THEODORA GOES WILD (1936) ** About the only wildness I noticed during the first half were the efforts of everyone around me to stay awake. Misplaced efforts for the most part, I thought, and myself refused to yield only on account of professional responsibility. It does get better but it never recovers. More like you get relieved that the entire thing isn't going to be that bad. The problem(s) is that it's almost impossible to decide (and painful) which of Irene Dunne's incarnations is most annoying or least believable: her librarian schoolmarmish thing is genuinely awful, but it's eerie and unsettling how boring she can also be as a literary libertine. Melvyn Douglas is nearly as annoying and for better or worse he's apparently a one (not very good) trick pony. And yet.rarely have such naked and courageous broadsides been thrown so deservedly. Aren't these characters battling against the ridiculous conventions of a staid and stifling society? They are, but to me they mainly look like evidence that there's a lot more to life, and aesthetics, than liberating oneself from the doctrines and dictates of idiots. If I was, like.45 years older.I might well have very fond associations with this film. I doubt it, but it might.you never know.even be one of my favorites, the way we all have favorite films that probably aren't objectively all that good. Hit us the right way at the right time. But I'm not. Eddie Murphy accomplished way more for me merely by writing "Be Free" in the concrete of the Gruauman's Chinese Theater. And it's no doubt only a matter of time before Eddie stars in a re-make of this, alongside Courtney Love is my guess.
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