DVD Review: Rarely Seen Screwball Comedies
Loretta Young, Irene Dunne in Four Columbia Films from 1930s, '40s
Aug 3, 2009
The essence of screwball comedies is the conflict, in increasingly ridiculous situations, of rich and middle class archetypes. In the best screwball films, the result is that both classes end up looking pretty ridiculous.
Irene Dunne Goes Wild
Irene Dunne's patrician good looks and aristocratic bearing serve her well in Theodora Goes Wild, from 1936. She plays to her wholesome, patrician screen image as the uptight Theodora Lynn of Lynnfield, Connecticut. But just eight minutes into the film, we learn she's secretly the author known as Caroline Adams, who has written a scandalously sexy best-selling novel.
Dunne's leading man is Melvyn Douglas as Michael Grant, an earthy free spirit who finds Caroline Adams irresistible, although she finds him quite the opposite.
He tracks her to Lynnfield, discovers her true identity and schoolmarmish nature, and declares, "Everything Lynnfield doesn't want you to feel, you write about. Love, laughter, all the things you want to experience. And cant...
"There's a happy world out yonder, girlie. Break loose, be yourself. Tell them you'll go take a jump."
Melvyn Douglas Has His Own Secret
Later we learn Michael has a secret all his own -- one he can't prevent Theodora from discovering and which drives the story to the end.
There are sweet moments of quiet intimacy between these two well-cast and skilled farceurs. The film becomes especially satisfying when Theodora really goes wild in the last act.
The cast includes the rotund Robert Grieg, usually typecast as a delightfully ironic butler. Here, he's got the meatier part of Theodora's kindly but savvy Uncle John. Spring Byington, so good in many films (including the classic The Devil and Miss Jones) is the town's head biddy and chief gossip.
A superior satire of morals and mores, Theodora Goes Wild is ripe for rediscovery beyond the insular world of film buffs.
Dunne and Boyer: Together Again
Like the title suggest, this 1944 entry re-teams Dunne for a third (and final) time with Charles Boyer. (Their best film together was their first, the original Love Affair in 1939.)
Again, Dunne is cast as a prim New Englander confronting a man from the Big City.
Here she's Ann Caldwell, who inherited the mayoralty of little Brookhaven, Vermont from her late husband, Jonathan. In fact, a statue of him in the town square plays a key role in the comedy.
After lightning knocks Jonathan's head off that statue, Dunne travels to New York to interview a sculptor about crafting a replacement likeness. The sly, sophisticated artist, Georges Corday is -- voila! -- the continental charmer Boyer.
And as in Theodora, when she rejects the man's advances, he follows her home to New England, ostensibly to win the commission but really to woo her.
Together Again is filled with nice twists and noteworthy performances, not just from the leads from an excellent supporting cast including Charles Coburn as Dunne's matchmaking father-in-law and Mona Freeman as her hormonally-charged teenage stepdaughter.
Loretta Young in The Doctor Takes a Wife
Loretta Young -- she of the angelic eyes and momentous cheekbones -- stars in the DVD package's final two films. In 1940's The Doctor Takes a Wife, Young is proto-feminist June Cameron, the author of Spinsters Aren't Spinach -- a bestseller instructing women why they don't need men to complete them.
You can guess where this one's headed.
The man who proves, for lack of a better phrase, that bachelors aren't broccoli is dashing Ray Milland as Dr. Timothy Sterling, a seemingly ineffectual university medical professor who's engaged to be married.
Naturally, they can't stand each other. But through a contrivance you'd only see in the movies, the two are mistaken for newlyweds. They soon become obligated to continue the charade, each for selfish, purely professional reasons.
Ray Milland Miscast
Watching these two get under each other's skin is the best part of the film. But the pacing is too sluggish for screwball. And the urbane Milland is not adept at playing hysterical, something he must do in a strained sequence of deception involving both his stuffy university colleagues and his fiancee.
Offering fine support is the nasal-voiced British character actor Reginald Gardiner as Young's smarmy publisher.
Loretta Young is alternately coy, sarcastic and strong-willed. Her fine performance is wasted against an actor like Milland,who's got the requisite looks and charm but little common touch.
Still, it's a fun ride, with a nice twist in the final act.
Loretta Young and Brian Aherne in A Night to Remember
The final film in the two-disc set, 1942's A Night to Remember, is simply out of place because it is not a screwball comedy at all.
If anything, you could call it a noir murder comedy -- if such a thing existed.
The film is an unhappy marriage of light comedy and homicidal mystery. And those are like oil and water -- they just don't mix.
Loretta Young is Nancy Troy, who's married to Brian Aherne as Jeff Troy, the author of cheesy murder mysteries.
Strange things happen when they move into a Greenwich Village basement apartment where someone recently died.
It soon becomes clear the death was a murder conspiracy involving the landlord and several tenants.
Loretta Young as Hard-Charging Heroine
As in The Doctor Takes a Wife, Young is the decisive force who drives the events forward. In this case, she leads the couple's own investigation. The ineffectual Aherne plays tag along. Still, he brings a nice, light touch to the role.
The suporting cast includes Sidney Toler; Lee Patrick (Sam Spade's girl Friday in The Maltese Falcon); Jeff Donnell (Frank Lovejoy's frightened wife in the Bogart vehicle In a Lonely Place) and the deliciously malevolent villainess Gale Sondergaard.
Don't confuse this film with the identically-titled 1958 movie about the Titanic disaster.
This is a modest entertainment noteworthy only for the presence of Young, whose energetic performance matches her remarkable beauty.
The two-disc set includes vintage trailers and a mostly forgettable Technicolor cartoon, The Mad Hatter, about a working girl's typical day. The set has a suggested retail price of $24.96 and is available Aug. 4, 2009.
Icons of Screwball Comedy, Vol. 1 is reviewed here.
