‘Theodora Goes Wild’ or — Transgressively Triumphant?
The outrage! The little town of Lynnfield, Connecticut, is up in arms about their local newspaper serialising the racy new bestselling novel ‘The Sinner’ by Caroline Adams and no one is more indignant about this “sexy trash” than Sunday school teacher and church organist Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne), a young woman who lives with her two spinster aunts and is an upstanding pillar of the community. Theodora, it turns out, is also novelist Caroline Adams, a secret that no one in conservative Lynnfield must ever discover.
Under the pretext of visiting her liberal and hedonistic uncle in the city Theodora has a clandestine appointment with her publisher in New York and it’s here she encounters her book’s illustrator, Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas). Michael takes a shine to Theodora so follows her home to Lynnfield where he manages to insinuate himself as her aunts’ live-in gardener as he is determined to get Theodora to loosen up, embrace life and live it as fully as her alter-ego presumably would or else he’ll expose her terrible secret to the world (what a gent!).
The problem is Michael’s plan works a little too well as soon Theodora is publicly announcing her love for him. Love?! It transpires that Michael has some secrets of his own and isn’t quite the free, uncaged spirit we’ve been led to believe, so he skedaddles straight back to NYC. And that’s when Theodora decides to turn the tables, follow Michael to New York and, like some sexually aggressive Rousseau, force Michael free from his shackles by turning his world, along with his entire social order, upside down by going completely wild and exposing EVERYTHING.
Although CAN Theodora go wild? She is, after all, rather timid and meek so she’s not exactly the epitome of an agent of rampant disruption. Theodora might not be able to go wild but Caroline Adams, on the other hand, most certainly can.
‘Theodora Goes Wild’ (1936) is a film of two halves with the first being a delightfully funny screwball comedy about a young woman living a double life whilst struggling with the small town attitudes of the local gossips and resisting Michael’s affections. Director Richard Boleslawski keeps things suitably energetic but also nicely relaxed, a great example of this being when Theodora feeds Michael berries by a river and the mess the two of the make is surprisingly natural and erotic.
Yet it’s the second half where the film really explodes as Theodora fully transforms into Caroline, claims all that indestructible libidinous power and sets out to obliterate every conceivable social norm to get her man.
And these poor men are utterly oblivious to the danger Theodora’s Caroline represents but all the women get it immediately, something the wife of Theodora’s publisher warns her husband about when she tells him “That adorable young thing is an unholy terror on wheels. There’s nothing in the world more deadly than innocence on the manhunt.” And as Theodora’s behaviour becomes more outlandish so do her costumes until she’s wearing a shiny lamé number that’s so tight and black she looks like an S&M dominatrix.
Naturally this Theodora/Caroline duel role allows Dunne to do what she does best which is to play naughty without losing her innate respectability, something she’d reprise the following year in ‘The Awful Truth’ (1937), and all accompanied that idiosyncratic throaty “G’ha-ahh” laugh of hers.
Although it’s Lynnfield’s busy bodies who steal the show and their repulsion/fascination with all the “sexy trash” being openly flaunted is a joy to behold, their mania at the old order of things collapsing as female sexuality exerts itself pushing the movie to a delirious climax.
And it’s some climax as, without giving anything away, Theodora has one last convention smashing, iconoclastic trick up her feathery sleeve as she arrives back home in triumph and pulls off a final gag that’s so shocking that even the most fervent supporters of her sexual liberation find their jaws smashing onto the station’s platform like stupefied anvils. It’s astonishingly transgressive and might just be the funniest joke any film has ever ended on.
‘Theodora Goes Wild’ is an absolutely wonderful celebration of honesty over moralising, sexuality over repression and modernity over controlling dogma. Watch it and set yourselves free.
