Penny Serenade (1941): watch the full film free, legally

Songs mark Julie and Roger's years

George Stevens directed Penny Serenade, a 1941 American melodrama produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Irene Dunne plays Julie Gardiner, later Julie Adams, opposite Cary Grant as Roger Adams. The film follows their meeting, courtship and marriage through popular songs associated with successive periods in their lives. Roger and Julie marry on New Year's Eve after a spur-of-the-moment decision, then spend their wedding night in Roger's train compartment while travelling toward San Francisco.

Julie, pregnant, later joins Roger in Tokyo, where he is working as a reporter. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake ends the couple's hopes for their unborn child, and they return to California despondent. Their friend Applejack Carney urges them to consider adoption. Roger tries to keep a newspaper alive in the fictional California town of Rosalia while Julie runs their home and prepares a nursery.

The couple apply to an adoption agency for a two-year-old boy, but Miss Oliver calls with news of a five-week-old girl. Roger initially wanted a boy, yet soon becomes devoted to the baby. Julie and Roger care for her through a one-year probationary period. Their daughter, Trina, later takes the role of the “echo” in a Christmas play because she is still too young to play an angel.

A screenplay built around popular music

Columbia Pictures paid $25,000 for the rights to a story by Martha Cheavens that had appeared in McCall's. Cheavens worked as a script consultant, while Morrie Ryskind received screenplay credit. The film's changing song selections provide a way of showing time passing. Papers belonging to Stevens at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library indicate that he carefully tracked the songs' chronology so they would correspond to the periods represented in the script.

Among the songs used are “The Japanese Sandman”, “These Foolish Things”, “Just a Memory”, “Three O'Clock in the Morning”, “Ain't We Got Fun”, and “The Prisoner's Song”. Penny Serenade was the third of three films to pair Grant and Dunne as a married couple.

Filming ran from October 14, 1940, to January 15, 1941. California law then limited an infant's studio time to two hours a day. An infant could remain on a sound stage for only one of those hours and could be filmed beneath studio lights for just twenty minutes at a time. To increase the time available for Trina as both a baby and a one-year-old, Stevens used identical twins. Judith and Dianna Fleetwood played the baby, and Joan and Jane Biffle played the one-year-old. Jane Biffle was billed in the end credits as “Baby Biffle.”

Grant and Dunne's dramatic partnership

The supporting cast includes Beulah Bondi as Miss Oliver, Edgar Buchanan as Applejack Carney, Ann Doran as Dotty “Dot”, Leonard Willey as Doctor Hartley, Wallis Clark as the judge, and Walter Soderling as Billings. Eva Lee Kuney plays Trina at age six. The film was released on April 24, 1941. For the Philadelphia promotion, Ray Wolf, manager of Affiliated circuit's Frolic Theatre, handed out chocolate pennies door to door and on busy street corners during rush hours.

Cary Grant was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, losing to Gary Cooper for Sergeant York at the 14th Academy Awards. Grant considered Roger Adams his best performance. Dunne said Penny Serenade was her favorite film because it reminded her of her own adopted daughter.

Variety commended Stevens' direction and the acting for lifting the script beyond maudlin melodrama. Its review described the ingredients as “tenderness, heart-throb, comedy and good, old-fashioned, gulping tears,” while observing that the story repeatedly approached saccharine before returning to “sound, human comedy-drama.” Time also praised Stevens' direction, though it said Grant and Dunne could not overcome the “ten-little-fingers-and-ten-little-toes plot.” Radio Times said Grant gave “a lesson in screen acting” through a subtly shaded performance that held sentimentality at bay. At its Radio City Music Hall premiere, Bosley Crowther singled out Grant, Dunne, Buchanan and Bondi, and wrote that the picture deliberately cozied up to the heart.

Film details from the Wikipedia article “Penny Serenade”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.