Wild Again

Theodora Goes Wild/Together Again (1936) is a nice Irene Dunne double bill. Theodora might have been the first movie I saw at the Stanford Theater, and this was my first time for Together.

In Theodora Goes Wild, Dunne is Theodora, the respectable daughter of a family of small-town Connecticut big shots. Secretly, she is also the author of a scandalous best-seller, which the newspaper is serializing, and the literary society (of which she is a member) deplores. 

She visits New York to see her rakish uncle Robert Grieg, but also to see her publisher. Hanging around the office is Melvyn Douglas, a sort of hanger-on who always shows up uninvited when there's a chance of free food. He accuses Dunne of being a prude who doesn't know anything about the lurid life she writes about. To prove him wrong, she has him take her out carousing.

There's a great couple of nightclub scenes, including a hula show, but she manages to survive and make it back to her respectable Connecticut home. But look who's coming up the sidewalk? It's Douglas, pretending to be a tramp looking for work. To keep her secret, she has to offer him a gardening job and a bed in the shed out back.

So Douglas is hanging around, being annoying (he whistles constantly, making sure Dunne can't ignore him). But of course, through all of this she is slowly falling in love with him. He encourages her to stop living according to other people's expectations and live her own life. Which she finally does - telling everyone in the literary society that she wrote that book, and that she is in love with the gardener.

But instead of being the happy ending, Douglas gets quiet and sour and disappears. So in the next act, Dunne hunts him up in New York. It turns out that he is married (unhappily) and he can't get divorced because his father is running for office. So Dunne moves into his apartment and starts tormenting him. It's a nice twist.

Together Again (1944) is set in another small town, with Dunne again one of the first citizens. Here she is the widowed wife of a much beloved mayor, with a teenaged daughter (Mona Freeman) who dotes on a statue of her father in the park, and shows distain for her boyfriend.

When lightning strikes the head off of the statue, Dunne travels to New York to hire a sculptor to make a new one. She finds Charles Boyer. He takes her out for some gay nightlife, including a visit to a strip club. When she spills something on her dress, a washroom attendant has her take it off to touch it up. And then the police raid the joint, a stripper grabs her dress and jumps out the window, and she gets photographed in her slip (fortunately with her hand in front of her face).

She goes back to her town, and finds that they have all seen the picture of the raid in the papers. She tells everyone that the sculptor is too busy, and by the way, he's old and ugly. Then he shows up. He even moves into her shed to work on the sculpture. There's a merry mix up with the daughter setting her hat for Boyer, which makes Dunne pretend to go for her boyfriend. All the while, Charles Coburn, the dead mayor's father, is trying to get Dunne to be a human and marry Boyer.

Pretty similar to Theodora - there's even a newspaper editor subplot in both. But in place of the twist where Dunne tortures Douglas, we have the cross-generational mixup, which frankly belongs in a 50s TV sit-com. Still, there's a lot to like about it, even if it isn't quite the classic Theodora is. It does have Charles Coburn, plus the washroom attendant is Nina Mae McKinney, a beautiful black woman who get very few roles. .