Spoilers and a longish digression
Tear jerker directed by George Stevens, while he would later direct my favorite film 'Giant', at this point in his career he was known mainly for comedies and the adventure film 'Gunga Din'.
Circa 1929, Brooklyn newspaper reporter Cary Grant spots Irene Dunne through the window of the music store where she works, he makes a large purchase he dosen't need as an excuse to meet her. The couple date for some time but Grant won't commit and Dunne starts to despair that he will never ask her to marry him. An opportunity to be his papers correspondent in Japan makes Cary face the prospect of life without Irene, so he proposes, they marry quickly and three months later he sends for her to join him.
The couple are happy together in Japan, the locals are portraid positivity in a film that would be released in April of 1941. Irene gets pregnate but a 1933 earthquake results in her having a miscarge. They move back to America and using an inheritance of Dunne's, Grant buys a small town Califorina newspaper and struggles to make it work.
Unable to have children the couple take in a six week old girl through the local orphanage and love her dearly. They are almost unable to finalize the adoption when the newspaper folds, but a determined Cary manages to talk a skeptical judge into signing the final papers.
Years pass, Grant has got his paper running again with help of right hand man/ old Brooklyn friend "Appeljack" Carney (Edger Buchanan). There is a sentimental Christmas pagent sequence with the adorable fiveish year old daughter. Just under a year later Trina dies after a brief illness. Irene is devistaed but Cary sinks into an alcoholic void of despair. The couple conclude their marriage can not be saved and plan on a separation, until the woman who runs the orphange (Beulah Bondi, in one of the few film roles in which she is not playing somebody's mother) calls to let them know she has a two year old boy who needs a home. Hope is restored, fade to black.
Man this movie is sad, but it's also very sweet. Cary Grant is a known quantity, but he stretches a few more acting muscles then usual for the emotional stuff. Irene Dunne is an actress I keep telling myself I need to see more of, she's very good but I feel like I haven't fully figured her out, she dosen't seem to fit neatly into an easy catagory but is a consistently endearing presence on screen.
Dunne was Oscar nominated 5 times but never won. She likely took this role in part because she and her husband Dennis adopted their only child, a daughter after 9 years of marriage. Dennis by the way was a dentist, the kind of detail I love. The couple was married 38 years before Dennis died, Irene would out live him by a quarter century, passing away in 1990 at the age of 91. Devout Catholics the only celebrity to attend her small private funeral was the also very Catholic Lorreta Young, a family friend. Their daughter Mary Francis would die in 2020 at the age of 85.
'Penny Serenade' lays it on kind of thick, but Grant's good and Dunne impressively subtle. It looks to be about three actresses who play their daughter at different ages and they have a real run of luck in that department, even the 18 month old could act. A sincere film which deals rather frankly for its time with money troubles, adoption, loss of a child and depression. ***1/2
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