Unfinished Business

Irene Dunne has lessons in love in Gregory La Cava’s uniquely bittersweet spin on the classic Hollywood screwball.

  • Director

    Gregory La Cava

  • With

    Irene Dunne, Robert Montgomery, Preston Foster, Eugene Pallette

  • USA 1941. 96min

  • 35mm

  • Certificate

    U

Skipping between sprightly screwball comedy, pained melodrama and caustic romance, Gregory La Cava’s uncategorisable film features Dunne as Midwestern singer Nancy Andrews, who travels by overnight train to New York looking to make it big, and is seduced by playboy Steve Duncan en route. Cruelly abandoned by him the following morning, with her dreams of becoming a star soon withering, she meets Steve’s brother Tommy and they drunkenly elope, but can companionship become love? Scripted by Vicki Baum, the Austrian author of Grand Hotel, La Cava’s often overlooked film is uncommonly mature and discomfitingly honest about compromise and relationships. It screens from a good condition 1970s 35mm print.

James Bell