George Stevens is the last of the "Five Came Back" WWII directors who I haven't written a "Great Directors" entry for yet. I was on the fence for a long time about whether he should have an entry or not. Despite winning the Academy's Thalberg Award, two Oscars, and a ton of other accolades, I never liked any of his films much. His socially conscious epics like "Giant" and "Shane" bored me. They looked great, but the stories were ponderous and self-important. It was only when I started digging into films from the 1930s and 1940s that I found Stevens' pre-War output of comedies, musicals, and lighthearted adventure films. It turns out that Stevens started out as a cinematographer and gag man for the Laurel and Hardy films. And it was his early career efforts that won me over.
"Penny Serenade" is an oddball film no matter how you look at it. Telling the story of a tumultuous marriage, most of the time it's a domestic comedy, but the second half grows more and more melodramatic, finally ending in tragedy with a little last-second uplift. Episodes from the couple's life are told in flashback from a point in time when the two are about to separate. There are several terrible plot twists that only work because the actors are good enough to pull it off, and because Stevens keeps the proceedings moving along swiftly. And even so, I don't know if I would have liked "Penny Serenade" as much if I weren't lucky enough to have seen it at the right time in my life, when I was primed to be the most sympathetic to its main characters.
Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a young couple who decide to adopt a child after suffering a miscarriage. Over the years, we watch them struggle through the adoption process, common parenting woes, and unexpected tragedy. The film is absolutely manipulative, getting all the mileage it can out of the cute baby, but also very charming. I knew it had me when we came to the scene where a family friend - an ink-stained printing worker named Applejack - has to patiently demonstrate to the clueless new parents how to bathe and diaper a baby. And I realized I was completely head over heels when Cary Grant had his big speech to a judge in the third act, pleading that love should matter more than a family's temporary money problems. The Academy took notice too, giving Grant his first Best Actor nomination.
The narrative skips backwards and forwards in time, taking us from the couple's first meeting through the present day. The use of music is key, tying the flashbacks to a record collection, where each transition to a different period is paired with a new song. The visual storytelling is wonderful, dispensing with dialogue when fortune cookies, a montage of nurseries, or newspaper headlines will do. Upon a recent rewatch, I was surprised at how long it took to set up the characters and their relationship, and I'd forgotten some of the early scenes, like the entire period the couple spent living in Japan. No one even brings up adoption until halfway through the movie, but once the baby shows up it feels like everything snaps into focus. It's amazing how little comic scenes of walking up a squeaky staircase, or fumbling an uncooperative alarm clock feel so much more impactful than the literal earthquake that happens in the first act.
One thing that's confounded me about "Penny Serenade" is that the most dire and upsetting tragic turn in the story isn't depicted at all, despite being critical to the plot. We only learn about it through a letter read by one of the supporting characters some time later. Was this kind of tragedy considered too much for 1940s audiences to take? I don't know if the filmmakers made the right choice, but at least the execution is tactful and sensitive, focusing on the terrible impact of the family's loss instead, and making more of a point of their resiliency. The balance was the important part - if "Penny Serenade" had been all melodrama, without the romance or the comedy, I doubt I'd have responded to it nearly so well.
George Stevens famously stopped making comedies after returning from WWII, focusing instead on humanist dramas and prestige pictures. I consider it a terrible loss. He was certainly no stranger to melodrama before the war, but he was also one of the romantic comedy greats, and never got enough credit for it.
What I've Seen - George Stevens
Alice Adams (1935)
Swing Time (1936)
Vivacious Lady (1938)
Gunga Din (1939)
Penny Serenade (1941)
Woman of the Year (1942)
The Talk of the Town (1942)
The More the Merrier (1943)
I Remember Mama (1948)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Shane (1953)
Giant (1956)
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
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