Thoughts on Theodora Goes Wild

   On Criterion, I watched the 1936 screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild, directed by Richard Boleslawski, written by Sidney Buchman, with story by Mary McCarthy, starring Irene Dunne and Melvyn Douglas. Dunne, who was just starting her winning streak as a screwball comedy heroine, plays Theodora Lynne, a Sunday school teacher and organist in a small conservative Connecticut town, who has a double life as a romance novelist, under the pen name Caroline Adams, and when excerpts of her salacious, sexual-tinged stories are published in the local newspaper, the local women are all aghast at it, declaring it immoral, while Theodora keeps her anonymity as the writer.

    She goes to New York City to meet with her publisher, worried about her real identity being leaked, and is soon introduced to her illustrator, Michael (Douglas), developing a playful relationship with him when out to dinner with her publisher and his wife. But when Theodora returns to her hometown, Michael follows her, and as she says that nobody thinks she knows anyone from out of town, he makes up a cover story of being her new gardener, scandalizing the locals and inciting gossip (the movie has several montages of the old women on the phone with each other gossiping, and even some close-ups of cats to show how "catty" they are being), and pushes her to have fun and get out of her straight-laced life, being afraid to break tradition publicly even while writing romance novels on the sly. And Theodora, when discovering more about Michael and his personal life in New York City, also wants to help him have more freedom and independence. Both of them essentially encourage the other to stand up to others to have more agency in their lives.

    It's a fun movie, and Irene Dunne is really charming and cute in this, as a woman who lets out her secret desires for love and adventure under a pseudonym to write stories, while still wanting to appear as a "good" woman for her Christian conservative town. And Melvyn Douglas has this sly wit to him that makes him interesting to watch as Michael, as he doesn't come across as old-fashioned as other romance heroes of the time may have. 

    It's a fairly light movie, likely not as memorable as Dunne's 1937 film The Awful Truth, but it was still enjoyable to watch as a 1930s screwball comedy hidden gem. And there's also a cute scruffy dog that gets into the mix, so that's a bonus.