Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Favorite Wife,’ on Complications Following a Wife’s Unexpected Reappearance)

Ellen Wagstaff Arden [played by Irene Dunne] [after being confronted by husband Nick about her seemingly sketchy 7 year disappearance and absence while shipwrecked with another man]: “It just occurs to me that I ought to feel insulted. I go through 7 years of agony. I come home to find my husband in the arms of another woman—married! My children don't know me. And all my husband can think of is, did I carry on with some poor man who wouldn't hurt a fly?”

Nick Arden [played by Cary Grant]: “Oh now, just a moment!”

Ellen: “You 'just a moment'! Did you tell her?”

[referring to Bianca]

Nick: “Hmm?”

Ellen [mercilessly mimicking him again]: “'Hmm'? Did you?”

Nick [flustered]: “Well...”

Ellen: “No, ya got into costume.”

[referring to his garish tiger print robe]

Nick: “I was about to tell her when...”

Ellen: “How long does it take to tell a woman 'My wife's come back'? I can say it in 2 seconds: 'my wife's come back'. You've had 2 days.”—My Favorite Wife (1940), screenplay by Bella and Sam Spewack, directed by Garson Kanin

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Smiles and Beauty)

“It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.” ― Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1856)

I had a really hard time coming up with an image associated with Leo Tolstoy that would epitomize what he was talking about in this quote.

The problem was this: no Tolstoy character, I believe, embodies beauty quite like the title character of Anna Karenina, and especially in the early pages of that novel, which gives a sense of her vivacity with this: “Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

When she has her fateful meeting with the man who becomes her lover, Count Vronsky, the animation in that smile comes to the fore, even as it is at war with the social and moral restraints that eventually doom her:

“In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

But I came up blank in my online search for an image that would capture the startling illumination of Anna. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the images I saw of the actresses who have played her (including Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset, and Keira Knightley) emphasized pensiveness and depression—not a surprise, when you consider the guilt, ostracism and suicide that Anna ultimately endured because of her affair with Vronsky.

So I had to venture far afield to find someone who shows how a smile “heightens the charm of a face”: 1930s Hollywood—or, to be exact, in the case of the photo accompanying this post, the actress Irene Dunne.

This weekend, in reading reviews about the new documentary about the personal and creative partnership of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, it struck me that Ethan Hawke was partly motivated in creating this tribute because younger viewers already had little sense of what this couple meant.

I’m afraid that’s even more the case with Dunne, whose heyday occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, before the use of color became commonplace in film. Consequently, at least a couple of generations of movie fans will not even bother to sample the classic films in which she appeared.

What a pity. As I discussed in this prior post, Dunne was a versatile actress as adept in musicals as in dark dramas.

But she glowed especially in the screwball comedy genre, in films like The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife and Theodora Goes Wild, where her smile could be marvelously adaptable: loving, understanding, or just radiant with unbounded joy. She was well worth the winning in these films for the likes of onscreen partners Cary Grant and Melvyn Douglas.

Particularly in his later years, when he became increasingly consumed with his spiritual quest and his own marriage deteriorated, Tolstoy himself was given very little to smiling.

But, in his youth and early middle age, he understood concretely that a smile made all the difference in beauty—marring a face when twisted by forces of destruction and evil, but heightening it if filled with inner grace.

Irene Dunne epitomized grace. If you ever meet someone with a similar life force, don’t take for granted how much your life has been enriched by that encounter. The memory of a smile can linger a lifetime.

Quote of the Day (Clarence Day, on His Mother Buying a Clock at Auction)

“Mother knew in her heart that she had no business going to auctions. She was too suggestible, and if an hypnotic auctioneer once got her eye, she was lost. Besides, an auction aroused all her worst instincts —her combativeness, her recklessness, and her avaricious love of a bargain. And the worst of it was that this time it wasn’t a bargain at all. At least she didn’t think it was now. The awful old thing was about eight feet tall, and it wasn’t the one she had wanted. It wasn’t half as nice as the clock that old Miss Van Derwent had bought. And inside the hood over the dial, she said, there was a little ship which at first she hadn’t noticed, a horrid ship that rocked up and down every time the clock ticked. It made her ill just to look at it. And she didn’t have the money, and the man said he’d have to send it this evening, and what would Father say?”—American humorist and cartoonist Clarence Day (1874-1935), “Father and His Hard-Rocking Ship,” in Life With Father (1935)

(The image accompanying this post is from the 1947 film Life With Father, based on Day’s book and the long-running Broadway comedy adapted from it. William Powell play Clarence Day Sr. and Irene Dunne his wife “Vinnie.”)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Awful Truth,’ With Cary Grant on a New Couple’s Relocation Choice)

[Lucy Warriner’s divorce from husband Jerry is about to come through, freeing her to wed oil-rich but unsophisticated Daniel Leeson.)

Jerry [played by Cary Grant]: “Ah, so you're gonna live in Ok-la-ho-ma, eh Lucy? How I envy you. Ever since I was a small boy, that name has been filled with magic for me. Ok-la-ho-ma!”

Daniel [played by Ralph Bellamy]: “We're gonna live right in Oklahoma City!”

Jerry: “Not Oklahoma City itself? Lucy, you lucky girl! No more running around to nightspots. No more prowling around in New York shops. I shall think of you every time a new show opens and say to myself, 'She's well out of it.'”

Daniel: “New York's all right for a visit but I wouldn't want to live here.”

Lucy [played by Irene Dunne]: [gamely but uncertainly] “I know I'll enjoy Oklahoma City.”

Jerry: “Well, of course. And if it should get dull, you can always go over to Tul-sa for the weekend. I think a big change like that does one good, don't you?”—The Awful Truth (1937), screenplay by Viña Delmar and an uncredited Sidney Buchman, based on a play by Arthur Richman, directed by Leo McCarey

Movie Quote of the Day (Irene Dunne, As a “Writer of Wide Reputation”)

Theodora Lynn (played by Irene Dunne): “I suddenly realized I was a writer of wide reputation and most of it bad.”—Theodora Goes Wild (1936), directed by Richard Boleslawski, screenplay by Sidney Buchman, based on an original story by Mary McCarthy

When I told a work colleague nearly a quarter-century ago the title of this great film I’d just seen at one of Manhattan’s late, lamented revival houses, The Biograph, she responded, “It sounds like a porno movie!” I’m sure many others have had that same initial reaction in the years since whenever they saw it listed on the schedule for Turner Classic Movies.

I’m not sure why Theodora Goes Wild has not entered the screwball-comedy pantheon with It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, Nothing Sacred, My Man Godfrey or Easy Living. In a way, it seems all of a piece with the reputations of the creative team behind this most underrated of cinema’s great romantic comedies.

Maybe one place to start is with Richard Boleslawski. The Russian-born director (whose career is summarized by a short but perceptive post by Katie Richardson on the blog Obscure Classics) helmed some of the more interesting films of the early sound era (Rasputin and the Empress, Men in White, The Painted Veil, Les Miserables), but had the rotten luck to die only a year after this unexpected hit for Columbia Pictures, leaving him no time to develop the long filmographies associated with other creators of the screwball genre such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, or Preston Sturges.

Take a look again at Boleslawski’s pictures: They’re serious dramas, not comedies. That lack of a track record in the genre led leading lady Irene Dunne (in the photo accompanying this post, with co-star Melvyn Douglas) to have grave misgivings about this project.

Dunne wasn’t known for comedy, either, but for that reason it might have been even more important that someone experienced in the genre could broaden her range beyond the tear-jerkers (Back Street) and musicals (Show Boat) that audiences knew her for so far. She got along well enough with the director during filming—Dunne, as virtually all her colleagues testified, was nothing if not a lady—but her confidence in Boleslawski was sorely tested when, for one scene, he ordered a crew member to fire blanks from a pistol just below her rear end to achieve the flustered reaction he hadn’t been getting from her to that point. Surely, she must have thought that even the suspension she’d been threatened with if she didn’t do this property would have been better than the near-heart attack that Boleslawski gave her.

Fortunately, they both had a sparkling screenplay by Sidney Buchman to work with. Slowly but surely, the latter (a graduate of Columbia University and a scribe at Columbia Pictures) had been building a reputation as script collaborator and script doctor. Theodora began a series of scripts (including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Talk of the Town) that made him mogul Harry Cohn’s go-to writer at Columbia. (By the late ‘40s, he had finally acquired some real power, as a producer at the studio, when his career was cut short by Hollywood’s blacklist.)

The great quality of Theodora Goes Wild, all the way down to its uproarious ending, is surprise. Other characters in the film don’t know what to make of Theodora, the church organist in one of those narrow-minded rural towns of yore who secretly writes a Peyton Place-style scandalous bestseller. Neither did audiences and critics of the time, who were bowled over by the comedy and its vivacious leading lady, an actress finding her comic voice in a film that hilariously sends up small-town hypocrisy and the joy of notoriety.

(By the way, speaking of that last phrase: when I checked out the film’s credits, it seemed perfectly plausible that this material would be based on a story by Mary McCarthy. The novelist-critic who years later would leave jaws agape with her scandalous semi-autobiographical novel of 1930s Vassar, The Group, and her short story about a promiscuous bohemian young woman, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit,” would seem a natural to write the kind of material in this film. It seems, however, that this McCarthy--Mary Therese McCarthy--is not the film’s McCarthy--Mary Eunice McCarthy. Oh, well--one less interesting tidbit to write about!)

“Dunne doesn’t just see the joke—she is radiant with it, possessed by it and glowing with it,” writes critic James Harvey in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. “Nobody else does this so completely or to quite the same degree; Dunne takes us inside her own amusement—rich, energizing, seemingly inexhaustible.”

Dunne’s performance did more than provide her with her first Academy Award nomination since the 1931 western Cimarron. It also put her on the A-list whenever romantic comedies were being cast. The following year, she was nominated for an Oscar yet again, for The Awful Truth, the first of three collaborations with Cary Grant (who, toward the end of her life, told screenwriter-director Garson Kanin that she was his favorite leading lady, partly because co-starring with her was less like work than like a “flirtation”).

By the end of her career, Dunne had five Oscar nominations, and in 1985, five years before her death, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Fans like myself only wish that her talents could have been discovered sooner so that we’d have even more great performances from her. A loving and luminous tribute to her can be found on the Irene Dunne Project.

This Day in Film History (Irene Dunne, Vivacious Screwball Queen, Dies)

September 4, 1990—Irene Dunne, who brought grace, vivacity and allure to several of the finest romantic comedies of Hollywood’s golden age, died of heart failure at age 91 in Los Angeles.

An Image search function of Google confirms the judgment of Florenz Ziegfeld (no slowpoke in appreciating femininity) in casting her in a Chicago production of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat. 

But the image I picked, oddly enough, is one of the few that capture one of her characteristic moments in her screwball comedies, where intelligence, wit and understanding of the poor, deluded male of the species were at a premium. It's a face lit by joy, ready to unleash a zinger.

The screwball comedy, a genre that Hollywood has fitfully tried to imitate (What’s Up, Doc?, TV’s Moonlighting) but has never really equaled, provided the finest moments of their careers to several actresses, including Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, and Myrna Loy. But Dunne might have been the most versatile of the whole bunch.

I mean “versatile” not simply in the variety of genres she took on in a film career lasting a bit more than two decades, but also in the variety of textures she could bring to a single role and single film.

She started in Hollywood with weepies like Back Street (1932), where she kept her dignity in a part that could have been played simply as a hapless victim. Before long, she was also making her mark in musicals, where she had excelled on Broadway before heading west. She appeared in the earlier—and, to most observers, better—of the two screen versions of Show Boat (1936).

Her comic scenes in the latter convinced studio heads that she’d be right for a full-fledged comedy. Dunne, no fan of the genre (at least, as far as her own work was concerned), was so reluctant to take on the property that she risked suspension by traveling to Europe so she wouldn’t have to do it. 

Luckily she gave in, and Theodora Goes Wild, released the same year as Show Boat, gave her one of her five Oscar nominations, while opening up a whole new range of films for her.

(By the way, can I stop her and complain about the injustice of Hollywood ignoring her continual brilliant work while awarding a statuette to the likes of Cher?)

Indeed, in his perceptive study, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, From Lubitsch to Sturges (1987), film critic James Harvey makes a persuasive case that Dunne was “the most dazzling screwball comedienne of them all.” 

Theodora is not as well-known today as some of the other classics of the form, such as It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, or His Girl Friday, but that only means that—if you’re uninitiated to all things Dunne, as I was nearly 25 years ago—it will surprise and delight you all the more. In the film, Harvey notes, Dunne “doesn’t just see the joke—she is radiant with it, possessed by it and glowing with it.”

In a few short years, Dunne was ready to try something even riskier than comedy—dramedies. Love Affair (1939), which would be remade twice (as An Affair to Remember and, again, Love Affair) began with the sophistication of a screwball comedy before taking an unexpected turn into far more serious territory two-thirds of the way through. 

The same thing holds true for Penny Serenade, Dunne’s third collaboration with one of her favorite co-stars, Cary Grant. (The first two—The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife—were more traditional screwball comedies.)

Dunne is a joy to watch onscreen—and, if her co-workers in Hollywood’s Dream Factory are to be believed, a joy to work with, too. Grant thought that co-starring with her was not merely work, but practically a “flirtation.” 

Most revealing might have been Lucille Ball, who was taking the kind of sharp mental notes that would later serve her in good stead for decades as TV’s premiere comedienne. Harvey includes this telling anecdote from Ball, related to an American Film Institute seminar in 1974, about how Dunne worked:

“(Katharine) Hepburn 'telegraphed,' she said-'Well, I'm going to be funny'-whereas Dunne always surprised, even in repeated takes of the same scene. 'But I watched her do takes-literally, one day there were thirty-two takes-and twenty-five must have been different. She really worked on how to do that scene. Where Kate would do it the same way every time and telegraph it every time.'"

Dunne’s film career ended in 1952, nearly four decades before her death. She would live long enough to see the type of persona she maintained offscreen—reserved, deeply if conventionally spiritual (a devout Roman Catholic), and possessing a sprightly wit that made her a kind of modern American counterpart to Shakespeare’s Rosalind or Shaw’s Candida—an increasingly endangered species in Hollywood.

In searching the Internet for material on this vivacious, versatile actress, I found a blog devoted to her: The Irene Dunne Project. Few if any other actresses merit such extensive, gloriously loving attention.