Film / News
Film festival dishes out free tissues for screening of Cary Grant weepie
Free packets of paper hankies will be available to anyone who needs them at this month’s Bristol Megascreen screening of the 1941 tear-jerker Penny Serenade, which earned Bristol’s very own Cary Grant his first Oscar nomination.
The screening is a long-held ambition of Cary Comes Home film festival director Charlotte Crofts. “We’ve been dreaming of showing Penny Serenade on the big screen for years—and now it’s finally happening!” she enthuses. “This is a film that deserves to be experienced in all its emotional glory, and there’s nothing like sharing those tears and laughter with a live audience.”
Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in ‘Penny Serenade’
The film, which features a second Brisol icon in the canine form of Nipper the HMV dog, stars Irene Dunne as a woman who triggers flashbacks from the ups and downs of her life and marriage as she re-listens to memory-soaked 78rpm records while on the brink of divorcing her husband, Roger (Grant).
“It would spoil it to give too much of the plot away but both Irene and Cary have named this as their finest work and it’s certainly a film which pulls at the heart,” adds Charlotte. “The New York Times’s critic warned: ‘If you are prone to weeping, you might want to take along a washtub’ while another reviewer asked ‘What more would you want from a movie, but that it makes you feel? I’m not a crier by nature, but if I cry I want it to be worth it and this one’s worth it’.”
Blubbers will be overjoyed to learn that attendees will be issued with free packs of Cary Grant-branded tissues. To get the audience in the mood, pre-film entertainment includes a DJ playing 78rpm records on a traditional gramophone and a choir singing some of the songs heard in the film. There will also be a post-screening panel discussion/Q&A about music and melodrama.
The screening takes place on Saturday 29 November. Go here to book tickets.
All pix supplied by the Cary Comes Home festival.
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