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The final pairing of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant bears almost no resemblance to their earlier two films, The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife – which, as returning readers may recall, are effectively the same movie. In those films, Dunne and Grant trade volleys of sharp-witted dialogue in an escalating battle for position over the other. The movies have a near-anarchic approach in their pursuit of the laugh. In short, they are comedies. Penny Serenade is not. It’s a classic Hollywood melodrama weeper as unquestionably calculating as it is effective.

Three years after the success of The Awful Truth, Irene Dunne & Cary Grant were paired again in another screwball comedy produced and co-written by that first film’s director, Leo McCarey. This reunion leans heavily – and I do mean heavily – on the foundation laid by its predecessor. Though the names are different, the lead characters are essentially the same: urbane, witty, and navigating a difficult marital situation. Dunne is more confident and decisive, Grant more flustered and circumspect. The narrative structure even matches the first – minimal exposition, clear act breaks, competing romantic partners, and an almost identical resolution. If the guiding notion was “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” then they mostly succeeded. Except that the premise this time is, to coin a phrase, totally bonkers.

In the four-year span from 1937 to 1941, Irene Dunne & Cary Grant co-starred in three different films, from two different studios, and three different directors. Two comedies (The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife) and one difficult to classify melodrama/tragedy/romance (Penny Serenade). Though they’d already had, and would continue to have, widely-acclaimed and popular success on their own – Dunne with Love Affair and I Remember Mama, Cary Grant with, well, being Cary Grant – there is a particular kind of crackle between them in these three films that is as exciting as exists in any of the more often heralded movie partnerships of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Hepburn & Tracy, Powell & Loy, Hope & Crosby, etc.

It's remarkable then that 1998’s Next Stop Wonderland somehow manages to be both genuinely romantic and comedic with multi-dimensional lead characters in an original story that surprises while remaining firmly ensconced within a traditional Romantic Comedy architecture. Incredible? Impossible? Unrealistic? Indubitably! But as is true in any film of the genre those obstacles disintegrate in the face of true love and, I have to admit, I truly love this movie…

Further digressing from the professed theme, this week’s film centers on a person so far into the margins of rock music that he’s a classical pianist. However, it earns inclusion due to its merit as an extremely successful example of a thankfully untraditional musical biography. Because a person’s history can’t be contained in their high highs and low lows, an accurate life story has to include countless digressions into the ordinary, off-topic, and non-narratively dependent. Happily, all of these are included among the eponymous thirty-two short films.