a film with possibilities, but sentimentally overdrawn and underwritten **warning: definitely includes spoilers to the story! Having been a Cary Grant fan for some time and more recently an admirer of director George Stevens I was eager to watch Penny Serenade. I find that, unfortunately, I have to disagree with most of the other listed comments.
That Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are wonderful actors, there can be no dispute. However, it is the screenplay that is at fault here. Both main actors are luminous and riveting, but they are either burdened with lines that fall flat or, in many instances, with a lack of words and dialogue.
***spoiler*** While in Japan, the newlywed couple are caught in an earthquake and the pregnant Julie (Dunne) miscarries. The word is never mentioned, which I found hard to believe. I am supposing that this must have been due to the censorship code of the time.
***spoiler*** After their adopted daughter Trina dies, there is an appalling absence of dialogue between husband and wife. Julie and Roger (Grant) are left without words, sitting in silence, supposedly to convey despair and sorrow. I found this such an unimaginative way to handle what the couple was experiencing. A series of brief scenes in which Dunne tried to talk with her husband in ordinary day-to-day situations might have better depicted Grant's withdrawal and depression.
The gimmick of using different songs to lead into flashbacks of various stages in the marriage was heavy-handed, stilted and trite. I think that the movie might have been better organized if the story had simply played in sequence from past to present. It put too much of a burden on Dunne to do what little acting she could as she put one record on the turntable after another. After the second record, I no longer found it credible that she would play those songs and temporarily relive all her heartbreak, considering the fact that she and her husband were on the brink of divorce and she was getting ready to leave him. I can only suppose that in 1941 this idea was more workable and more acceptable for the audience of that time.
The actress who played Katrina at age six had a forced smile that did not seem natural or genuine. The couple of times she smiled at the end of her lines was distracting. She was trying too hard to be cute.
In some scenes it almost seemed as if Dunne and Grant were told to improvise their lines and it was clumsy. Here I think of the scene when Miss Oliver from the orphanage comes to the apartment to check on them for the first time and the scene in which they go to the orphanage to see the baby for the first time. Even Miss Oliver is not given sufficient, credible lines. In describing the infant Katrina to the couple, all she can say is: "she is like no other child" two or three times. It was wearing. The scene when they take the five-and-a-half week old Trina home from the orphanage was overlong and overplayed. Grant seemed very uncomfortable, while Dunne managed her way. The scene where several of the men who worked on Roger's newspaper were in the apartment watching the nervous and inept Julie washing and diapering her baby was, again, overplayed and overdrawn, especially the repetition of the cracking of the peanut shells as a distraction to Julie and wearing on her nerves.
As many have said, the highlight of the film is Grant's scene with the judge, pleading that his daughter not be taken away because he is out of work. It is such a powerful and wonderful scene, which, for me, only emphasizes the fact that so much of the rest of the movie is weak by comparison.
As for the director, I think it is fair to say that films like A Place in the Sun and Giant were far more successful and far better achievements artistically and dramatically.
I can really only recommend the film because of Grant and Dunne. They have done much better work in other films. I was surprised to learn that Grant was nominated for an Oscar in this movie.