Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941) is a classic example of a weepie: a drama, usually romantic in nature, designed to make its audience weep buckets by the time it’s through. Favourites of mine in the genre are the Bette Davis vehicles Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) and All This And Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940). Although the term ‘weepies’ isn’t used as much these days, they are still being made. A very good recent example is The Notebook, Nick Cassavetes’ sleeper hit of 2004 starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.
Penny Serenade is also an example of a film that is hard to talk about without giving away plot points designed to take you by surprise and pull at your heartstrings. So if you plan on seeing this film and want the full shock value of all the obstacles thrown in Irene Dunne and Cary Grant’s way, don’t read past this paragraph but skip to the final paragraph for my recommendation. Although I plan to tread judiciously in order to avoid too many spoilers, I wouldn’t be able to write about the film at all without mentioning a couple of key plot points that were quite a shock to me right at the beginning.
The film opens in a melancholy mood with Julie (Irene Dunne) and Roger (Cary Grant) on the verge of divorce because, as Julie sadly tells their devastated friend Applejack (Edgar Buchanan), they just don’t seem to need each other anymore. Applejack tries to convince Julie otherwise and leaves her alone with a scrapbook of records and other mementos the couple has collected over the years. Julie then begins playing the records one by one and relives the memories of her relationship with Roger.
The transitions to the flashbacks are done in a very clever way. Instead of the usual dissolve to the past, they have gone for an iris in and out over an image of the record of the tune that evokes each memory. The tagline for the film is “Remember the tune they were singing the night we fell in love?” For Julie and Roger that song was Freed & Brown’s "You Were Meant for Me”, a song from the late 1920s that would no doubt evoke nostalgia on the part of the original 1941 audience watching the film, as would the collection of other nostalgic songs of the '20s and '30s referenced during the course of the film: “Just a Memory”, “The Missouri Waltz”, “I’m Tickled Pink with a Blue-Eyed Baby”, and “The Moon was Yellow.”
Article comments
1 - Joe
I love this film for the challenge it poses in trying to appreciate its effect on its 1941 audience. Roger's high hopes and the heartbreak of his crushing failures must have been familiar to an audience grown through the depression. And the segue from the career-centric Roger to family-first Roger was so well done I'd suppose many in the audience were feeling a "yes, been there; done that" moment.
Dunne was marvelous in her generosity with Grant. She could so easily have made this, as has been said, into just another weeper. The underplaying by her and Grant just made this film so much more believeable and gave us one of our few looks at Grant's depth of dramatic talent. No wonder here that they were one of the great, great screen pairings ever.
2 - Nishikata Mama
I agree -- Dunne & Grant were pretty incredible together. I heard that this was Dunne's favourite film because of her own experiences with adopting a daughter.