Irene Dunne at Bright Lights
Dan Callahan in "The Elusive Pleasures of Irene Dunne" at Bright Lights:
"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.
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"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."
I disagree with quite a few of the comments Callahan makes in his article — including the fact that it’s not just Agee and Kael who offered the "most subjective film criticism" for all criticism, whether one admits it or not, is highly subjective. That said, just about any current article on Irene Dunne is worth a look. Though without much a following today, Dunne — lively, pretty, funny, sincere — was one of the best, most versatile Hollywood actresses of the 1930s and 1940s.
In his article, Callahan offers a thorough — and, of course, quite subjective — appreciation of Dunne’s films and of her talents as an actress/singer, though I part ways with him when it comes to Dunne’s private life, which was considerably more complex than his article would lead one to believe.
Also, I should add that High, Wide and Handsome was restored in the 1990s — it’s not one of Dunne’s best films or performances — and that most of Dunne’s films are very much available on cable television via Turner Classic Movies.
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Thank for for doing a profile of Irene Dunne. She certainly is underappreciated and her views underseen. I’ve always loved her in the Awful Truth, where she more than holds her own against Cary Grant, in many ways she’s in much more control than he is. Love Affair is the film that made me truly appreciate her talents though. All at once she’s funny, romantic and selfless. A beautiful film.