Irene Goes Wild

In Theodora Goes Wild, Irene Dunne plays ultra-respectable Theodora Lynn, a Lynn of starchy Lynnfield, Connecticut, who has secretly, we learn almost immediately, under the pseudonym Caroline Adams written a scandalous best seller of romantic hot-cha, The Sinner: “Modern . . Different . . Thrilling!!,” the posters assure us. At the office of her New York publisher, Theodora meets up with book jacket designer Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas), who prods her—and, it should be noted, it doesn’t take much prodding, assisted by a few belts of whiskey—to publicly cut loose. Romantic hijinks ensue, you can be sure, and the backdrop includes two disapproving maiden aunts amid an armada of straitlaced New England biddies led by Spring Byington; an adorably rambunctious dog named Jake (played not by the beloved Skippy of the Thin Man series, Bringing Up Baby, and The Awful Truth but by a nonetheless perfectly genial hound named Corky); a chortling newspaper editor (the inevitable, you might say, Thomas Mitchell) and an indulgent uncle; Douglas’s to-die-for bachelor pad, complete with etchings and glass brick walls; and a Chekhov’s gun of a subplot in which you can bet your Hays Office that a clandestine pregnancy introduced in the first act is going to go off in time for the finale in the person of a shocking baby—all within the bounds of matrimony, have no fear.

So: Snappy dialogue, of course. Slapstick, a little. Disguise, to be sure, not only our heroine’s masquerade as Caroline Adams, who’s at least as much the real Theodora as Theodora is, but also Michael’s charade as a down-at-heel handyman. But there’s no class conflict in view (everyone’s well-off and then some); suave Melvyn Douglas, with his suave mustache, is the straightest of straight arrows; and Dunne is an awful lot of things but she’s certainly not madcap, certainly no relation to the agents of chaos that Carole Lombard embodied so exuberantly, much less the feral terror that Katharine Hepburn played in Bringing Up Baby. She’s an intelligent, sensible woman in conflict with herself who makes a series of more or less well-thought-out choices, plays her hand strategically, and eventually gets everything she wants. “A Lynn may go wild,” her uncle notes, “but never silly.”

Indeed, Theodora goes wild but never silly, cutting loose but never losing control. And if in her contained exuberance Irene Dunne stands apart from her classic screwball sisters, she is, I think, the actress who best embodies what we truly find most alluring in the genre, what I see as its real beating heart: the way these films’ protagonists break free of the straitened existences they’ve either been trapped in or trapped themselves in (or both). Yes, often with the assistance of a playful playboy, helpfully crazed heiress, alluring cardsharp, or even, sure, Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea, but also, and more important, because they themselves need to and do the work to break free.