by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I a 1936 movie called Theodora Goes Wild, which I’d heard about for years but mostly from Bob
Thomas’s biography of Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn. Thomas said
that the filmmakers, director Richard Boleslavsky and writer Sidney Buchman
(adapting a more-or-less “original” story by Mary McCarthy, not the writer who became famous in the 1960’s for her
novel The Group but an earlier
Mary McCarthy whose best credit was probably the screenplay for Dudley Nichols’
alternative-health masterpiece Sister Kenny in 1946), had raised Cohn’s ire by deliberately
making the opening of their film boring until the titular “wild” heroine
returns to a small town carrying a baby — but that happens only at the very end
of the movie and what precedes it isn’t boring at all. Theodora Goes
Wild begins in the small town of Lynnfield,
Connecticut, where the local townspeople — especially the Lynnfield Literary
Society, a group of middle-aged and older women with a highly puritanical sense
of “morality” — are up in arms over the decision of Lynnfield Daily
Bugle editor Jed Waterbury (Thomas
Mitchell) to publish a serial version of The Sinner, the scandalous novel by Caroline Adams that has
become America’s number one best seller. (Given that Theodora Goes
Wild was made just two years after similar
women’s clubs and the Legion of Decency, the censorship arm of America’s Roman
Catholic Church, had clamped down on Hollywood and forced it to get serious
about enforcing the Production Code, I couldn’t help but think McCarthy and
Buchman meant this as a satire of censorship in general and in particular how
the movies had been forced to give up the relative moral honesty and freedom of
the so-called “pre-Code” era.)
The campaign to stop the Bugle from publishing The Sinner is led by the three Lynn sisters, daughters of the
founder of the town, and their niece Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne). We then cut
to a scene in New York, where Arthur Stevenson (Thurston Hall, considerably
less overbearing and more human than usual), publisher of The Sinner, is about to meet with Caroline Adams — and of
course it turns out that “Caroline Adams” is really Theodora Lynn, who wrote
the book under a pseudonym but now finds herself blocked on a second novel because
she can’t write for fear her townspeople will discover her secret. She goes out
with Stevenson, his wife and Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas), who drew the sexy
cover for The Sinner, and rather
unconvincingly protests that she’d thought she was writing an innocent romance
novel and didn’t realize how steamy it was until she heard one of the women’s
club members read part of it aloud at their meeting. She’s also hyper-concerned
about not revealing her secret, but her cover gets blown when she starts ordering
straight whiskeys, gets drunk, goes home with Michael Grant and (this being a
1936 movie) escapes with her virtue (and, we suspect, her virginity) intact but
leaves behind some papers than enable him to trace her. Michael blackmails
Theodora into hiring him as a gardener for the Lynn estate and, in the usual
fashion of a 1930’s movie hero, tries to get Theodora to fall in love with him
by annoying her. He whistles — there’s a great scene in which Theodora tries to
drown him out by playing the Lynn family piano and singing (and yes, it’s Irene
Dunne’s own voice: she was an operatically trained mezzo-soprano who auditioned
for the Met but decided to sign with RKO and make movies instead) — and
pressures her into going out with him to the countryside, where they pick
blackberries and fish. (One wonders if the inclusion of a fishing scene was,
uh, “inspired” by the similar, and even funnier, fishing scene in MGM’s Libeled
Lady the same year.) The gag, of course, is
Theodora is great at those tasks while Michael is hopeless. Michael finally
breaks down Theodora’s resistance and leads her to abandon her small-town
values and become more like the woman she wrote her best-seller about, only
just when Theodora thinks they’re going to run off together Michael leaves her
a note that explains that now that she’s liberated the two of them will be
better off alone.
It turns out that the reason for Michael’s sudden departure
is he has a secret of his own — he’s married, and while he and his wife are
estranged they’re staying together for the sake of the political career of
Michael’s father, who’s the lieutenant governor of New York state and has
insisted that Michael (who already betrayed the family’s financial-industry
tradition by walking out on his bank job and becoming an artist) stay married
at least for the duration of his term in office. There’s an acid little comment
about the governor also having a penchant for dating beautiful women other than
his wife that sort-of anticipates Buchman’s script for Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington three years later. The film’s
second act is an obvious turning of the tables, as now it’s Theodora, in
“Caroline Adams” guise, pushing Michael to break free of his oppressive family and lifestyle, which she
accomplishes by getting herself named as co-respondent first in publisher
Stevenson’s divorce case and then in Michael’s (and there are lots of neat
cut-ins to the reaction of the people back home in Lynnfield as every new
development in Theodora’s love life gets reported in huge bold banner headlines
in the Bugle), and of course
ultimately Michael divorces his wife and he and Theodora get together. In case
you’re wondering where the baby comes in, she’s actually the daughter of
Theodora’s cousin Adelaide and the rather milquetoast husband (Roger Taylor)
she met in college, but when she shows up at the Lynnfield train station (to a
heroine’s welcome) with the kid in tow, that’s just one more frisson for the townspeople. I thought Theodora
Goes Wild was a sheer delight, but Charles
was considerably less taken with it; he said that today the actions of the
Melvyn Douglas character would be read as stalking and sexual harassment rather
than the charming, devil-may-care rakishness the filmmakers intended — and even
though the second act set up the situation so she could turn the tables on him,
Charles said that didn’t work for him because it only made her less likable. My one problem with this film was that
it’s hard to believe Theodora was really so innocent about the content of what
she had written: the plot might have worked better if she had originally given
her manuscript a more anodyne title and been genuinely shocked when her
publisher renamed it The Sinner
and played up the sex aspects in his promotion.
Still, I think it’s a lovely
comedy, atmospherically directed by Boleslawsky (who’d die the next year in the
middle of filming Joan Crawford’s Cinderella farce The Bride Wore Red — Dorothy Arzner replaced him and got sole credit)
and so beautifully acted by the leads it’s hard to believe it was ever pitched
to anyone else. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, it was originally
intended for Marion Davies and Clark Gable as a follow-up to their 1936 film Cain
and Mabel (which I haven’t seen in decades
but I recall as not very good, even though Davies remains one of Hollywood’s
most underrated talents and she was quite good in comic roles), and when she
turned it down it was pitched to Carole Lombard — who would have been great in
Theodora’s comic moments but wouldn’t have brought the underlying seriousness
to the small-town side of the character that Dunne did. The only other actress
I thought of while watching the film was Katharine Hepburn, mainly because I
think Dunne was copying Hepburn’s flaring intonation to make herself believable
as a New Englander (which Hepburn was for real and the Kentucky-born Dunne
wasn’t), but Dunne was the right choice for the role even though it seems odd
that this was one of the five
films in which she was nominated for an Academy Award and one would have thought
her other 1936 role, as Magnolia Hawks Ravenal in James Whale’s film of Jerome
Kern’s Show Boat, would have been
more deserving.
