Penny Serenade (1941)

Penny Serenade is one of those movies that eases into revealing its holiday credentials. I spent most of the first half thinking I'd been misled by whatever Christmas movie list I saw this on, but - sure enough - by the end I was convinced. More than that, the nature of its structure makes it particularly interesting to examine as a Christmas movie.

As usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's backup and get some context. If Penny Serenade were released now, it would probably be considered a dramedy, as it pointedly contains both tragedy and humor and its tone tends to revert to a midpoint between those extremes. It's mostly notable for being the first film to earn Cary Grant an Oscar nomination, though if you ask me, his costar, Irene Dunne, is the real MVP here. Don't get me wrong: Grant's great too, but I found Dunne's performance more believable and sympathetic (to be fair, the writing around her character also ages better, as we'll discuss in more detail later).

The movie indulges in melodrama at times, making it difficult to recommend to audiences who might find its excesses cloying or even unintentionally silly in a few cases. That said, there's a lot here to appreciate, as well. If the stars, era, or genre are enticing enough, and you're not turned away by the sort of sentimentality now associated with Hallmark movies, it might be worth closing your browser window before I get into spoiler territory (though, for what it's worth, this is the kind of thing that telegraphs where it's heading well in advance, making plot spoilers kind of a moot point).

The movie's title ties to its central gimmick: the entire story is told in flashback as Julie (Dunne) plays record after record and each cues an associated memory about her relationship with her husband, Roger (Grant). It's an effective storytelling tool that works well overall. I'm not sure the decision to cut to each flashback by zooming into the record was necessary (a little too on-the-nose, in my opinion), but I like the overall conceit.

The whole thing starts at what seems to be the end of its leads' marriage. Julie asks Applejack, a longtime friend of hers and Roger's played by Edgar Buchanan, to help her move out. He tries to get her to reconsider, but she insists there's nothing more her and Roger need from each other. We're not told what happened yet, but the camera lingers on an empty child's room, foreshadowing where this is all headed.

But of course we need to go back to the beginning first, so Julie puts on the first record while she waits for Applejack to finish running an errand. We learn she met Roger while she was working at a record store and he stopped in, ostensibly to pick up some albums, but really to pick up... you get the idea. He confesses this to her later that evening, by which time she's receptive to starting a relationship.

This is only the first of many red flags she misses or ignores regarding Roger's behavior, which falls somewhere on the spectrum between childish and outright creepy. The next comes during the next flashback, in which he behaves evasively towards questions of wanting a family after a fortune cookie raises the topic.

Naturally, there's a brief interlude between each flashback showing Julie changing the music. Next, we're taken to a New Year's party and reintroduced to Applejack, an awkward friend and coworker of Roger's. When Roger arrives late, he pulls Julie aside to tell her that he's leaving for Japan, where he's accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper he works for. He asks Julie to marry him and join him in a few months. They elope and head to the train, ostensibly to see Roger off, but she winds up spending a few hours with him in his train compartment.

In case you're unfamiliar with movies made during the Hay's Code, that's about as risqué as things get. 

At any rate, the next flashback brings her to Japan, where she discovers Roger spending a bit more recklessly than she'd prefer. He's got a large house staffed with a family of servants. Julie reveals she's pregnant, and - to his credit - Roger seems excited. However, he wants to raise the child in America and quits his job to move back, planning to open and run his own newspaper.

Before we can get to any of that, an earthquake strikes, Julie is injured, and she suffers a miscarriage. Back in America, she tries to keep her spirits up while Roger uses his inheritance to start the aforementioned newspaper and hire Applejack, who convinces the couple to consider adoption (we learn he's an orphan, himself). He initially tells Julie that Roger is open to the idea but scared to broach the subject, though the movie's unclear whether this was actually true. Regardless, soon the couple is at the agency, where they exaggerate their income to remain in consideration. Here, we're introduced to Miss Oliver (Beulah Bondi), who eventually sets them up with a five-week old daughter named Trina, despite their initial request for a two year-old boy. Everyone ignores a few dozen red flags around Roger whining that they're not able to get the precise make and model orphan they were after, but I never promised everything in this movie (or this era) aged well.

At first, they struggle as new parents (relatable), but they find an unlikely helper in Applejack, who - despite the rough exterior of a mechanic - turns out to know a great deal about caring for babies. By the time we jump forward a year, Roger and Julie are managing well in that role, albeit not so well elsewhere. The paper has shut down, and they don't meet the financial requirement for the adoption to be finalized. Roger and Miss Oliver see a judge and Roger delivers a stirring monologue that convinces him to toss out the law and let him and Julie keep Trina.

We then move ahead five or six years to find them all doing well. Trina is cast in the school Christmas play, though she's a little upset she won't get to be on stage yet and expresses her desire to be an angel the following year.

Again, this is not a subtle movie. Between that and the establishing shot of her room being empty, it's not exactly a surprise to discover a year later her wish of being an angel was granted with the cruelty of a 2nd Edition D&D Dungeon Master after a PC fails to think through how to word a wish spell. Trina dies offscreen of a sudden illness, a fact we learn when Julie writes to Miss Oliver. Now it's Christmas again, a fact we learn when a woman breaks down outside their home while trying to get her own child to the Christmas play Trina would also have been performing in. Julie and Roger drop everything to get them there, despite being emotionally gutted by the act.

We learn that Roger has been distant and somewhat cruel to Julie through this as he's struggled to deal with his own grief. He sort of implies that he wants her to leave, then soon after begs her to stay. She confronts him with the fact he hasn't been available to help her through this, and - despite everything they've shared - she can't see any reason to stay together. Just as she's about to leave, the phone rings.

It's Miss Oliver, calling to tell them there's a two year-old boy at the orphanage who matches the description of the one they originally asked for years earlier. Would they be interested in coming by the following day? Within seconds they're planning how to fix up the house for the new infant, and the movie ends on a note of... of... I think they're going for optimism here? Personally, I don't think these people are in a healthy enough state to be trusted with a housecat, and no child should be placed in a situation where they're the glue holding their parents' marriage together, but I suppose this was being written with eight fewer decades of understanding about healthy environments for raising kids.

Speaking of when this was made, let's start peeling back a few of these layers. First, Roger is difficult to take seriously as a character. He's clearly selfish, shortsighted, and egotistical. To the movie's credit, it addresses these as flaws - he admits to his shortcomings during both his speech to the judge and to his wife at the end, though it's difficult to take his second transformation seriously when the first didn't seem to fix his root issues.

I'm not sure this is really an issue with the movie - again, it understands this is bad behavior - but the extent to which the character exhibits these traits makes him hard to root for. I do appreciate that Julie serves as the movie's POV, is more sympathetic, and is by far the more reasonable of the pair (which hasn't been typical of '40s movies I've encountered). I also don't fault them for having Roger act as blatantly childish as they did - my guess is anything less would have gone over the heads of audiences of the time. But in 2024 this feels a bit extreme, which only reinforces the sense that the movie as a whole lacks nuance in its messaging.

Well, most of its messaging. There are a couple elements that aged very well. I've already mentioned Julie, who works well as the movie's most important character. In addition, I was impressed with how the movie depicted Applejack as a gruff, manly, figure with a wealth of emotional intelligence and knowledge of childcare. It's difficult to overstate this: the role he fills in the back half of the movie is one typically reserved for a female character - usually a servant or relative - and the movie treats his ability to step in as natural and praiseworthy. In a movie that otherwise struggles with subtlety, the writing around his character challenges gender stereotypes while fading into the background.

The movie's portrayal of adoption, on the other hand, is awkward. The narrative comes out strongly in favor of adoption (it's more or less the central thesis of the picture), but the way it presents its case feels antiquated. Adoption is more or less shown as a method of healing the parents, which is problematic even before you get to that ending (which also seems to unintentionally imply children are replaceable and even that boys are preferable to girls). It means well, but the years haven't been kind to this aspect of the film.

Let's talk Christmas, which is a surprisingly rich area, considering only a small portion of the runtime was obviously set around the holidays. I say "obviously" because the ending reveals that the entire frame story was at Christmas - we just didn't realize, because Roger and Julie were mourning rather than celebrating. Other than the frame and resolution, we're shown two holidays during flashbacks: the New Year's they eloped, and their last Christmas with Trina prior to her death.

In both cases, I find it most interesting how the holidays don't align with the central theme and concept. This is, after all, a movie explicitly about nostalgia and the desire for lost family, ideas that would come to dominate postwar Christmas movies. But while later films typically fixate on the reclamation of past Christmases, the holidays here seem to be primarily forward looking. The New Year's sequence is the start of their life together (which remains the default use of that holiday in popular culture), and the prior Christmas is largely focused on Trina's desire for a future that never arrives. Obviously, there's a sense of nostalgic loss experienced by Julie during the frame story and final Christmas, but it's never shown to us through the prism of that holiday (i.e.: she doesn't seem to feel a desire to experience Christmas, so much as she feels the loss of her daughter). Even the scene where they drive a stranger and her kid to the Christmas play is viewed through a lens of pain and loss - they're doing this because they understand what it means to the child, not because they're inspired by the holidays. There's no point in which it feels like they're trying to reclaim Christmas in any sense, and the seeming miracle at the end only reinforces the sense the holidays are a symbol of hope and the future.

This makes a degree of sense in the context of the decade that came before. Movies of the 1930s typically portrayed the holidays as a time for looking forward towards a more modern, progressive future. A few years after this, movies would almost exclusively treat Christmas as a chance to reclaim the past. The fact even a movie centered on nostalgia still follows this pattern makes for an effective illustration of the effect the war would have on media and our understanding of the holidays.

That doesn't mean this or prior depictions of Christmas were portraying the holidays as free of heartache, obviously. This certainly leverages the holiday connection with children to heighten the tragedy of Trina's death, just as Bright Eyes used it to magnify a child's pain at the loss of her mother in 1939. Movies have never exclusively treated the holidays as a happy time and have always been eager to use the juxtaposition between Christmas and tragedy to wrench tears from the audience.

Penny Serenade is also notable for the unusual timing around New Years. A key sequence uses that holiday early on, setting it up as a sort of delineation of an era in its leads' lives - the start of their marriage. While this is typical, it's a little surprising the movie doesn't circle back to this: both Trina's final Christmas and the close of the movie seem to wrap up sometime before the 25th. Again, this isn't necessarily a flaw - the sense of personal timelines being defined through key moments is established and linked to the season - but I was a little surprised the movie didn't recycle that particular symbol.

Overall, I found this mixed as an experience. There were some charmingly funny moments, and I like a great deal of the ideas. Likewise, the tonal blend felt more refined than most comedic melodramas I've come across from the era - this does a good job leveraging the lighthearted moments to build tension for the hard ones. And, as I said at the start, the leads are doing fantastic work. However, some of the movie's most dramatic twists come across as a little silly, both because the movie is a little too eager to foreshadow where it's headed and because of lackluster production values. The earthquake sequence in particular (despite what I imagine were fairly expensive effects) feels over-the-top.

I'll grant a lot of that likely has more to do with a disconnect between stylistic conventions of the '40s and today (though it's worth noting the movie was criticized by some at the time it came out along similar lines). Regardless, this is one of those cases where a film with a great deal of merit just doesn't quite work the way it was intended. Between moments that come off as more cheesy than shocking and well-intentioned morals using dated messaging, I don't think this works as well as perhaps it once did, which is likely why despite its many positive attributes it's not better known. Still, there's more than enough here that will appeal to viewers willing to look past all that. It's mostly still a good movie; just not good enough to elevate it to classic status.

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