PENNY SERENADE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 16

PENNY SERENADE

(Columbia)

HE sense of smell and the sense of taste are supposed to be the best mediums for arousing nostalgia. (The taste

of caper sauce always sends ‘me back a good many years to a certain riotous Sam Weller Swarry which I attended as a fledgling reporter, but I’d best not go into that.) Next in potency aS a memory-reviver are probably old tunes ("Moonlight and Roses" always does something to me). In Penny Serenade, Columbia have used the device of the replayed melody to tell in retrospect the romance and _ chequered domesticity of Roger Adams (Cary Grant) and his wife Julie (Irene Dunne). While Julie packs up to leave her husband in the opening scene, she plays over her collection of favourite recordings, and as each disc revolves it recalls old associations, sentimental, tragic, or happy as the case may be, and explains the reason for the impending break-up in the Adams household. Or rather, it tries’ to explain, for the reason given hardly bears close examination. After a whirlwind courtship, Roger and Julie Adams settle in Tokio, where he is a foreign correspondent,’ but an earthquake which is terrifying enough to make one glad it is only faked shatters their home and their hopes of happy parenthood, condemning Julie to

a childless future. Back in America, their marriage becomes increasingly aimless until they adopt an orphan baby and suffer some of the pangs of parenthood by proxy, providing in one or two sequences some of the most delicious comedy seen in any picture for a long time. But this felicity doesn’t last for them or the~audience; their adopted daughter dies suddenly, and the husband allows his grief to turn him into a selfish, sulking boor, who sends himself and his wife to coventry, and finally drives her to call a cab to go home to mother. Only the fortunate discovery that there are other babies to be adopted saves the situation and should enable the feminine portion of the audience to put away their last handkerchiefs unsodden. The husband’s cruelly self-centred behaviour is the unsatisfactory part of the story. I hope I shall not seem to libel Cary Grant too much if I say that, while I always half expect him to act boorishly in every picture, in this particular one such behaviour is scarcely in character. But for the most part the direction and acting is good enough to save what is frankly a "tear-jerker" from becoming objectionably maudlin. The device of telling the story by memory-reviving gramophone discs is ingenious and doesn’t run flat, though occasionally the needle scratches and sticks in a groove; and in recording the death of the adopted daughter the director has withstood the temptation to pile on the agony. Radically departing from the style of crazy farce which they established as co-stars in The Awful Truth and My Favourite Wife, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant (apart from the flaw in character I’ve mentioned) put a great deal of human nature and natural comedy into roles that might easily have been ruined by over-emphasis. If you see Penny Serenade, watch for that window which slams down of its own accord every time a door is opened. An obvious director’s trick, it interested me because of its apparently sinister purpose (will the small daughter be guillotined? I kept wondering), and also because the director so plainly forgot to do anything about it.