I confess to being a soft touch, despite being such a cynic. Some movies have moved me to tears, even when I realize I am being blatantly manipulated. But my eyes stayed bone dry throughout the only time I intend to watch 1941’s Penny Serenade. I found it to be an accurate title for something so packed with cheap sentiment.
That’s surprising as it stars Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, who were so phenomenal together in The Awful Truth. But that was a screwball comedy. One major mistake made by this film is it almost entirely forgot humor. Another major mistake is it fills the absence with cheap melodrama.
Even the framing device is trite and annoying. Starting in the present, Dunne is walking out on her husband (Grant) when she decides to play the 78 rpm records in an album they have. The movie is split into flashbacks, with each beginning in a circle wipe over the spinning record. I found this more annoying with each flashback. Also, this is a two-hour movie that feels even longer and, by the end, I was hoping she would accidentally break a record or two just to shave some minutes off the runtime.
The reason for the record motif is established in the first flashback, where Grant sees Dunne working in a music store. Desperate to get to know her better, he manages to monopolize her time by previewing and buying 37 discs. This, despite him not owning a Victrola. What I found interesting about this scene is this is a music store and not just a record store—it sells sheet music and instruments as well. I’ve read about how, in the early days of record retailing, discs were largely sold in furniture stores. No joke.
So their meet-cute is cute enough, but things start getting wobbly with the next flashback. It’s New Years Eve, and Grant is so far a no show at Dunne’s party. Being a newspaperman, he’s still in the office. His friend and colleague Applejack has shown up, at least. Played by Edgar Buchanan, this character receives the kind of welcome Norm would always get on Cheers, and we have no idea who this guy is yet. Actually, even when the movie is over, I still wasn’t entirely certain why Applejack is always around this couple. That said, I came to like this character more than any other in the film.
Anywho, Grant shows up and announces he has just been given a highly lucrative foreign correspondent opportunity in Japan. After breaking her heart with this news, he proposes marriage because, of course. She accepts, and it is suddenly midnight and everybody is cheering and it immediately starts snowing. And the needle on my bullshit detector starts moving.
I need to jump back to an earlier scene to set-up for something that’s coming. On a date at a restaurant on the beach, Grant and Dunne open their respective fortune cookies (yeah, Chinese food served beachside—I can’t quite picture that, either), and hers reads “You’ll get you what you want—A BABY”. It is obvious this strikes a chord with her, but she refuses to show the fortune to him.
Now let’s jump ahead to when she finally joins Grant, now her husband, in an entirely set-bound Japan. Up to this point, he has been seemingly ambivalent about children, and she has not been open with him about her desire for them. Not sharing your dreams and goals—that’s a great foundation on which to build a relationship. Anyhoo, now she’s knocked up and he at least appears to be enthusiastic about it.
Then the great earthquake happens. In what may be the most obnoxious metaphor I have encountered in a film, we’ll see her fortune cookie message on the ground as it gets obliterated by falling debris. Sure enough, she has miscarried. While she recovers in the hospital, we see babies being delivered to seemingly every room in the ward but hers. Alas, it turns out she will never be able to bear children. You may ask, “Why don’t they just adopt?” Yeah, we all know that’s coming, so just chill.
Just before the earthquake, Grant had come into an inheritance and quit his job with the paper. Once they are back in the states, he buys a small town’s defunct newspaper operations, which conveniently has a large apartment above it. Applejack leaves the big city to manage the printing press. In one of the few obvious jokes in this picture, and one of the few that made me chuckle, we see the circulation numbers skyrocket over time from 901 to 908.
Applejack plants the idea of adoption in the couple’s minds, as he was an adoptee himself. At the orphanage, the head matron (Beulah Bondi) explains how thoroughly prospective parents are screened, a process that normally takes roughly a year to complete. I was glad to see the movie portraying adaption in a positive light while also showing how seriously the process is taken.
The next flashback takes us to one year later. The newspaper’s operations have folded, and Grant hasn’t taken another job, for whatever reason. It’s time for a judge to consider making the adoption official, though I thought it already was. This must have been one of those Rent-A-Center orphanages where they repossess the child if you can’t make the payments.
In what may be the dumbest moment in this picture, the judge confirms the adoption despite the couple not having any income. I was stunned the movie so respectfully portrayed the adoption process earlier, only to show complete disregard for it later. I’m sure audiences of the time cheered when the judge throws caution to the wind and grants the adoption. Myself, I was appalled by his disregard for procedures that were there to ensure the health and safety of children. This is a bad judge who should be unseated.
Some more years pass and the baby grows into a cloyingly cute girl whose eyes don’t smile when her mouth does. Applejack is still there as some sort of presumably unpaid household help. Once again, I don’t understand why this guy is always with this couple. At least he was the only competent person in the room when Grant and Dunne needed to be shown how to bathe and diaper the baby years before.
I don’t want to give anything away, but viewers already know some sort of tragedy happens, because the film started in the present, when Dunne is leaving Grant. I’m not sure which is more ridiculous: the foreshadowing of this event, or how the resulting tragedy is communicated entirely through a multi-page letter displayed on the screen. Pity the poor viewers of the future, unable to read cursive, who will be denied the thrill of reading several pages of text.
By this point, I started hating Penny Serenade. A final twist is so preposterous that I ended up flipping the bird to the television with both hands while making PEW PEW sounds. While a so-so melodrama for most of its runtime, roughly half of this picture is deeply terrible, resorting to the most pathetic of attempts to wet our eyeballs. As for myself, all my eyes did was roll, and way too much.
Dir: George Stevens
Starring Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Edgar Buchanan
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray