I’m not much for New Year’s Eve (I have already covered this), and I’m not much for big parties anymore, nor am I into people who can’t hold their liquor. My friend Ann Marie calls New Years Eve “open mic night for alcoholics.”
But there is a New Year’s Eve party I would like to go to. It’s the one from Penny Serenade (1941), starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, where Dunne’s realistically cramped New York apartment is filled with carousing people, the rugs rolled up for dancing, with people making out in corners of every room. Hostess Irene Dunne waits anxiously for her boyfriend to show up, but she’s also waiting for the bootlegger to arrive because she’s running out of illegal booze.
Then comes an excited tete a tete on the snowy fire escape with her boyfriend Johnny (Grant), a semi-aimless young guy who wants to do big things in his life, he’s just not sure what. He’s got news for her. He’s gotten a great job offer, very exciting, but the bad news is he needs to leave for Japan THAT NIGHT, like RIGHT NOW. Time is of the essence, so he asks her to marry her then and there on the fire escape. Of course she says Yes.
The happy couple make their way through the partiers in the apartment, and they race off into the night with two excited friends (to be witnesses) to find a justice of the peace who can do the deed. At one o’clock in the morning.
There is a hurried wedding, with the judge in his pajamas, and then the two race to the train station so he can head off to his new job.
They both get on the train, him to settle in, and her to say goodbye before the train leaves. They stand in his little sleeping compartment, still out of breath from their whirlwind. They’re married now. He’s leaving. What do they do now? He takes her in his arms. At that moment, the train chugs, blows its whistle, and slowly starts to move. She murmurs anxiously, “The train’s leaving!” He reaches out to close the door of his compartment, saying, “We’ll get you off.” (Nobody on any censorship board noticed this super hot double entendre.)
Then director George Stevens cuts away from the scene, showing a snow-covered sign saying NEW HAVEN 120 MILES. He cuts again, showing another sign: NEW HAVEN, with the train pulling into that station. This is a perfect cut. A model of efficiency and innuendo. 120 miles is plenty of time to get off, to put it crudely.
She stands on the empty platform, and he leans out the window waving to her as the train pulls away. She waves, and weeps, with snowflakes on her face. It’s a beautiful sequence.
Before all this happens, however, the two of them – engaged just moments ago – stand on the fire escape (and just like the apartment, it’s a realistic New York fire escape, it’s not a Hollywood-ized version), embracing as the snow falls around them. The clocks ring midnight, and you can hear people singing “Auld Lang Syne” from other apartments on the block, as well as from the partiers inside her apartment. People on another fire escape, across the way, call out “Happy New Year” to the happy young couple and Irene and Cary call “Happy New Year” back, exhilarated.
This is so much what it’s like in New York at New Year’s, at least outside the mania of Times Square.
I’d like to be at that party.
I’d like to roll up the rugs.
I’d nurse my drink until the bootlegger got there.
Waiting for my boyfriend to arrive.
I saw that movie a couple of years ago and I know exactly what you mean. That party looks bangin but nice and contained haha!
Contained is very important. I did the Times Square thing once – when I first moved to New York – and it was BONKERS. I’ll never do it again but I’m glad I at least did it once. It was a freezing night but nobody felt it because of our collective body warmth of millions of people crammed into a 5-block area.
Sheila
We watched that movie once and we can’t ever again! I can’t even remember that New Year’s Eve scene because all I remember is what happened to their kid and that killer scene where they wait and watch for her to come out in a play where she is, I think, the moon going across the sky. You can’t see her exactly because she is behind it but they are so excited, “there she is!” It tears me apart.
Now I have to see it again!
Our daughter was in a dance number in junior high school and she told me she needed a white short skirt. I had this old white pleated number and said, “oh here, use this!” It needed to be shorter so I cut it! You’d think I’d go to a tailor. I don’t know how to sew and didn’t even think to make a hem. “are you sure Mom?” “yeah! It’s a white short skirt!” We go and she jumps on stage with about 15 other girls all in perfect white gleaming short skirts. Her skirt is ragged, a little too long, slightly yellow and totally rumpled. I’m a little shocked and start hysterically laughing to myself. The funniest part was that she didn’t slink on, she came on proud as can be! I look over at C and he’s in tears with his hands on his face, “is that the skirt you made for her?” To this day my daughter can not hear me try to tell this as a funny story, she will not forgive me for it.
And I cannot believe you did the New Year’s Eve Time Square thing!!
Regina –
oh my God, the white skirt!!
// he’s in tears with his hands on his face, “is that the skirt you made for her?” //
hahahahaha
and yes that Penny Serenade concert scene is killer – the way Cary and Irene clutch each other’s hands as they watch her onstage. It’s TOO MUCH.
In re: Times Square: it certainly was an experience. But I wish I could have been airlifted out of there after the ball dropped – because getting HOME was an ordeal like something out of Lord of the Rings. I took a bus back to Hoboken. They block all the streets off for miles around so they can funnel the crowds through – blah blah – it was a mess. I think I got home at 5 o’clock in the morning.
Never. Again. But at least I can say I did it once!
Hi Sheila!
Another year. Happy 2019 and I hope everything you want will come. I really wish you the best.
That scene on the fire escape and the lovely people inside partying. I love the social worker, her wisdom, her bending the rules. And the first bath of the baby, there’s nothing more tender and funnier. Oh, and the record listening at the store, when you KNOW they’re going to be together.
My best New Year was a few years ago on a telescoping tour at the desert and at 12pm we heard some shouts from nearby ranchs, and 40 unknown people hugged each other in the darkness. Sometimes unforgettable things happen.
Clary – happy new year to you too!
// I love the social worker, her wisdom, her bending the rules. //
Oh God, me too!
The first bath of the baby is just high-comedy. I love how it plays out in real time. They are both so frightened!
Your “best New Years” sounds absolutely magical.
Mine was in Dublin, when all the pubs emptied out so people could hear the church bells ringing at midnight.
Irene Dunn. So very good.
Just the best.
Irene said this was her favorite movie – in part, I would assume, because she and her husband adopted their daughter. It’s certainly one of *my* favorites, too.
In a recent issue of the New Yorker, the theater critic was reviewing a new musical about a fictional encounter between several real people who used LSD. One was Cary Grant, who the reviewer, in a supreme moment of jack-assery, identified as “actor/dancer.” First off, who needs Grant to be identified?!? Second, if you do so, get it right: he wasn’t a dancer, he was a tumbler, a kind of acrobat. The level of snobbery evidenced by this writer just astonished me. Sheesh.
“actor/dancer.” I’m so mad about this. I went and looked up the review and it’s really really bad. Not just because of that, although that’s bad enough. He also assumed a superior attitude about the very thing he was reviewing. He said something like “they all did LSD searching for God know’s what” … so condescending. All of those people knew very well why they were doing LSD and all of them spoke about it at length, discussing their experiences and why they went into it. His snotty attitude was palpable.
It really makes me angry. So many great writers would love to have a perch at The New Yorker, and there they are publishing this shoddy lazy shit.
I’m so glad you felt the same way! I was SO mad when I read that review! Thank you for taking the time to track down and read it.
There was an interesting documentary on HBO sometime in the past year or two about Grant, produced by his daughter. Among other things, it examined his relationship with his mother, including the fact that for decades he was told she was dead, when in fact she was institutionalized, and the effect all of this had on ability to connect on an emotional level with people. The documentary looked at length at his LSD use – why he chose to do it, what he hoped to achieve, and what he actually accomplished. There’s a beautiful moment near the end where an excerpt from Grant’s journal quotes his description of his breakthrough session, saying (and this is as close to a direct quote as a I can come from memory), “The door opened and – my God! – humanity!” A true moment of grace, making the New Yorker critic’s snottiness all the more vile and misplaced.