Irene Dunne

    1952     It Grows on Trees
    1950     Never a Dull Moment
    1950     The Mudlark
    1948     I Remember Mama
    1947     Life With Father
    1946     Anna and the King of Siam
    1945     Over 21
    1944     Together Again
    1944     The White Cliffs of Dover
    1943     A Guy Named Joe
    1941     Unfinished Business
    1941     Penny Serenade
    1940     My Favorite Wife
    1939     When Tomorrow Comes
    1939     Invitation to Happiness
    1939     Love Affair
    1938     Joy of Living
    1937     The Awful Truth
    1937     High, Wide & Handsome
    1936     Theodora Goes Wild
    1936     Show Boat
    1935     Magnificent Obsession
    1935     Roberta
    1934     Sweet Adeline
    1934     The Age of Innocence
    1934     Stingaree
    1934     This Man is Mine
    1933     If I Were Free
    1933     Ann Vickers
    1933     The Silver Cord
    1933     The Secret of Madame Blanche
    1933     No Other Woman
    1932     Thirteen Women
    1932     Back Street
    1932     Symphony of Six Million
    1932     Consolation Marriage
    1931     The Great Lover
    1931     Bachelor Apartment
    1931     Cimarron

X LEATHERNECKING

as Delphine Witherspoon
1930, Edward F Kline

Contemporary Reviews

“Balances are all wrong. What, for example, is the idea of casting a charming romantic actress like Irene Dunne opposite a comedian like Eddie Foy Jr?”
-NY Times

CIMARRON

as Sabra Cravat
1931, Wesley Ruggles
Film:

Initial Review

Difficult to sit through early Oscar winner; Irene Dunne, in just her first major role, can’t even help this along. Hmmm, only for Oscar completists and history buffs.

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne does nicely enough in a role of a loving wife and mother, which does not permit her to be much else. What she later accomplishes in a political way is suggested rather than acted.”
-Variety

BACHELOR APARTMENT

as Helene Andrews
1931, Lowell Sherman
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne is best and offers the only real attempt at acting…”
-Variety

“A relatively unglamorised Irene Dunne seems already to have mastered the register of unfussy romanticism familiar from her later 30s work.”
-British Monthly Film Bulletin

THE GREAT LOVER

as Diana Page
1931, Harry Beaumont
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Neither Neil Hamilton nor Miss Dunne does much to help the success of the film, but in justice to them it should be stated that their lines are often poorly written.” (:lol:)
-NY Times

“Irene Dunne makes a charming figure as leading woman, and contributes several songs necessary to the action. Part calls for quiet and persuasive grace, which this young actress possesses abundantly.”
-Variety

CONSOLATION MARRIAGE

as Mary Brown Porter
1931, Paul Sloane
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“…Irene Dunne looks well in her first star role. As far as her performance is concerned, she does as well as she did in ‘Cimarron.’”
-Variety

SYMPHONY OF SIX MILLION

as Jessica
1932, Gregory La Cava
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne is meaningless, appearing but seldom and then always in forced and unreal situations.”
-Variety

BACK STREET

as Ray Schmidt
1932, John Stahl
Film:

Other Resources

Screencaps

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne is excellent as Ray Schmidt. She is the personification of ‘a real woman’* an excellent casting assignment for this sort of role.’
-Variety

*Oh, Lord, I hope not. Only in a Fassbinderian power dynamic way could I even see the woman as interesting, far less real!

YouTube Videos

Clip

THIRTEEN WOMEN

as Laura Stanhope
1932, George Archainbaud
Film: - Review

NO OTHER WOMAN

as Anna Stanley
1933, J Walter Rubin
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne’s role is a thankless one, but she is attractive and sincere in the acting of it.”
-NY Times

THE SECRET OF MADAME BLANCHE

as Sally Sanders St John
1933, Charles Brabin
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne, moving through most of a normal lifetime as the action progresses from the 1890s to wartime, is at all times excellent. She is as much the picture as any part of it…. More of this sort of thing could be stood, especially if the singing is in as capable hands as Miss Dunne’s. (;))”
-Variety

THE SILVER CORD

as Christina Phelps
1933, John Cromwell
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne acts commendably, but here and there the lengthy dialogue is too much for her.”
-NY Times

ANN VICKERS

as Ann Vickers
1933, John Cromwell
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Star gives fine performance. She is sincere and believable except that so handsome and fascinating a warden for a woman’s prison is a bit beyond probability.”
-Variety

“Irene Dunne, as Ann… [manages] to pick the thing up considerably by [her] intelligent acting, and the film is good entertainment without being in any way provocative.”
-New Yorker

IF I WERE FREE

as Sarah Cazenove
1933, Elliot Nugent
Film:

“Considering the limited possibilities of her role, Miss Dunne does remarkably well.”
-NY Times

THIS MAN IS MINE

as Tony Dunlap
1934, John Cromwell
Film: - Review

STINGAREE

as Hilda Bouverie
1934, William A Wellman
Film: - Review

Other Resources

Screencaps

Contemporary Reviews

“Musically Miss Dunne rises above her dramatic work, since the authors have given her small opportunity, and she wisely does not attempt to steam it up.”
-Variety

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

as Countess Ellen Olenska
1934, Philip Moeller
Film: - Review

SWEET ADELINE

as Adeline Schmidt
1934, Mervyn LeRoy
Film:

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne, in fine voice, is comely as Adeline, and effective, also, despite that she’s not suited to torch songs. They didn’t make it a cinch for her, either, in doing such things as requiring her to sing a number after reading a lyric sheet once.”
-Variety

ROBERTA

as Stephanie
1935, William A Seiter
Film: - Review

YouTube Videos

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” - who can simultaneously sing and act with as much feeling and grace as Irene Dunne? To add to her exquisite soprano interpretation of the song, she runs the gamut from ardor to anguish in an expressive, honest and multilayered performance. And she takes one with her… I feel every look on her face.

“Lovely to Look At”

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

as Helen Hudson
1935, John Stahl
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne’s role… is developed with her usual charm and tranquil power. Her version of valor under fire, sacrifice for love, spirit rising above tribulation leaves nothing to be desired in the essentials of good, sound theater.”
-Oakland Tribune

YouTube Videos

Clip

SHOW BOAT

as Magnolia Hawks
1936, James Whale
Film:

Initial Review

I spent too much on Ebay for a terrible VHS, couldn’t hear every other line in parts, & so shouldn’t rate it at all. It’s revered by people who know & love musicals, so people know what to expect without my comments. Still I post this blurb as I feel it is worth repeating: parts of this film are hawt, shockingly hawt. And no amount of blackfaced “gallivantin’ around” can take that away from me.

Irene on Show Boat

“James Whale wasn’t the right director. He was more interested in atmosphere and lighting and he knew so little about that life. I could have put my foot down about it but there would have been no reason to do so because we had so many of the original people that you could only expect the best. I knew the whole thing backwards.”

Contemporary Reviews

“The most gratifying surprise of the picture is its star, Irene Dunne. Catching every shade in a role that spans a lifetime, she imbues the part with her usual warm intelligence. But one is hardly prepared for her gay comedy flair — a flair she has kept, up to now, hidden from the screen.”
-Liberty

YouTube Videos

“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” — last minute shocking, sexy

THEODORA GOES WILD

as Theodora Lynne
1936, Richard Boleslawski
Film: - Review

Irene on Theodora Goes Wild

“I know lots of friends of mine like it better than almost anything I ever made. Because they say, that’s the real you.”

Contemporary Reviews

“Although she goes wild, she also goes silly; and farce does not set too well upon the lovely shoulders of Irene Dunne. Douglas and Miss Dunne are a splendid comedy team when there’s comedy to be played, but neither fits well in the farce sequences.”
-NY Times

“Miss Dunne, who so outsparks this spark, has become quite a comedienne, and gives an imitation of ZaSu Pitts, too.”
-New Statesman & Nation

HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME

as Sally Waterson
1937, Rouben Mamoulian
Film:

Initial Review

Considering what I spent on it, the quality, and the possibility that I’m at the tail-end of a fixation, this was a huge disappointment. But it’s exactly what it looks like (regular ’30s Kern/Hammerstein musical) and maybe a bit better.

THE AWFUL TRUTH

as Lucy Warriner
1937, Leo McCarey
Film:

Other Resources

Screencaps

Irene on The Awful Truth

“I tried to embarrass Cary Grant’s would-be in-laws. The idea was to play against my own image, which was very ladylike, you know. Leo said, ‘Do a [stripper] bump.’ I tried but told him I never could do that. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Use that line when we shoot.’ And that’s how we shot it.”

“I have a confession to make. For the first time since I’ve been in pictures, I felt like giving my salary back to the producer. I had such fun making it. When the day’s work was over none of us wanted to go home. It was a riot every minute we were on the picure.”

Contemporary Reviews

“She tops [Theodora] by almost an Alp in ‘Awful Truth.’”
-Variety

“Irene Dunne is the personification of perhaps one of the most complete reversals registered in the cinema world. She introduced in ‘Theodora Goes Wild’ a personality vivacious, winsome, delightfully feminine, and at the same time so completely clothed in comedy that she became an overnight hit. In ‘The Awful Truth’ she goes even more carefree in a rollicking portrayal of young married life.”
-Arizona Republic

“Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play opposite, around and against each other endowing a very giddy piece with smooth and varied comic acting.”
-Stage

YouTube Videos

Jerry finds Lucy in Armand’s apartment! Cary does pratfalls, Irene laughs gloriously mid-song. (I swoon, a little.)
Miss Lola Warriner!

JOY OF LIVING

as Maggie Garret
1938, Tay Garnett
Film: Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Another of those loony shows, with Irene Dunne playing a hard-working, family-ridden prima donna of the stage. Miss Dunne is delightfully giddy as the heroine.”
-Stage

LOVE AFFAIR

as Terry McKay
1939, Leo McCarey
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer are the principals involved in the plot’s rich and variegated emotions, and director Leo McCarey is the man responsible for shifting, with no detectable trickery, from the brittle comedy of the early sequences to the genuine emotionalism of the later. It is superior entertainment all the way through.”
-Stage

[re: Dunne & Boyer] “…playing it lightly now, soberly next, but always credibly, always in character, always with a superb utilization of the material at hand.”
-NY Times

INVITATION TO HAPPINESS

as Eleanor Wayne
1939, Wesley Ruggles
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne switches to a straight dramatic role from her recent cycle of comedies and farces, and does a most capable job in the assignment.”
-Variety

WHEN TOMORROW COMES

as Helen Lawrence
1939, John Stahl
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Boyer, with the charm that has made him one of our few authentic matinee idols, and Miss Dunne, always a pleasant and sincere performer, are unequal to the task of bringing life and conviction to James Cain’s made-to-order script.”
-NY Times

MY FAVORITE WIFE

as Ellen Wagstaff Arden
1940, Garson Kanin
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“McCarey is, without compare, a master of the technique of the prolonged amorous tease; and with an actress such as Miss Dunee through whom to apply it — she with her luxurious and mocking laughter, her roving eyes and come-hither glances — mere man is powerless before it.”
-NY Times

PENNY SERENADE

as Julie Gardiner Adams
1941, George Stevens
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Here the comedy team produces a sentimental film that, sniffle for sniffle, ranks with the best in the tear-jerker class. But Steven’s shrewd direction and the sincerity of the Dunne-Grant performances restore order and credibility.”
-Newsweek

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

as Nancy Andrews
1941, Gregory La Cava
Film: - Review

Irene on Unfinished Business

“We thought we had another My Man Godfrey.”

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne, even though she must combine the naivete of Cinderella with devastating wit of Dorothy Parker, is charming.”
-NY Times

“Despite the artificialities of the plot, it is a film two-thirds agreeable, and Irene Dunne has a native charm that survives all obstacles.”
-New Statesman & Nation

X LADY IN A JAM

as Jane Palmer
1942, Gregory La Cava

Contemporary Reviews

“Universal wasn’t kidding when it tagged Irene Dunne’s new picture ‘Lady in a Jam.’ For never, in our recollection, has the generally delectable Miss Dunne been made to appear to less advantage than she is in this vapid confusion.”
-NY Times

A GUY NAMED JOE

as Dorinda Durston
1943, Victor Fleming
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Miss Dunne is as lovely and fetching as we’ve seen her — maybe even a little more so.”
-NY Times

“Miss Dunne is nifty to look at and turns in a sufficiently restrained but emotionally convincing portrayal.”
-Variety

Girlygush! The above reviewers did it first, so I must agree. Irene was her most beautiful in this role.

THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER

as Susan Dunn Ashwood
1944, Clarence Brown
Film:

Initial Review

War melodrama that drifts in and out of interest. Nothing very special, but an excellent dramatic vehicle for my beloved Irene Dunne.

Irene on The White Cliffs of Dover

“I don’t think it smacks of propaganda, but if it does then I’m glad. I feel everything possible should be done to cement the friendship between two nations that are most alike and speak the same language.”

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne has been cast in a role which magnificently suits her talent for reserved power.”
-San Francisco Chronicle

TOGETHER AGAIN

as Anne Crandall
1944, Charles Vidor
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“A buoyant, featherweight entertainment that is eminently suited to its principals’ talents… Miss Dunne and Mr Boyer are altogether diverting, and so is ‘Together Again.’”

OVER 21

as Paula Wharton
1945, Charles Vidor
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne, who can time a line so precisely that no seconds are wasted, and who wields a sizable vocabularly in the inflection of her voice, plays the spirited and resourceful wife with a generous undertone of warmth and understanding.”
-Theatre Arts

ANNA & THE KING OF SIAM

as Anna Owens
1946, John Cromwell
Film:

Initial Review

Thus I have exhausted the entire supply of Dunne films released on DVD and VHS. I am entirely at the mercy of kind Karagargans… Anyway this is lovably offensive; hilarious to realize it’s Rex Harrison’s first role. Et cetera, et cetera…

Contemporary Reviews

“It took me more than half an hour to get used to and Englishwoman talking American (Irene Dunne) and a Siamese King replying in pidgin English (Rex Harrison). An odd, clumsy, entertaining film.”
-New Statesman & Nation

LIFE WITH FATHER

as Vinnie Day
1947, Michael Curtiz
Film: - Review

Irene on Life with Father

“I didn’t like the role very much, and he [Curtiz] had to placate me and make it more palatable.”

Contemporary Reviews

“Dunne interprets Vinnie Day with charm, wit and an exactness that perfectly complement Powell’s Father.”
-NY Times

I REMEMBER MAMA

as Martha Hanson
1948, George Stevens
Film: - Review

Irene on I Remember Mama

“I love Mama; she has such sensitiveness — she is such a fine person, and in her own way, a philosopher. I knew that we must have someone to direct who would appreciate all these things, so I said if I could have George Stevens I would play Mama.”

Contemporary Reviews

“As Mama, the wheel-horse of the family, Irene Dunne does a beautiful job, in a blonde, braided wig and in dresses which actually appear to be worn. Handling with equal facility an accent and a troubled look, Miss Dunne has the strength and vitality, yet the softness, that the role requires.”
-NY Times

“Miss Dunne, who has been prone to hurt her serious roles with snobbish or ironic undertones, takes her tongue out of her cheek and gives a performance that is warm, disciplined and unaffected.”
-Time

THE MUDLARK

as Queen Victoria
1950, Jean Negulesco
Film: - Review

Irene on The Mudlark

“I am so glad that the criticism of my selection for the role has died down. I look upon it as one of the most important roles in my career. But after all it is only acting — and surely an American actress can act the part of an Englishwoman.”

Contemporary Reviews

“Irene Dunne’s natural exuberance has been effectively cloaked by the clothes and mask of Queen Victoria, the charm of her speaking voice converted into the hoarse, measured tones of an old woman. Hers is less a performance than an impersonation, a diligent but unpersuasive reading of an impossible role.”
-Saturday Review of Literature

“Unfortunately, through no fault of hers, she is not possessed of the nature of the talent to do this job. And although she is made up stoutly to look like the overstuffed queen, she conveys very little illusion or real emotion, which is sadly missed.”
-NY Times

NEVER A DULL MOMENT

as Kay Kingsley
1950, George Marshall
Film: - Review

Contemporary Reviews

“The best that can be said for this somewhat undernourished farce is that Dunne tackles her indoctrination as a ‘fair hand’ about the place with commendable stamina.”
-Newsweek

IT GROWS ON TREES

as Polly Baxter
1952, Arthur Lubin
Film:

“Miss Dunne’s arch refinement throughout underlines the basic coyness of a joke that makes its point and dingdongs itself to death.”
-NY Times

QUOTES & TRIVIA

Irene on…

Popularity

I don’t know exactly why the public took a liking to me so fast. Pupularity is a curious thing. The public responds to a dimple, a smile, a giggle, a hairsyle, an attitude. Acting talent has less to do with it than personality.

The lifestyle

I watch my weight, too, and I’ll bet you won’t get many of them to admit that. Why is it that many women who have divine figures like to pretend theat they’re God-givien? Gosh, I haven’t had a potato since I played in Cimmaron.

Comedy

Being a person who wants to enjoy living, I want to laugh. The Irish in me has never been givien a chance. I’ve been labeled the ‘cool’ Miss Dunne, the ‘dignified’ Miss Dunne, so consistently that no one seems to realize that I can do something besides look cool — or cry.

With a good director and, say, Cary Grant, comedy can be a hilarious occupation. We used to laugh ourselves into inertia at noontime rushes of The Awful Truth.

I never admired a comedienne, but it was very easy for me, very natural. It was no effort for me to do comedy at all. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t so appreciative of it. I liked the heavier things.

Cary Grant

[Cary] once said I had the best timing for comedy of any actress he ever knew. He also said — and I don’t know that we should put this into print — that I was the sweetest-smelling actress he ever knew.

Her image

Now don’t you dare call me normal. I was never a Pollyanna. There was always a lot of Theodora in me!

Entering politics

I began to perceive that when one is a motion picture player, he has the advantage of a ready-made audience. People in just about every walk of life have seen your pictures and they enjoy talking to you. It seemed a very wonderful advantage, and one that should be put to good use.

Retirement

I don’t know for sure why I retired when I did. I didn’t have to quit. Scripts were still coming in. I compare my career to Mickey Mantle’s. Like him, I quit while I was still at the top. Maybe it was simply because I didn’t think I’d be happy playing second and third leads. I never wanted to be a character actress.

I drifted into acting and drifted out. Acting is not everything. Living is.

…on Irene

Charles Boyer

I like working with Irene. We’re used to one another. I’ve a pretty good idea by this time just what Irene’s reactions will be — how she likes to play a scene. With an actress who is a stranger, it’s all a question of trial and error. It makes one a little uncertain, and the camera can tell the difference.

She’s the twinkle of diamond heels going down a theater aisle. But the person wearing them might just possibly be chewing bubble gum. There’s an irrepressible youthfulness about Irene.

Maria DiBattista

She may have been a morally unimpeachable, happily wed Catholic woman in private life but on screen she courted impropriety like a pagan.

Cary Grant

She should have won [an Oscar], you know. And she would have, too, but she was so good — her timing was so marvelous — that she made comedy look easy. If she’d made it look as difficult as it really is, she’d have won.

Garson Kanin

[Cary said] Dunne was his favorite leading lady partly because she was always so inventive and delightful on the set; doing a movie with her was less like work than like a long and always surprising flirtation.

Gregory La Cava

If Irene Dunne isn’t the first lady of Hollywood, then she’s the last one.

Leo McCarey

You can really call Irene Dunne the first lady of Hollywood, because she’s the first real lady Holywod has ever seen.

Will Rogers
[who was famously opposed to women in politics.]

If women like Irene Dunne would run for Congress, I’d vote for them.

Andrew Sarris

Talk about sexy. When she takes off her necklace in the train compartment in Gregory La Cava’s Unfinished Business, and later whspers with post-tryst intensity to Preston Foster, ‘I love you,’ well, with censorship and all, that was part of my own rite of passage, and I feel a little sorry for kids today caught up in a kind of slut-worship.

[She was] a good girl deciding thoughtfully to be bad.

* Strongly regetted losing the lead roles in Holiday [confessed she cried when it went to Hepburn] and Madame Curie.
* Turned down the lead roles in His Girl Friday, …
* Never removed her wedding band for any role. It had to be disguised with makeup or tape.
* For most of her career, had directorial approval written into her contract.

Robert Osborne for TCM’s Star of the Month: link

The late Roddy McDowall, a nice fellow who had a multitude of pals and took his friendships very seriously, once told me that when he first met a person, whenever the conversation would get around to movies, he’d always ask, “Do you like Irene Dunne?” If the answer was “no”, said Roddy, he knew then and there that he and that person – female or male, old or young, celebrity or mailman – could never be friends. He was kidding, but not entirely. He said quite earnestly, “If a someone doesn’t like Irene Dunne, what’s wrong with them?” Fair question.

Today, the only thing wrong with such a query is that too many people don’t know the work of this amazingly versatile lady, something we’re hopefully going to help change this month with a 28-film smorgasbord of Irene Dunne films, which range from sophisticated comedies to screwball farces, from romantic dramas to melodic musicals, from a western epic to a melodramatic tale in which Myrna Loy (!) tries to kill off Irene and a group of her sorority sisters. (Check out Irene being good and Myrna being bad in Thirteen Women on Dec. 6.)

Throughout this month on TCM, you can also get a look at all five of the Irene Dunne performances which brought her Academy Award® nominations: Cimarron, Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, Love Affair and I Remember Mama. Well deserved they were, too; the only stunner is that she never went on to win an Oscar®, not even an honorary A.A. for her extraordinary body of work. During Hollywood’s golden age, the delightful Dunne was as big a star as any in the film business. She was also one of the few in that fabled era of iron-clad studio contracts who had the courage and confidence to spend most of her career as a freelance actress. Except for six early years as a contractee at RKO, she was never tied to a single studio. That was considered equal to career suicide in the mid-1930s and 1940s when the major film companies always saved their best scripts for their own “family” members; outsiders didn’t have much of a chance. Because of her talent and popularity, however, Irene still managed to get the pick of the litter.

20th Century-Fox stars Gene Tierney and Maureen O’Hara both campaigned vigorously to win the lead in Fox’s 1946 biggie Anna and the King of Siam but it was given instead to the free-wheeling Ms. Dunne. Bette Davis, during the era she reigned supreme at Warner Bros., desperately wanted to play “Mama” in Warners movie version of the famous Broadway success Life with Father and even did a screen test for it (and, for the record, so did Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, even Mary Pickford who came out of a 14-year retirement to test) but it was Irene who nabbed the role. It would require several books to even list the great roles first offered to Dunne but which, for various reasons, she declined, among them Now, Voyager, Gaslight, Mr. Skeffington, all the way to The Lady in Ermine.

Something which amazes me about this lady: she made such an indelible presence it films, it’s difficult to fathom she made movies for only 22 years (1930-52); by contrast, today’s Robert DeNiro and Harrison Ford, for two examples, have each been making films for over 40 years,with no signs whatsoever of slowing down. Think of the great work we missed because Ms. Dunne decided to exit when she did. But, as her fan Mr. McDowall often expressed it, we’re extremely grateful there was an Irene Dunne. Don’t be surprised if her presence on TCM this month turns out to be the Christmas present you enjoy most.

by Robert Osborne

Excellent one from Bright Lights film journal — actually seeing this a few months ago was the sole reason I got in the mood to watch more Dunne films, and what started off this damn fixation in the first place. link

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
The Elusive Pleasures of Irene Dunne

“You’d never get tired of having her around, because
she’d always be someone else for you.”

By Dan Callahan

The reasons for Irene Dunne’s continuing, undeserved obscurity are fairly well known. Nearly all of her best films from the thirties and forties were remade and the originals were suppressed and didn’t play on television. She did some of her most distinctive work for John Stahl at Universal, and non-horror Universal films are rarely shown now. Practically all of her movies need to be restored; even her most popular effort, The Awful Truth (1937), looks grainy and blotchy on its DVD transfer, to say nothing of things like Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939), or Rouben Mamoulian’s High, Wide, and Handsome (1937), two key Dunne films that have languished and deteriorated in a sort of television/video purgatory.

Dunne’s uneventful private life will never hold much interest for scandalmongers. She was born in Kentucky in 1898, to a riverboat captain father who died when she was eleven. Following a convent upbringing, her mother encouraged her to sing, and Dunne had ambitions to become an opera singer, but she failed her audition for the Metropolitan Opera in 1920. Not too certain of herself or her career path, Dunne spent her twenties pursuing work in musical comedies on the stage, finally landing the role of Magnolia for the road company tour of Show Boat. A movie contract offer came through on that tour, and Dunne went out to Hollywood, leaving behind her husband, Dr. Francis Griffin, a dentist who was twelve years her senior.

Dunne in a Christmas publicity shot, 1938Dunne and Griffin lived on separate coasts for six years; such an arrangement may have started rumors for other stars, but Dunne comported herself in such an unimpeachably ladylike manner that no one blinked an eye, and it seems clear that she enjoyed one of Hollywood’s few successful marriages (it lasted until Griffin’s death in the sixties). Dunne was famously religious, a staunch Catholic who stayed rather truer to her faith than her friend Loretta Young. “God does not read an actresses’ press clippings,” she said: later on in life, she went to Mass every day. She was little seen in public after the early fifties, though she did come out for a few select tributes in the seventies.

Dunne’s career achievement has long been damaged by two key critical reactions to her work: James Agee’s assertion in the forties that she made his skin crawl, and Pauline Kael’s assorted bitchy comments about Dunne’s performances in her book of short reviews, 5001 Nights at the Movies. Agee and Kael are two of the greatest film critics, and hugely influential, so it helps to put their comments in context. These two practiced the most subjective film criticism, and their writing about Dunne is extremely subjective and understandable only if you are familiar with their specific taste as writers and as people. Agee had a yen for simple women like June Allyson, and he reacted to movie actresses in the manner of a prospective suitor, so Dunne’s blithe, mature complications might have intimidated him. Kael made a religion out of skewering pomposity, and she invariably heeped scorn on any actress she felt was doing a high-falutin’ “great lady” act. Kael called Dunne smug in her dramatic roles, and damned her with faint praise even in her best comedy parts, conceding only that she had “energy” in Theodora Goes Wild (1936). She saw Dunne’s respectable surface and made a snap judgment that stuck; Kael didn’t bother to delve a bit further.

James Harvey published an insightful rebuttal to these early cavils in his classic book Romantic Comedy, even ending his study with a lengthy, revealing Dunne interview. Her critical reputation has improved since, but her films are still so difficult to see that there needs to be a new accounting of who she was and what she did on film. Her genre versatility is unmatched, and she had unique versatility as an actress — compare, for example, her sober scientist in The Silver Cord (1933) with her ditzy wife and mother in Life with Father (1947). These are two completely different women, and both are completely believable creations.

It’s hard to say just what sort of image Dunne left behind, because it changed through several periods, and, as Harvey wrote, she usually “lies low” on screen. Dunne doesn’t shout “Look at me!” like Davis or Hepburn, or Jean Arthur or Carole Lombard, for that matter. She doesn’t have a fixed type. Is she worldly? naïve? young? middle-aged? It’s difficult to tell, because she was so fluid, so there but not there. It might do to call her vague, but that’s not quite it either. Dunne is entirely self-contained, and she’s rarely in danger on screen of exposing anything she doesn’t want to show us. She doesn’t seem to have a nerve in her body; this was perhaps a result of a life that was a good deal more contented than those of her contemporaries, and a religious faith that gave her supreme assurance (which pagan Kael found infuriating). Her involved characterizations and sense of fantasy made certain that she emerged from her Hollywood experience with nary a scratch, having conquered three distinct genres in the span of about twenty years.

I: Serious Irene

Dunne made her debut in Leathernecking (1930), a musical that is just about impossible to see, if it indeed still exists at all (most of its songs were jettisoned on release). Reviews of the time make it sound like a trifle, but Dunne soon made up for this inauspicious beginning with Cimarron (1931), an epic western and Best Picture Oscar winner that established her on screen and won her the first of five unrewarded Best Actress nominations. In that film, which looks mighty creaky today (Dunne herself found it “awfully hammy” when she saw it later), her Sabra Cravat is written as the eternal wife, a little dim and shy, but ever loyal. Dunne highlights Sabra’s rigidity, complacence, and concern with appearances, and she enjoys burying herself and the character under old age make-up in the last scenes.

This is an actress unconcerned with putting herself over in the most flattering manner. She wanted to stay true to an imagined person: in her interview with Harvey, Dunne confessed that she always discussed “her” at home as she created a role, and went to her dressing room to write detailed thoughts about her various women. “Everything I did had a purpose — you know?” she said. “It wasn’t just a superficial acting job for the moment. It was tremendously important to me.” Dunne also reported that she thought of sad things from her own life in order to cry, though such Lee Strasberg methods would seem to be useless to a woman with such a settled, unstormy personal life. Perhaps her father’s death was a large source of emotion for her; that would explain the distance and privacy of her grief on screen. (Dunne claimed that she had a temper, but it’s barely visible in her work.)

Her dedication and intensity was wasted on most of her Cimarron follow-up films, programmers like Bachelor Apartment and Consolation Marriage (both 1931), or idiotic thrillers like Thirteen Women (1932). Once the superlative Back Street (1932) set her up in soap operas, she had to play knock-offs like The Secret of Madame Blanche (1933), where there are moments when she seems to be doing an (unconscious?) Carol Burnett parody of the mother love material. At the start of If I Were Free (1933), Dunne plays burned-out, flippant anger for the first and only time, and she’s very striking in this mode, without ever letting it define her. “What is it about Irene Dunne?” asks David Thomson, at the top of Dunne’s entry in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. “She was not a great beauty, or a commanding actress.” Even characters in her films discuss her elusiveness. In The Age of Innocence (1934), a decent adaptation of the Wharton novel, an older man muses, “She’s not exactly beautiful . . . I don’t quite know how to say it.” Dunne is miscast as the erotic Countess Olenska, but her quiet, languid, “what is it?” quality gives her Countess all the fascination she needs.

With John Boles in Back StreetIn The Silver Cord, Dunne effortlessly incarnates the cool New Woman of the thirties, tactfully but directly facing off against Laura Hope Crews’ eye-openingly manipulative mother. The year before, Dunne had scored in Stahl’s Back Street (right), where she played a loose, almost bovine, childlike woman ensnared in a Fassbinder master/slave dynamic with the caddish John Boles. Dunne plays the opening scenes of Back Street with a lightness of touch that captures our sympathy, and when we see her detached, cat-like contentment with Boles after she meets him again, she’s gone beyond mere heroine sympathy into a downright haunting image of reflective, complex feeling. Boles installs her in a sad little apartment, where Dunne’s once vibrant character waits her life away painting little bits of china and longing for the phone to ring. Fannie Hurst’s soap opera is transfigured by Stahl’s remorseless, sober concentration, which is close to Dreyer’s treatment of Gertrud (1964).

Keen on working with interesting directors, Dunne always had it in her contract that she could pick her auteurs, a smart move. She made three films for John Stahl, later complaining about his endless takes, and that he wanted her “bothered” on the set. Yet he got something out of Dunne that she never showed elsewhere. He wore down her poker face of piety and staid playfulness, and what was revealed was something somewhat severe, almost malevolent. Stahl only scratches her surface in Magnificent Obsession (1935), and it’s a wonder he can give the mystic mumbo-jumbo of that story any interest. But look at some of her close-ups in the same director’s When Tomorrow Comes, during the wondrous mid-section where she and Charles Boyer are trapped together during a storm. Dunne stares at the married Boyer with sophisticated misgivings, which is in her range, certainly, but Stahl keeps the camera on her face, and at last he gets what he is looking for: Irene Dunne. In a few lingering shots, he reveals the source of her dignity, her apprehensions and her nearly malignant gravity. As far as her dramatic work goes, Stahl is Dunne’s best director; maybe her Catholicism (Mass every day?) was secretly stimulated by his many-take attention.

In two touching but slightly labored films for George Stevens, Penny Serenade (1941) and I Remember Mama (1948), Dunne is again encouraged by the slow patience of the director. Penny Serenade is about disappointment, and it makes big demands on Dunne. She has to hold the whole film together by reminiscing silently to records in between scenes, and she succeeds in drawing us into her character’s private world and thoughts. When asked to portray grief after losing a child, Dunne makes an unusual choice: instead of acting jumpy and bereaved, she merely sits in a chair and gets a glazed, hard look in her eye. The same look of intent self-reproach colors her Norwegian mother figure in the later film. Dunne submerges herself in this heavy-spirited, kind matriarch, endowing her with vagrant hints of playfulness at strategic moments.

This playfulness activates and enlivens one of Dunne’s signal achievements as an actress, her portrayal of Queen Victoria in The Mudlark (1950). The film was considered a failure when it was released, even by Dunne herself, and it is little-seen. But this is quite a performance. Dunne wore padding and complicated make-up to give her Victoria’s heavy jaw line. More impressively, she changed her whole way of speaking to fit the character: Dunne’s native Kentucky drawl is noticeable throughout much of her work (she sometimes says “muh” for “my” and “yuh” for “you”), and it was a large part of her purring, honeysuckle style. As Victoria the English queen, she speaks in fast, clipped, harsh British tones, much more pronounced than her standard American speech in Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and she obliterates herself in a way that Bette Davis, for instance, never could when she played her fabled character roles.

Dunne in The MudlarkDunne’s Victoria is round, nostalgic, a little poky, and her voice is thin and privileged (whereas Dunne’s was thick and almost folksy). When John Brown (Finlay Currie) mentions putting whisky in some tea, she doesn’t turn around to face him: she simply straightens her back slightly to make her outraged point (Dunne’s sense of timing was always knife-sharp). Though The Mudlark is a modest movie, it serves as a proper showcase for Dunne’s detailed character study; she took a huge risk in attempting to play Queen Victoria, but it really paid off. Her Victoria seems monstrous as the film goes on, a death’s head, even, and sympathy ebbs away from her genteel stoniness. But in her penultimate scene, when her Victoria suddenly says, “They don’t like me,” admitting that she’s scared of her subjects, the actress wins our love for this iffy woman.

II: Musical Irene

Dunne’s background in music and accomplished soprano voice was only gradually revealed to audiences, but she often sang in movies — musicals, dramas, comedies. For a silly film like The Great Lover (1931), she did some operatic arias, and she had fun with a bawdy music hall ditty in The Secret of Madame Blanche, but it wasn’t until the bizarre western/musical Stingaree (1934) that she had a full-scale musical vehicle. Dunne plays a speculative, ambitious girl (again, a distinctly different sort of woman for her) who winds up as an opera star, and she gets to do a respectably sung aria from Faust. Another ramshackle musical vehicle, Sweet Adeline (1935), had the advantage of a lush Jerome Kern score. Trilling “Why Was I Born?” and other Kern standards here, Dunne really seems to love singing — it has an almost narcotic effect on her. Even when she puts a tear into her voice, she seems to touch a secret source of amusement and bliss when she sings, as if she has thrown some kind of druggy switch in herself.

There aren’t many performers who could compete with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the dance floor, but Dunne makes a tantalizing try in Roberta (1935). In sumptuous close-ups, she sings “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as if she likes the idea of being concealed by the smoke. Dunne could be glamorous if she chose to be (she could be practically anything if she chose to be), and she’s a real vision when she sings “Lovely to Look At,” kidding the song a bit but putting the truth to its words. Her voice is full-bodied in Roberta, with impressive high notes, as if she wants to be at her best next to Fred and Ginger (just as she worked hard to be ultra-lively and charming opposite an obdurate Spencer Tracy in A Guy Named Joe, 1943, where she lyrically sang “I’ll Get By”).

Dunne in High, Wide, and HandsomeIn James Whale’s pretty, panoramic version of Show Boat (1936), Dunne easily gets away with playing her old ingènue part, though she was close to forty. In carefully lit close-up, she impatiently sings “Make Believe” and does a weird shuck and jive with Hattie McDaniel (a completely indefensible blackface number later on in the film serves as a blot on Dunne’s career, alas.) For High, Wide, and Handsome (1937, right) an epic western/musical filled with corny energy, square-dances, and fistfights, Dunne isn’t particularly convincing as a barnstorming singer, but she’s very funny belting out “Allegheny Al” in a beer hall, and mockingly reprising the Kern title tune over and over again, as Randolph Scott keeps shaking apple blossoms onto her head. Kael called her the “Julie Andrews of her day” in musicals like this, but that’s far off the mark. Dunne uses her soprano voice playfully, often ironically; she’s never as simple and starched as Andrews, or as coy as Jeanette MacDonald. And Dunne’s voice isn’t her be-all and end-all, as it was with those singing stars: it’s as if she’s saying, “Look, I can do this too!” And she’s too emotionally reserved to really believe in her often-sentimental music fully.

Gregory La Cava’s Unfinished Business (1941) gets uncomfortably close to Dunne’s own life at times. It’s one of the few movies where she seems to be playing her own age, and her character starts off at a mid-life crisis point, languishing in a small town. Determined to make something of herself, Dunne hops on a train and meets a leering Preston Foster. Stuck in the confines of their train compartment, they seduce each other. (This sequence has to be the most sexually direct Dunne ever was on screen. She loves to tease her leading men, but never crosses the line into eroticism.) Her character auditions for an opera company, and we see her singing parts of an aria — she gets rejected, as Dunne herself was in 1920. Like many of La Cava’s movies, it has a grim, hung-over vibe, and it is personal in all the wrong ways for Dunne, who is by turns revelatory and depressed in it (she wants to hide in the movies, and make believe, not expose herself).

As far as singing goes, though, Dunne’s finest musical moment on screen is in Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes, when she slowly sings Schubert’s “Serenade” with Charles Boyer accompanying her on the piano, cautiously enunciating the words as a storm starts to blow in. Dunne was often a nervous singer, somehow, as if she was fearful of showing too much feeling, or marked by that earlier rejection from the Met. But for Stahl, Dunne lets go of her insecurities and sings one of the world’s most beautiful songs in a scared but impassioned voice: she never did anything more romantic.

III: Comic Irene

The real surprise and delight of Dunne’s career, of course, was her ability to play comedy, which was unveiled right in the middle of the screwball comedy cycle of the thirties with Theodora Goes Wild. Dunne didn’t want to do the film; she saw herself as a dramatic actress, and even after her success with comedy, she disdained the genre and her career-defining efforts in it, saying that it was largely a matter of timing. Theodora Goes Wild is Dunne’s flashiest, most purely pleasurable performance. “I know a lot of friends of mine like it better than almost anything I ever made,” she said. “Because they say, now that’s the real you.” If so, her friends were lucky.

Poster for Theodora Goes Wild, 1936As the secret author of a scandalous book, Dunne is armored in primness at first, furtive. You can only see what lies underneath her reserve in brief, secret smiles, a slight flash of her eyes (when Dunne really opens her eyes on screen, they can seem a bit desolate, which is why she kept them half-closed a lot, especially for comedy). When Theodora gets drunk with some city slickers, she parodies her own inhibitions and lets out gurgling laughs at Melvyn Douglas’ wolfish illustrator. In the last third of the movie, the “going wild” part, Dunne unleashes flurries of her most extreme physical mannerisms: blinking her eyes rapidly, touching the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, emitting low, self-loving “ahas” and “ums” and “ahs.” Dunne plays at being naughty, and the distance between herself and her effects makes the joke. It’s a real movie joke, too, since Dunne seems to suggest that imagining being naughty is more fun than actually putting in the enervating work for a good debauch.

She got another Oscar nomination for Theodora, and a third one for The Awful Truth, her most famous movie and still a glossy situation comedy marvel. Dunne enters the film in a huge white fur coat, bubbly as champagne and dizzily vivacious, taking Theodora’s wildness several steps further with the aid of Leo McCarey’s improvisational gusto and Cary Grant’s passionate, silly/sexy partnering. Dunne has a keen sense of movement here, making hilariously dismissive hand gestures toward Grant’s errant husband, kicking the train of her gown at him with just the right amount of hauteur to land the joke (like her back-straightening in The Mudlark). Giving a serious music recital, Dunne arches her eyebrows as she lets out a melodic laugh after Grant takes a pratfall, fusing Serious Irene, Musical Irene, and Comic Irene together in one perfect moment.

Her Southern drawl comes out more in The Awful Truth because she’s so relaxed, and this is especially helpful for her big set-piece, when she pretends to be Grant’s low-class sister “Lola” in front of some society people. Lola is afraid of having her purse stolen, brags of eating a ham for dinner, and asks for a drink because she “had three or four before I got here, but they’re starting to wear off, and you know how that is!” Dunne’s stylized treatment of seemingly bottomless personal vulgarity is so expertly judged and all-out that it takes the breath away, and she shows the full measure of her talent by switching to pert, gently yielding sexiness in the film’s final bedroom encounter. Dunne’s Lucy is the ideal woman because she’s the ideal actress, Irene Dunne, able to do just about anything, an emblem of romantic versatility. You’d never get tired of having her around, because she’d always be someone else for you (and it’s no mistake that Dunne was a consummate actress who actually enjoyed a happy marriage).

Joy of Living (1938) reprised the last part of Theodora with sometimes labored results, though it does end on the memorable image of Dunne walking barefoot in the rain. And My Favorite Wife reprised The Awful Truth in many of its situations, but Grant and Dunne are so perfectly matched that they’re fun to watch even in re-warmed material. (She loved working with Grant, and said she cried when she didn’t get to do the second film version of Holiday with him.) Her later comedies are threadbare affairs, and Dunne’s shtick became purely technical after awhile, as if she was flirting only with herself. But Leo McCarey offered her an apotheosis with Love Affair (1939, below), a whole film that fuses her disparate modes much as her singing laugh did in The Awful Truth.

Boyer and Dunne in Love AffairAs Terry McKay, a former nightclub singer who’s gotten used to a rich boyfriend’s gifts, Dunne is at her most arch and adult when she meets up with Continental seducer Charles Boyer. She goes much further into improv interplay with McCarey; the conversational stops and starts have the effect of making the actors seem more actory, more glamorous. Dunne’s Terry is droll about nearly everything as she sips her pink champagne, yet she stares at an image of the Virgin Mary and the phallic Empire State Building with equal parts yearning and devotion. In the second half, when she’s been crippled, Dunne offers deep, still-faced despair, then smiles, heartbreakingly. She sings with children, and she gracefully waits for Boyer to come to her, as Dunne herself gracefully waits for audiences to come back to her films, which all need to be restored and made more available. “She seems to be terrific in just about everything,” said a friend of mine, with a note of surprise in his voice, after I showed him a few very different Dunne movies. Terrific she is: platonically romantic, slightly above it all, always slipping out of your grasp, and completely at one with her medium.

Author’s note: This piece could not have been written without the assistance of Joan McGittigan, a Dunne aficionado who kindly made me copies of some of the actress’ rarest films. She truly went above and beyond the call of duty, and my hat is off to her. Editor’s note: Heartfelt thanks, too, to the incomparable Howard Mandelbaum and his staff at PhotoFest, the world’s premier stills archive, for providing the rare Dunne images.

August 2007 | Issue 57
Copyright © 2007 by Dan Callahan

Irene’s recordings

It’s absolutely chilling & thrilling to hear these rare recordings…

All the Things You Are
They Didn’t Believe Me
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Yes, I am endeared. I am, in fact, ensorceled. His inhumanly arched eyebrows, his little winks and half-smiles, and that ability to at once maintain full control of his material while shining the spotlight on his costar: yes, that is talent; yes, this is love. And no, Cluny Brown, it’s not just the cocktails giving you that persian cat feeling… I think we both know too well it has a bit to do with Mr Charles Boyer. Rawr.

Nothing better suited to Hollywood romance than three weeks out of time, away from life, falling in love with a stranger, spending days idly and nights actively.