Sony has been the only company doing great in terms of commercial releases of classic film lately. Warner and Fox have announced and released very small compared to their huge activity of the last few years.
Like volume one, this space contains four films on two discs:
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Theodora Goes Wild (1936) – Irene Dunne is allotment of the leading family in a small-minded minute town. She is also the author of a provocative bestseller under an assumed name. Melvyn Douglas is a book jacket illustrator who figures out who the author is and assumes Theodora wants to be liberated from her shrimp town existence. Probably the best film in this place.
Together Again (1944) Irene Dunne is a Vermont widow who goes to Fresh York to interview a sculptor, played by Charles Boyer. When she returns to Vermont she is surprised to recognize Boyer again when he decides to fade into her garage to do his sculpting. Charles Coburn costars as Dunne’s confused father-in-law. A hard-to-find and laughable film.
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The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940) Loretta Young plays the feminist author of books on the joy of being a single woman. Ray Milland is a college professor whose career advancement is wound by the fact that he is unmarried. When the two are inaccurate as a married couple they settle to let the farce continue since it benefits both of them individually. A very estimable film and rarely seen.
A Night to Remember (1943) – Loretta Young plays the wife of a novelist. She rents a sunless apartment in Greenwich Village hoping it will provide the atmosphere her husband needs to write his next unique. Instead, a body turns up in their apartment. Not as apt as the other films, but salubrious enough.
I accumulate the impression that we should query no extra features.
Sony offers us one masterpiece of Screwball Comedy and three lesser but in varying degrees perfectly acceptable minor films.
The masterpiece among these four movies is of course “Theodora Goes Wild”, Columbia’s 1936 comedy about the adventures of limited town girl Theodora Lynn in the great city. Leading lady Dunne was so unattracted to such a role – a ditzy comedy – she took off for Europe in the hope Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn would give up on his ‘crazy idea’ of casting her, dignified and very edifying Irene Dunne, a serious actress, as a petite town girl who secretly pens a exciting bestseller under a pseudonym, Caroline Adams, then tries to screen her notorious identity attend home from her church-going family and neighbors. Cohn stuck to his guns, and through one of those palatable transformations film is forever giving us, the melodramatic star of countless womens pictures reemerged reborn as a star comedienne!
The basic legend line is elegant straightforward, Theodora doesn’t want anyone to ogle she is the author of a book condemned in her beget home town, Lynnfield – named after her family! When Michael Grant, played by Melvyn Douglas at his most urbane, the artist who painted the sexually alluring camouflage for the book, tricks Theodora’s publisher into meeting the highly elusive Ms ‘Caroline Adams’, the painter discovers she’s anything but the wild debauchee the book suggests. Instead, the accurate author is shocked at all the notoriety and wishes she had never written ‘That thing!” “What came over me!” Theodora says, as she explains to her publisher and the leering artist who she’s distinct is undressing her with his peruse, “Were you ever raised in a petite town by two maiden aunts? Have you played the organ in church since you were fifteen? No, well I have. And just now I ask myself where did Caroline Adams reach from? How did all this launch? ”
When Michael tries to survey the sexpot he believes is hidden slack Theodora’s chilly reserve, he gets nowhere, and she flees attend to Lynnfield. And fair when Theodora thinks its sterling to breath again and her secret is well-behaved, who should appear whistling on the sidewalk in front of her collected home but Grant, posing as an out of work drifter. When Theodora’s aunts hire him to do some work around the set she’s disturbed. Naturally events follow a predictable course, with Theodora falling for Michael, but in this case Michael, glad he has won through Theodora’s reserves, returns to the gargantuan city, leaving slack a shallow effect, claiming he has ‘freed’ Theodora. Confused and upset, Theodora feels mature and jilted.
Refusing to win such treatment from Michael, and now infuriated by the wagging of local tongues gossiping about Theodora and a ‘GARDENER!’, a now flush with best-seller royalties Theodora sets off from microscopic town Connecticut for Modern York City. There she discovers Michael also has his fill issues, including an gruesome bitter marriage continuing only because his father demands his son conclude married as to not upset the father’s political standing. Instantly recognizing her chance, Theodora moves in to embarass Michael as he embarassed her, and the film zooms into overdrive as Theodora, now turned out in improper fashions, and filling an fervent press who lap up her juicy hints of broken marriages, becomes both avenging angel and amusing muse.
The films high point: A glorious Theodora giving the papparazzi a smart smile while dancing in the arms of the Governor, who of course has no clue as to the identity of his though-provoking partner – now a celebrated wild woman and homebreaker who has become front page copy in all the scandal sheets of Unique York. The handling and photography of this scene at the Position Ball is one of the absolute highwater marks not only of Screwball Comedy but American film.
This deliberately runt synopsis only suggests an outline of parts of the film; what gives it such special charm is not only a clever storyline but the ease with which Dunne plays off her fellow actors – exquisite professionals who allow her to literally bloom from the girl of the three hankie weepies into the liberated humorous creature she becomes.
Dunne was so advantageous she received an Academy Award Nomination for Theodora, and the next year returned to comedy in the spontaneous perfection that is “The Bad Truth”. The Terrible Truth – a rare comedy nominee for Best Characterize, and winner for best director. Dunne’s mesmerizing skill at reading comedy is truly unbelievable here, and once again she was nominated for Best Actress. For audiences of the times Dunne’s performances were apt out of left field, wholly unexpected for anyone who had sat through her playing interminable jilted women in such fare as “Abet Street.” Now at her best, Irene Dunne illuminates the shroud, an irridescent actress, and “Theodora Goes Wild” is the first film showing her in paunchy cruise! Highest recommendation!
Of the three other films –
Dunne and Boyer in “Together Again” is a disappointment. I fail to glimpse why unprejudiced because a well-liked actor or actress are in a film people lavish praise on it. This same uncritical adoration is laivshed indiscriminately on for several Myrna Loy/William Powell features – in particular the later films in the “Thin Man” series. Ladies and gentleman – “Together Again” is not a very splendid movie. Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer were earlier – and far better cast – in the respectable film, “Savor Affair”, remade by its director Leo McCarey with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr as “An Affair to Remember. The later well known version, in attractive color, and hugely common, appears, when seen against the first version, device too long, idle and labored. Boyer is far better than Grant, suitable as the illustrious lover, and Dunne more the assured lady than the skittish Kerr. Sadly, like so many Columbias, this earlier film fell into a depressed place and today looks very poorly. Esteem Affair So witness this film about Boyer the sculptor, and Dunne as diminutive town mayor, but go aid and look Dunne and Boyer gain magic together in the earlier film.
(Movie buffs as bored as I was by the basic film can at least have fun trying to place a number of uncredited performers, notably two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters at the very beginning of her career; Carole Mathews, long since escaped from a Midwestern nunnery and gone Hollywood; and Miss World’s Stunning, Adele Jergens, with her brunette hair now blonde as a stripper in what would too soon become her type casting. Oddly enough, for a wartime movie the director insists on showing far more of the aging Dunne than these young bombshells! At one point Ms Jergens is out of watch on stage performing while Dunne is before the camera backsatge in the ladies dressing room doing the valid stripping while her dress, with had wine spilled on it, is being ironed by an attendant. One can only imagine what the servicemen felt watching a film with the likes of Unusual York’s top display girl Adele Jergens beginning a strip tease when suddenly they are given such a switcheroo as that! The film also has an isolated and rather painful bittersweet elevator scene lively one of the Petite Rascals.)
“The Doctor Takes a Wife” mixes Ray Milland and Loretta Young in a less than first-rate legend, but the two leads both offer charm. Gail Patrick is as ever typecasted as the other woman, and once again somewhat wasted. (To perceive Patrick in absolute top originate one must survey “My Man Godfrey”, given a magisterial reissue on Criterion – My Man Godfrey – Criterion Collection ) Let’s hope the underrated Ms Young, perhaps too familar from her long running television expose, finally can be seen in her better films, such as the positive but utterly charming “The Farmer’s Daughter”.
The other Young feature finds her playing detective after a fashion – this is certainly nothing to obtain mad about.
Had “Theodora Goes Wild” been offered as a single feature this DVD whisper would have received a pudgy and very deserved five stars. Hopefully a four star review will not support anyone from trying the lead feature. I should notice that Dunne was not alone in losing out in the Academy Awards – in 1936 Carole Lombard was passed over for her glorious performance as Irene Bullock in “My Man Godfrey”, and in 1937 Garbo, up for her work in “Camille” lost out. In 1937 Dunne’s finest comedic partner, Cary Grant, amazingly wasn’t even nominated!
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