Popcorn and Inspiration: ‘Penny Serenade’: Sharing Is the Lifeblood of Love

NR | 1 hr 59 min | Drama | 1941

Handsome newspaper reporter Roger (Cary Grant) marries pretty Julie (Irene Dunne), who works in a shop selling music records. His job takes them from America to Japan, but they return after she, expecting their first child, miscarries following an earthquake. He quits his job so he can run a neighborhood newspaper, helped by common friend Applejack (Edgar Buchanan). Meanwhile, she copes with the emptiness of now being unable to bear children.

When they decide to adopt, adoption agent Miss Oliver (Beulah Bondi) explains how serious a responsibility adoption is: They can’t simply walk off with a baby they fancy unless they demonstrate, not just willingness, but competence to put the child’s welfare first.

Eventually, adopted baby Trina becomes the center of their merry world before fate strikes again, and she succumbs to illness. Emptiness returns, as the once-inseparable couple drift apart.

At times, producer-director George Stevens’s characters are looking at something or someone through a window or a half-open door. At other times, audiences are doing that, just like window-shoppers; a lot seems within grasp, but a lot else is out of reach.

Newspaper reporter Roger (Cary Grant) marries pretty Julie (Irene Dunne), and they soon want to share their love with a child. (Public Domain)

Roger and Julie first notice each other through a record-shop window. Later, a half-open train-cabin doorway through which we spy them appears to warn that they’re plunging into marriage without fuller sight of their contrasting temperaments. Whenever they open the glitchy dining-room door in their marital home, its abrupt shudder bangs their window shut, comically symbolizing trade-offs they’re forced to make.

When Applejack bemoans the fact that they’re even considering divorce, Julie replies through a half-open door, “We don’t need each other anymore. When that happens to two people, … there’s nothing left.” Achingly, she looks through a half-open door at a baby’s doll on the bed.

Quite realistically, for all their romantic banter, the couple seldom discuss what matters most; they raise the idea of adoption with Applejack but not with each other. Off key, though, is how an otherwise doting Roger alienates Julie instead of drawing closer to her in grief.

Not a Contract of Convenience

Screenwriter Morrie Ryskind’s narrative isn’t just about marriage and children. It goes further, defining love as a joy that bubbles over when shared, and sputters when it isn’t. The couple learns that marriage isn’t a contract of convenience but a chance to mature, to grow beyond self-centeredness and the merely necessary.

Bursting with talent and ambition, Roger could stay a bachelor, yet he can’t bear to take a step without sharing it with Julie. Once united, they can’t wait to share their now-common journey with a child. As the story unravels, you recognize how that bubbling over is hard to contain.

Ryskind is saying that sharing isn’t a means to an end, but an end in itself. It isn’t a tactic to have something shared back; it’s the whole point of love. Despite his meager earnings, Roger wants to get Julie better furniture, clothes, car, and house. Julie, too, draws her joy from Roger’s, rushing to Japan to be with him or hiding her yearning for an adopted child because she fears that he prefers his own.

Their longing for a child is an extension of this desire to share their ups, their downs, and to surrender their space, their little freedoms for a greater freedom: to love more.

Newspaper reporter Roger (Cary Grant) marries pretty Julie (Irene Dunne) find their life becomes fuller when they adopt a baby. (Public Domain)

At the agency, Roger sheds his preference for a boy the instant he sees Julie cradling a girl as her own; her wordless expression is enough. They give up traveling the world, so they can lavish even the little they have on Trina. They rejoice in creating anticipation and delight around a birthday; their smiles grow bigger because they see another’s smile.

Denied the typical costume and makeup transitions that allow actresses to portray the passage of time, Dunne subtly depicts shades of womanhood; she’d adopted her real-life daughter a few years before filming began.

Grant occasionally stutters over dialogue, lending Roger an endearing spontaneity. His six-minute sequence before a judge who is to decide whether his dwindling income makes him an unfit parent helped secure his first Oscar nomination.

As Dunne fumbles, fearing she’ll drown the baby, watch Grant and Dunne look on with barely disguised admiration as Buchanan, in a single take, steps in to give baby her first bath.

‘Penny Serenade’ Director: George Stevens Starring: Cary Grant, Irene Dunne Not Rated Running Time: 1 hour, 59 minutes Release Date: April 24, 1941 Rated: 3 stars out of 5