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 McCarthyWhen 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.
