Well Dunne

IRENE DUNNE has made a twenty-one-year career of being the Gracious Lady. Before seing her "coming of age" picture It Grows On Trees (for release next week), I wondered how long she could keep it up. Now I know: just as long as she likes.

 In one all-important way the gracious lady has the advantage over the glamour queen. There are no dangerous years for her; no hazards of encroaching age, poundage and wrinkles. Years cannot dim the sunny integrity that personified by Irene Dunne shines through even the silliest screen situation.

 Whether the film she appears in is good or bad, whether the role she plays is zany or straight, Irene Dunne injects a kind of moral uplift. The special Dunne quality of niceness is unimpaired, no matter what its content may be.

 It is probably her facilty for making palatable the too-often sickly pill of goody-goody morality that prompts Irene to pick, as she sometimes does, the mild, but pleasant, comedy, rather than something dramatically stronger.

 The story of It Grows On Trees, for example, might have been brought to life by any fairly competent comedienne. But I can´t think of anyone who could have given its domestic fantasy anything like the warmth and credibilty that Irene does.

 It is the essence of nonsensical simplicity. A financially harrassed American housewife discovers that she has bought a couple of trees that... well, grow money. Just that. It seems to call for the tongue-in-cheek treatment; but Irene plays it as though she honestly believes in fairy stories. And in the end you know that it is her way that, even it is not histronically correct, is by far the happier one.

 It Grows On Trees brims over with the kind of morals to which you´re sure that Irene subscribes -- "Everything comes to he who waits"; "Love thy neighbour"; and so on. Watching it all you suspect that the slim, forty-seven-year old charmer, with the voice that sounds as though she´d gobbled a potful of words and was having difficulty digesting them, is out to do good. And the chances are that you´ll enjoy the moralizing.

 In many ways, Irene Dunne is the exception who is always cited to prove the wilder and woolier Hollywood rules. The label "Gracious Lady" for instance. Irene is one of the very few actresses who have worn it with credit and survived sucessfully in the movie jungle.

 Perhaps it´s the climate... or the tempo of work and living... perhaps it´s just that when you´ve fought your way right from the bottom to pretty near the top, graciousness happens to be one of those expendable qualities that have been shed en route.

 Whatever the reason, serenity and sweetness are not easily marketable. The actress who starts out by making a career of them finds it wiser to change the pace midway.

 Both Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine found it more profitable, after a long colorless stretch, to turn to characterizations with the bite, the irony and the power of drama.

 Yet the cinema woods are always full of would-be contenders for the Dunne crown; the phoney ones die a quick death, for the camera is a penetrating debunker of false charm and cultivated condescension.

                                            Who Follows?

 Who, then, will take over from Irene when she decides to vacate her throne?

 Kathryn Grayson invites comparison, having recently warbled delicately through the Dunne roles in Show Boat and Lovely To Look At (formerly Roberta). But her screen sweetness merely skims the surface, so to speak. It has still to suggest the depth and sincerity of Irene´s.

 Perhaps Betsy Drake -- whose casual humour and expression of absolute genuineness are Dunne-ish in the extreme. Or Deborah Kerr. Perhaps Jeanne Crain -- but again hers is yet a comparatively lightweight screen charm.

 Strongest bet of all, possibly, is Ann Blyth, who oddly enough took the circular route (screen-wise) from a little thing to nasty little thing and back to nice little thing. Her nice little thing of today has stature as well as sex-appeal.

 So much for speculation. The fact remains that Dunne is unique and still going stronger than most. And certainly to sum up he career in such a grossly inadequate nutshell, is to do less than justice to her artristry.

 She is, of course, a most capable actress; she has ranged from the maddest of comedies to the tenderest of romances; she has been historical and musical with equal success.

                                        Scored As "Mama"

 Her characterizations seem to me to be unlike a calculated job of work -- except for her Queen Victoria in The Mudlark, which was probably the most intensly considered acting task she had ever attempted. Her best performances give the impression of being deeply felt, rather than having been deeply thought out.

 For choice, I´d single out her adorable Norwegian-American mama in I Remember Mama. It was a triumph of well-observed detail.

 But Irene Dunne´s "Mama"  was more than exactingly detailed. To try to analyze its success any further would, however, be like trying to explain why, material things apart, one man believes in Socialism while another leans towards the Tory line. It´s a mixture of emotion, passion and personal instinct.

 Arriving over here as it did, almost at the same time as Life With Father, the film was at something of a disadvantage. Irene´s two charmingly remembered period mothers were teamed together in the same category. Witty, wise and exquisitely mounted though it was, Father was the lesser film, without the sublteties and the breadth of the other. And Irene´s portrayal was that much less important, too.

 Were it not for that stabilizing and ever-present quality of serene gentleness, the Dunne screen-line could be described as a pretty varied one.

 The star admitts that somehow she escaped the tough grind of reaching the top. She made the grade without the seemingly constant effort of, say, Stanwyck or Crawford.

 Her pleasant, light, but not exceptionaly singing voice won her a plum role in the Broadway stage version of "Show Boat", during the twenties. She was a comparatively mature twenty-six when she arrived in Hollywood in 1931. And even there things worked out well almost from the start.

 After an inconspicuous beginning in a forlorn piece called Leathernecking, she convinced the powers-that-be of her abilitly  to play the dramatic lead in Cimarron. That started the Dunne legend.

 Now that the "downs" in her career have been conveniently forgotten, the "ups" are constantly being remembered. There was the romantic tragedy of Back Street, and The White Cliffs Of Dover; the tender highspot of her blind girl in Magnificent Obsession and the flawless teaming with Charles Boyer in Love Affair, When Tomorrow Comes and Together Again.

                                           Shocked At Comedy

 And there was the excursion into high comedy in Theodora Goes Wild and The Awful Truth -- Dunne followers were shocked, but they stayed to laugh and then applaud.

 And musicals... best of all, perhaps, musicals. The delight and gaiety, tenderly edged with melancholy, of her singing and acting in Roberta and Show Boat are living memories.

 Except for one monumental exception, Irene Dunne has remained almost defiantly American. Perhaps because she is what she is, we hardly minded that her Victorian British school-marm in Anna And The King Of Siam spoke with a Kentucky drawl.

 Strange it seems that the role of Queen Victoria, to which she subordinated absolutely her American personality, should have prompted the severest complaints.

 With philosophical shrewdness she shut her ears to most of the howling critics and came through with a gemlike portrayal, complete with slightly suggested German accent. It was as unlike Irene Dunne as Peter Lorre is unlike Stewart Granger.

 The model career, too, has been paralleled by a model private life, which has also come in for its share of honours from all quarters -- official and otherwise. Hollywood respects and marvels a little. For, in her quiet and unassuming fashion, Irene has been confounding the pundits in the movie city for years.

 Curiously enough, though Irene Dunne has never won an Oscar.

 Some day the people who decide these things may award her with the sort of "long service" Oscar handed out to Colman, Crosby and Crawford.

 There are many who consider she deserves one -- for bringing grace to the screen.

(Picturegoer, October 25.  1952)