Saturday, September 4, 2010

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.

2 comments:

Renata said...

Irene is my idol, that's all I can say, she is just the best and I will never understand why she is so forgotten today =( I love you Dunnie!

casu said...

Thank you for this beautiful and intelligent article about Irene.
And thank you for mentioning my blog The Irene Dunne Project with such kind words. Susanne