Penny Serenade DVD Cary Grant DVD Irene Dunne DVD New

Penny Serenade DVD Cary Grant DVD Irene Dunne DVD New Factory Sealed

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Penny Serenade

Plot

While listening to a recording of "Penny Serenade," Julie Gardiner Adams (Irene Dunne) begins reflecting on her past. She recalls her near-impulsive marriage to newspaper reporter Roger Adams (Cary Grant), which begins on a deliriously happy note but turns out to be fraught with tragedy. While honeymooning in Japan, Julie and Roger are trapped in the 1923 earthquake, which results in her miscarriage and subsequent incapability to bear children. Upon their return to America, Roger becomes editor of a small-town newspaper, just scraping by financially. Despite their depleted resources, Julie and Roger want desperately to adopt a child. It seems hopeless until kindly adoption agency head Miss Oliver (Beulah Bondi) helps smooth their path. Alas, their happiness is once more short-lived: their new daughter, Trina (Eva Lee Kuney), succumbs to a sudden illness at the age of six. Reduced to hopelessness, Julie and Roger decide to dissolve their marriage, but Miss Oliver once more comes to the rescue. Sentimental in the extreme, Penny Serenade is also enormously effective, balancing moments of heartbreaking pathos with uproarious laughter. Only director George Stevens could have handled a scene with a copiously weeping Cary Grant without inducing discomfort or embarrassment in the audience. Since lapsing into the public domain in 1968 (though released by Columbia, the film was owned by Stevens' production firm), Penny Serenade has become almost as ubiquitous a cable-TV presence as It's a Wonderful Life.The third pairing of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Penny Serenade differs from their earlier films by being a tragic melodrama rather than a lighthearted comedy. Indeed, sometimes the soap operatics are laid on so heavily that bathos threatens to overwhelm the pathos, and with a lesser pair of stars or director, this would surely have come about. Fortunately, George Stevens shows a sure hand in knowing how far he can let the emotions be manipulated before it becomes ludicrous, and while he directs the scenes for all the emotional turmoil they're worth, he doesn't let them get out of hand. Of course, with Grant and Dunne on board, Stevens' work was made considerably easier. Both stars play with the perfect mixture of charm, class, and effortlessness, and both are willing to put themselves on the line emotionally. Grant's bravura courtroom scene is justifiably famous and a stellar example of the kind of beautifully judged work that the actor was capable of. And, though she lacks this kind of set piece, Dunne is a perfect match for Grant, turning in work that is a bit quieter but every bit as fully realized. Serenade's screenplay may be the stuff of the standard tearjerker, but its stars not only rise but fly above the material.