roger's insolvency. Pleading with the courts. The shock is too much to bear. We meet them at the very end, as they are prepared to go their separate ways. The flashbacks that tell their story are keyed to music--they first meet in a music store where Julie works--and the film's vignettes are accompanied by well-known songs of the day (hence the title of the film).
By 1941, Cary Grant had arrived. He had already made some of the best and most enduring films of his career with directors including Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, and a previous film with George Stevens. He followed Penny Serenade with his first film for Alfred Hitchcock. He was in the full flower of his stardom and he was codifying into an archetype what the phrase "movie star" means in the public's imagination. And yet, Grant was beginning to be taken for granted (if you'll pardon the pun). Grant never won an Academy Award, settling for an honorary statue more than a decade after he had retired from film. The two films* for which he was nominated are not usually films most fans of old Hollywood immediately think of when Grant's name is mentioned, though both of them are excellent. Both of them are what would be called "Oscar bait" in today's parlance: serious dramas with barely a laugh to be found. Comedy has never been favored by the Oscars. Grant's talent for light comedy is an essential component of the Grant Persona (even in films for Hitchcock). Indeed, he might be the best light-comedian ever to step in front of a camera. You do the math.
Penny Serenade, in contrast to Grant's best-remembered films, is a tear-jerker, and as such it more closely matches the screen persona of Grant's co-star, Irene Dunne. Throughout the 1930s, Dunne made melodrama after melodrama, including Back Street, Magnificent Obsession, Love Affair, and The Age of Innocence. After Penny Serenade, she starred in more melodramas, most notably I Remember Mama (for which she was an Oscar nominee). Although she appeared in musicals, too, she didn't star in a comedy until 1936, seven years into her career. It is, perhaps, ironic that she's best remembered today for her comedies. Grant is part of that, having co-starred with her in his own star-making film, The Awful Truth, and again in My Favorite Wife, both archetypal examples of screwball comedy. Beyond that are the changing tastes of audiences. The 1930s-style melodrama, the weepie as they used to call them, is out of fashion with cynical contemporary viewers. Adding insult to injury, many of Dunne's films were remade in the 1950s in more famous versions (Magnificent Obsession by Douglas Sirk, for example, or Love Affair as An Affair to Remember by Leo McCarey, who also directed the original item). In any event, Penny Serenade is more of a piece with Dunne's career than it is with Grant's.
If you believe his biographers, director George Stevens came back from his service making documentaries during World War II a haunted man. Stevens was among the American soldiers who liberated both the Duben labor camp and Dachau. The film he shot there was used at the Nuremberg trials and is one of the key documents of the War. It is said that his films took a more serious turn afterwards, but I'm not sure if that's right. Stevens started his career making comedy shorts for Hal Roach, principally starring Laurel and Hardy. It was Stevens who figured out how to shoot Stan Laurel in a way that made his blue eyes show up on film, hence ensuring him a career as a film actor. Stevens left Roach to make feature films for RKO because he felt that he could make more serious films in a comedic frame. Even before the war, he was turning to darker and more serious subject matter. In between Gunga Din and The More the Merrier are two dour dramas, Vigil in the Night and Penny Serenade. Both of these films upend the screen personae of their stars. Both Carole Lombard and Cary Grant were primarily known for comedies at the time, but Stevens saw dramatic potential in comic actors. The war, it seems, only hastened Stevens the way he was already going. His work with actors on Penny Serenade prefigures his work on films like A Place in the Sun or Shane or Giant, in which he coaxes a raw emotionality from his movie star casts, turning them into actors in the process. And Grant had to be coaxed. He was openly hesitant to crack the polished veneer of the Movie Star facade he had constructed. In the fullness of his stardom, he wasn't sure if an audience weaned on Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday would find a more emotional, more human Grant worth watching. At Stevens' behest, he opened up.
Penny Serenade's structure follows a one-damned-thing-after-another parade of misery. This isn't a touchy-feely film, or, at least, it isn't often one--the fade to musical inserts to denote chapters seem hopelessly melodramatic (in the pejorative use of that word)--but it still intends to encourage a receptive audience to get out their handkerchiefs. The stars are what make this film watchable. Their performances rescue the film. Grant and Dunne (mostly) prevent it from turning mawkish, which may be why Stevens went for Grant in the first place. Stevens stages long scenes as comedy, which has the effect of making the tragic scenes into gut-punches while defusing their overt emotional manipulation a tad. The scenes that might seem outrageously manipulative--particularly the earthquake and courtroom scenes, are provided a lived-in naturalism by the actors. Watching Grant plead with the court is evidence that he could have excelled in even the starkest dramas had he chosen that path, in part by using the same techniques he often used to play comedies. He underplays. He doesn't over-emote. He puts just a touch of strain in his voice and it's very effective. Dunne follows this lead. There's no rending of garments in this movie. No wailing into the void. It's effective.
In spite of what I may imply by calling the film "potentially mawkish," the filmmaking on display in this movie is usually a cut above the standard "invisible" filmmaking of classic Hollywood. It takes some risks. I may grouse about the melodramatic use of musical interludes, but the first of these is accompanied by a skipping record that not only foretells the difficulty of the film's central relationship, it performs an astonishing segue between past and present. The whole film is decorated with similar flourishes. There's a romantic sequence where Julie follows Roger onto a train as he is bound for Tokyo, and the way it's cut suggests their relationship is a good deal less chaste than usual for the production code era, while nominally staying within the code's strictures. The notion that Grant wouldn't be having sex with any romantic partner in any of his movies is patently absurd and this is one of the few films in his portfolio that acknowledges this fact. Even beyond this, Roger and Julie are shown to share a domestic bed (as opposed to a sexual one) in contravention of the code. They likely got away with it because in those scenes, they were new parents dealing with insomnia and child rearing, so the fact that they share a bed likely didn't register for the blue-noses at the Breen office. Regardless, this is a film that treats its characters and the audience as adults. This, too, prevents the film from being overwhelmed by its own melodrama.
My first impressions of George Stevens were formed--perhaps unfairly--by his later white-elephant production of The Greatest Story Ever Told (and to a lesser degree by Giant), so it's occasionally surprising watching him work in miniature. This is all surely the result of the comedies he made for Laurel and Hardy, which were very detailed in the little things, but the same techniques work well with melodrama, too, where they serve to disguise the wheels of fate turning the machineries of plot. It's not naturalistic, but it fakes being naturalistic really well. I'm also surprised at the treatment of Japan in this film, given that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a mere seven months after this film's original release, though maybe not because of the proximity of the war so much as the attitude toward the Japanese in The More the Merrier, a mere two years later. That film buys into the racist propaganda that Hollywood produced as part of the war effort. This one does not, at least not beyond the casual racism built into all major studio productions of the day. And so it goes.
Because my focus in Penny Serenade is Grant, I have ask myself how this film fits in with the rest of his career. It's not correct to say that it's a fluke, because it's not. Grant scaled back his work in screwball comedies with the onset of World War II, preferring to appear in more dramatic roles. Penny Serenade opened the way for Grant to appear in those more serious films. Certainly it's a key that opened the door to his first two films with Hitchcock. A year after Penny Serenade, Grant found himself in Once Upon a Honeymoon for his frequent collaborator, Leo McCarey. That film duplicates the formula of Penny Serenade, in so far as it starts as a light comedy then veers sharply into something very dark indeed. You can see the bones of Penny Serenade in Mr. Lucky, a romance from 1943, as well. Beyond that, it's inconceivable that Grant would have been considered for None But the Lonely Heart in 1944 if he didn't have Penny Serenade as a calling card. It put directors on notice that Grant was indeed an actor who could do almost anything, who could carry a serious drama. He got a second Oscar nomination for that film. Mind you, Cary Grant the dramatic actor was already there in films like The Eagle and the Hawk, something that is sometimes obscured by Grant the movie star. And yet, in our culture's collective memory of Grant and his place in classic Hollywood, Grant's dramatic films are off in a corner if they're remembered at all. They're outshone by the great entertainments, and by the Grant Persona itself.
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