Cary Grant became one of the most popular stars of Classic Hollywood thanks to comedies. However, the role he considered his favourite belonged to a film of a different genre. That film was Penny Serenade, the 1941 romantic drama produced and directed by George Stevens.
The plot begins when Julie Gardiner (played by Irene Dunne) tells a family friend, Applejack Carney (played by Edgar Buchanan), that she is going to leave her husband, Roger Adams (played by Cary Grant). Before she departs, she indulges in listening to a song on the gramophone, and that makes her reminisce about her life with Roger. Through flashback, the plot goes back ten years to when she first met Roger while working as a clerk in a music shop. They soon fall in love, marry, and later travel to Japan, where Roger works as a reporter. Julie gets pregnant but loses the baby through a miscarriage during an earthquake. When she returns to America, she learns that she can never have a child again. Roger decides to invest all of his modest savings into a newspaper that he would run in a small California town. The Adamses, thanks to an agency run by the sympathetic Miss Oliver (played by Beulah Bondi), are able to adopt a baby girl named Trina. They manage to keep her when authorities question Roger’s fitness for parenthood due to his financial problems. Yet fate would strike them with another tragedy.
The reason why Cary Grant favoured the role in Penny Serenade over others is probably the same reason why he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for it. Acting as a straight romantic lead in a film with serious, and sometimes even dark, overtones—including a scene where the protagonist had to cry—was, or at least appeared to be, more challenging. Grant, on the other hand, had the good support of Irene Dunne, "The First Lady of Hollywood", an actress with whom he had appeared in two hit screwball comedies: The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. Dunne would often name the role of Julie Gardiner as her favourite, because it always reminded her of her own adopted daughter. Just like Grant, Dunne was great at comedy, but, unlike Grant, she had previous success in melodramas. The two of them had great chemistry together, and it contributed a lot to this film. Their work was complemented by Edgar Buchanan, a character actor who provides something of comic relief in Penny Serenade and who had a distinguished career in 1960s television sitcoms.
Director George Stevens handles the plot well and uses popular songs from the past to depict the passage of time and create feelings of nostalgia among the audience. The technique was, in a way, something of a novelty for Hollywood and would later be used by other film-makers with great success. Despite being well received by critics, Penny Serenade wasn’t a big hit with audiences and is nowadays one of the lesser-known films starring Cary Grant. One of the reasons for its relative obscurity can be found in unfavourable historical circumstances. Part of the plot takes place in Japan and features Japanese characters as polite and kind towards the protagonists. Only a few months after its premiere, the attack on Pearl Harbor made such an approach at odds with the chauvinistic attitudes of the US public.
However, even without the broader historic context, Penny Serenade at times looks odd because the script by Morrie Ryskind represents an unusual and often unsuccessful amalgam of two different films. One is an old-school weepy melodrama which tackles sometimes very dark subjects like the loss of a child. The other is a light-hearted comedy that tries to remind the audience of the screwball comedies that made Grant a star. There are too many tonal shifts between the two, which can create confusion among viewers. Penny Serenade is still a good film, but viewers may find it more an example of the craftsmanship of Hollywood’s golden age than anything close to a classic.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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