Tag: Irene Dunne

Love Affair (1939)

Two people in love, separated by circumstance, in this film of two halves: one comedy, one sentimental

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Irene Dunne (Terry McKay), Charles Boyer (Michel Marnay), Maria Ouspenskaya (Michel’s Grandmother), Lee Bowman (Kenneth Bradley), Astrid Allwyn (Lois Clark), Maurice Moscovich (Maurice Cobert)

In many ways you could say Love Affair was the turning point in Leo McCarey’s career. For years in silent films and the early talkies he had been one of Hollywood’s leading comedy directors, the quick-witted master of the improvisational pun. But there was a second McCarey: the devout Catholic, concerned about social issues. The McCarey who light-heartedly complained when was given an Oscar for The Awful Truth rather than his heartfelt critique of elderly care, Make Way For Tomorrow. This McCarey increasingly leaned into well-meaning, sentimental dramas.

So why is Love Affair a turning point? Because the first half is a charming, funny, sexy meet-cute: and the second a well-meaning but sentimental love story that pulls two people apart. Those meet-cuters are famous Parisian playboy (he’s basically a gigolo) Michel Marney (Charles Boyer) and nightclub singer Terry McKay (Irene Dunne). They meet on a trans-Atlantic liner and fall in love. Problem is they are both engaged to others (both of them rich), waiting for them in New York. Should they decide to chuck it in and be together, they arrange to meet six months later at the top of the Empire State Building. Come the day, Michel waits – but on the way there, Terry is hit by a car and possibly left paralysed. She doesn’t want to tell him. He thinks she never planned to show up. Will they ever be together?

That car crash is the pivot in a film that feels like two genres surprisingly successfully wedded together. Love Affair is a great idea (so good in fact that McCarey remade it about 20 years later as An Affair to Remember), a romantic story with all the joy and vibrancy of a couple finding each other and falling in love, then the painful sting of tragic circumstances pulling them apart. It manages to be sweetly funny and then more or less manages to land just the right side of sentimental (though, lord, it skates near to the edge).

You go with that more overtly manipulative conclusion though, since the subtle comedic and romantic manipulation of the first half is so well done. McCarey encouraged his actors to improvise: filming started with McCarey sitting at a piano, plinking keys, waiting for inspiration to jazz up the script. It’s an approach many actors found challenging (Cary Grant nearly had a meltdown at first on The Awful Truth). But he found the perfect pairing with Boyer and Dunne.

Of course, Irene Dunne was a veteran. An actress far too overlooked today, Dunne flourished under McCarey’s style. Here she’s gloriously warm, sexy and charming. Terry McKay has a very dry (at times almost slightly smutty) wit; she’s absolutely no fool, but also kind, caring and considerate. Dunne sparkles every time she steps in front of the camera, displaying the sort of comic timing you can’t buy (her teasing glances at Michel during their first meeting, when she accidentally reads a telegram all about his sexual exploits at Lake Como, are to die for). But her face also lights up with a genuine radiance as she finds herself falling in love.

She also sparks wonderfully with Charles Boyer. Another overlooked star of 1930s Hollywood, Boyer was desperate to work with McCarey. He found the improvisational style awakened a relaxed, playful element in his acting that helped make Michel exactly the sort of dreamboat you could imagine falling in love with on a cruise. Boyer was also a superb reactor, his face able to communicate anything from growing interest, to delight and also piety, pain and disappointment. Boyer’s comic timing, like Dunne’s is faultless. Like her, he also effortlessly shifts to drama in the second half, expertly demonstrating the maturity of a playboy into someone generous and understanding.

With these two actors, McCarey couldn’t go too far wrong. Their natural ease with each other makes for wonderful chemistry. They are two people who progress naturally from teasing, to enjoying each other’s company, to realising they enjoy each other’s company way too much. Today, Love Affair can look a little tame – they don’t even kiss (although one shot of crashing waves, cutting to them opening a door on the boat to walk along the deck together, is rather suggestive). But the point is that this is love not an affair (or an affair about love). The feelings they develop for each are genuine and, bless them, they don’t want to corrupt it with behaviour that could compromise them.

Tellingly their love is cemented during a stop off in Madeira, where they visit Michel’s aunt (played by an archly eccentric Maria Ouspenskaya). She welcomes them into her home, bonds with Terry, and Michel shows Terry a far different side to himself than his playboy persona: a thoughtful artist. McCarey even shoots them together (in a beautifully lit scene by photographer Rudolph Maté) in a chapel, kneeling side-by-side at the altar. Could McCarey make the endorsement of their love more clear?

Perhaps he felt he needed to, since the screenplay was controversial. The Hays Code had no intention of allowing a film showing two engaged people walking out on their partners. Perhaps that’s why they needed to be “punished” with that sudden car crash. The second half is less successful: maybe because I find the “I can’t ruin his life by making him look after me in a wheelchair” a little too on the nose. Boyer and Dunne play the hell out of it: Dunne is quietly crushed under a surface of charm and what-will-be-will-be. Boyer tries his best to hide his pain, but still searches for some of what he’s lost in his new career as an artist.

Of course, the truth will out – and it will end happily. But there’s a little too much sentiment in the second half, after the heartfelt romancing of the first. A little too much put-a-brave-face-on-the-pain, a few too many contrivances to maintain the illusion (of course they go to the same play on Christmas Eve!). There are too many sickly sweet scenes of Dunne singing with the kids at the orphanage she’s recuperating at (a ghastly advance warning of McCarey’s tedious Going My Way). But it just about works, because we really care about Terry and Michel. We want them to be together, come what may.

Love Affair can be a mixed bag, but it’s got two wonderful performances for Boyer and Dunne (she was nominated, he was robbed) and McCarey manages to juggle comedy, romance, sweetness and a little touch of sadness. It’s a luscious romantic film, even while you see it manipulating you – and for that, it will always give you a great deal of pleasure.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Irene Dunne and Cary Grant flex their comic muscles to outstanding effect in The Awful Truth

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Irene Dunne (Lucy Warriner), Cary Grant (Jerry Warriner), Ralph Bellamy (Dan Leeson), Alexander D’Arcy (Armand Duvalle), Cecil Cunningham (Aunt Patsy), Molly Lamont (Babara Vance), Esther Dale (Mrs Leeson), Joyce Compton (Dixie Belle Lee), Robert Allen (Frank Randall), Robert Warwick (Mr Vance), Mary Forbes (Mrs Vance), Skippy (Mr Smith)

Lucy (Irene Dunne) and Johnny (Cary Grant) Warriner divorce because both of them are constitutionally incapable of being faithful. But yet, they also pretty much can’t stand the idea of the other being with anyone else. Can they face The Awful Truth that they are, in fact, perfect for each other? This is a feuding husband and wife who enjoy the horrified looks on the faces of other people as much as they enjoy seeing how far they can push each other.

When winning the Oscar for Best Director for this film, Leo McCarey believed he actually deserved it for his more serious melodrama about the struggles of the elderly, Make Way for Tomorrow. While Make Way for Tomorrow might well be a more serious work, and not the souffle of The Awful Truth, I’m pretty sure far fewer people over the past 80 odd years have found revisiting it such a delight as going back into The Awful Truth. Perhaps the eponymous truth for McCarey was that we are never the best judges of our own work.

The Awful Truth is possibly the best, funniest, remarriage comedy ever made. It was pulled together almost from nothing onset. Nominally an adaptation of a play by Arthur Richman, McCarey effectively dumped almost the entire plot and instead largely improvised the film and its plot on set as he went, throwing in jokes, plot developments and bits of business depending on what worked with the actors on the day. Producer Harry Cohn would arrive on set to find McCarey plinking on a piano, swopping stories and coming up with ideas for what they would shoot that day. From this the director would decide on the structure of the scene, the jokes and most of the dialogue. No wonder Cohn was pulling his hair out.

Sounds like chaos right? The stars certainly thought so. Grant was terrified. Prior to this a reliable Studio actor, used to being given the lines and standing where he was told. Finding out here that McCarey wanted something loose and improvisational, at first he was all at sea – even offering instead to buy himself out of the film. But McCarey saw something in him: in fact what he saw was “Cary Grant”. The Awful Truth is the moment the Grant we all know came to be: sophisticated, arch and a masterfully relaxed light comedian (rumour has it, at least partly based on McCarey himself). From hating the experience, Grant suddenly realised it was inspired. The same went for his co-stars: Dunne, Bellamy and the rest all excitedly contributed their own ideas and business into what became one of the greatest comedies of all time.

The Awful Truth is frequently laugh-out loud funny, a perfect combination of witty lines delivered with pin-point perfection. Many of the best lines fall to Irene Dunne’s Lucy, from denying an affair with her latest beau (“That’s right Armand. No one could ever accuse you of being a great lover. That is, I mean to say…”), to archly responding to Jerry’s “I know how I’d feel if I was sitting her with a girl and her husband walked in” with a “I’ll bet you do”. Grant though gets plenty of his own – “The car broke down? People stopped believe that one before cars started breaking down.” – and only he could make “I only just met her” a laugh-out loud moment. Nearly every scene has a perfect bon mot, brilliantly delivered.

McCarey’s direction also adds hugely to the comic effect. The Awful Truth is so smooth, polished and assured you can overlook how skilfully and brilliantly it’s been put together to accentuate the comic effect. From cuts that reinforce or set up gags, to characters entering and leaving at the edges of frames at the perfect moment for a laugh, the entire film is a masterclass in how to shoot and frame comic business. The film is a triumph of reaction shots: watch Grant, Dunne and Bellamy respond to the appalling singing of Jerry’s new girlfriend Dixie Bell (Lucy: “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than her whole family to change theirs”). Best of all a superb sequence where we hear Jerry and Armand fight off screen (with crashes aplenty) while Lucy attempts to maintain a banal ‘nothing to see here’ conversation with Daniel and his mother.

The entire film is a triumph of comic set-pieces, with Grant and Dunne sparking off each other like two whirligigs of static electricity. Both actors are absolutely sublime. Grant manages to make everything not only funny, but also effortlessly cool and his archness and confidence are hilarious. Dunne throws herself comedy with a full-blooded commitment and a total willingness to look silly. Like Grant, she also has the ability to tip the wink to the camera and flag up just how ridiculous many of these situations are. Ralph Bellamy, on paper, has the dullest role as the straight man but as well as being winningly naïve, he also has two show-stopping moments, most strikingly his hilariously enthusiastic dancing (made even funnier by Dunne’s increasingly uncomfortable efforts to keep up with him).

It’s all wrapped up in a plot light as air, perfect for the jokes to latch themselves onto. You’ll laugh almost from the first, but you’ll also care about these two dotty eccentrics who are clearly perfect for each other. With Grant creating his entire screen persona in front of your eyes and Dunne absolutely radiantly hilarious, The Awful Truth will carry on entertaining the masses for decades to come. Hopefully McCarey doesn’t regret that Oscar decision too much.

Cimarron (1931)

Richard Dix strikes a pose as Irene Dunne looks on in the appalling Cimarron

Director: Wesley Ruggles

Cast: Richard Dix (Yancey Cravat), Irene Dunne (Sabra Cavat), Estelle Tayler (Dixie Lee), Nance O’Neil (Felica), William Collier Jnr (The Kid), Roscoe Ates (Jesse Rickey), Stanley Fields (Lon Yountis), Robert McWade (Louis Hafner), Edna May Oliver (Tracy Wyatt), Judith Barrett (Donna Cravat), Eugene Jackson (Isaiah)

The only reason Cimarron doesn’t regularly top polls of the worst Best Picture winners ever made, must surely be because so few people have seen it since 1931. Believe me you are not missing anything. A ponderous, pompous, puff of a movie, Cimarron might have tricked people into thinking it looked radical, daring and inventive at the time – but it’s fooling no-one today.

Over 40 years in Oklahoma, from the Land Rush of 1889, the town of Osage grows from tents and mud hats to a thriving modern 1920s city. Part of the story of the town are the lives of two of its founders, Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) and his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne). Yancey is a noble, man’s man with wanderlust, who rides into Osage, guns down the bullies and campaigns for the rights of the poor and down-trodden via his newspaper. Sabra picks up the pieces when he wanders off (often years or decades at a time) raising the children, running the newspaper and eventually becoming a congresswoman.

It should be a sprawling epic, but Cimarron is a dull fart of a film that runs out of any narrative drive after its opening hour (which largely focuses on 1889-1893) and collapses into a series of disconnected, uninteresting scenes, very dully filmed, that sees our characters obtain increasing amounts of old age make-up while shedding what little personalities they had to begin with.

Ruggles shoots the film with such tepid flatness, you might as well be in the theatre. Most of the scenes sees the camera set in a static position (to capture the sound – the sound mix on the film, by the way, is appalling making most of the dialogue extremely hard to hear) with scenes taking place in medium shot allowing us to see the sets and follow the actors walking in and out. You might as well be sitting in the theatre – although, if you were, it would be harder to leave.

It’s not helped by the generally terrible acting, pretty much across the board. Irene Dunne just about emerges with some dignity by underplaying and even showcases a surprising amount of feminine independence – even if her character is an insufferable prig, demonstrating flashes of racism as and when the plot requires. But you can at least see why she continued to have a career – just as you can see why this was Richard Dix’s highest profile sound film. Dix doesn’t know whether to go for a declamatory theatrical style or to telegraph every emotion with poses, silent movie style. So, he does both. The result is a ludicrous collection of poses and grandstanding, that his wild eyes, dyed hair and middle-distance starring stance doesn’t help with. It’s a dreadful performance.

It’s fitting it sits in a film as bad as this one. The only moment of invention the film manages is its opening sequence, restaging the Oklahoma Land Rush. This set piece uses an army of carts and horses to restage the entire land grab from start to finish, the camera capturing these waves of prospectors charging into Oklahoma to grab the best bits. Nothing else in the film beats it, not even the gun fight that occurs part way through. Instead, the film degenerates into long, vague scenes, usually centring around a self-important speech of self-righteous bluster from Dix.

Nothing looks more dated in the film than its depiction of anyone not white and Christian. Now I will cut the film a little bit of slack here. It’s clearly trying to make a plea for greater toleration. Dix’s character passionately campaigns for the rights of Native Americans (or “the red men” as he puts it). He treats his black servant Isaiah with love and affection. He defends the Jewish prospectors. This film is trying to push an agenda more advanced than its time. It gets points for that.

It loses them all though for how these characters are presented. The Jewish characters are smiling, wizened Shylocks. The Native Americans are exotics, forever “How”-ing and happily accepting their status as second-class citizens. Worst of all, Yancey’s servant Isaiah is one of the most shockingly racist caricatures put on film. You think Gone with the Wind is bad? Watch this. Isaiah is stupid, muddle-headed, speaks in a clumsy patois, ridiculously fawning, delighted to be a servant and treats the white men like Gods. The film encourages us to chuckle at him, while patting his head with a smiling paternalism. All the tragic death scenes in the world can’t wash the bad taste out of the mouth. Back then it was fairly forward-thinking – today its jaw dropping.

The main problem is the film is a dull, drifting, dawdling mess that goes nowhere and asks us to root for two characters who are both, in their ways, self-important prigs, convinced they are right about everything. It builds to nothing at all, other than mirroring the sort of relentless march of time you’ll experience while watching it. It’s patronising, uninteresting and outstays its welcome. I can’t even work out why it’s called Cimarron (the name of Yancey and Sabra’s son). Is it because it’s a film asking us to think about the future? It can’t be because Cimarron is important – in ten minutes he ages from about 12 to 40. But then the fact the title refers to an empty non-character is somehow fitting for a film that really should be put down at the earliest opportunity.