A wild double feature! Movies viewed

For last weekend’s date-night movie I picked THEODORA GOES WILD (1936), a rom-com starring Irene Dunne as a small-town spinster who’s penned a bestselling scandalous novel under a pen name because she can’t bear the scandal if the truth gets out in her home town. Enter Melvyn Douglas as a free-spirited painter determined to push Dunne out of her comfort zone and make her embrace life — a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, even if Douglas is too mellow to be manic.

[Edited to add] Except when Douglas has finally jolted Dunne free of her staid life and she comes to find him in New York, it turns out he’s not so free-spirited. He’s stuck in a loveless marriage because divorce would ruin his father’s upcoming shot at the governorship. He’s got to wait a couple of years before he’s free — but Dunne’s now determined to jar him as much as he shook her up. It’s that surprise shift that makes the movie memorable as well as fun. “Do you remember that typeface we used when war was declared?”THE WILD CHILD (1970 is Francois Truffaut’s story of the Wild Boy of Averoigne, a feral child (Jean Pierre Cargol)caught by hunters and turned over to a local doctor (Truffaut). The doctor’s mentor considers the boy a lunatic fit only for the asylum; the doctor stubbornly sets out to prove the can learn enough to function in society or at least prove his humanity. As you can see from that terrified face above, it’s not easy.

I’d like to say something deep about this but it doesn’t provoke any deep thoughts (here’s Roger Ebert’s if you want them). That’s not a veiled insult or anything — I found this completely fascinating and well watching. “To obtain a less ambiguous result, I must do an abominable thing.”

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