The team of producer-director Herbert Wilcox and actress Anna Neagle, who would later marry each other, made many English films and, for RKO, three old-fashioned musicals that revived older American hits to mediocre effect. The first of these, Irene, is now on demand from Warner Archive.
Irish lass Irene O’Dare (Neagle) gets a job as a fashion model after catching the eye of rich young Don Marshall (Ray Milland, at his ease) who secretly runs the business as “Madame Lucy”. This is a change from the original, where Marshall and Lucy are different people, and indeed Lucy is a very swishy man of a type the 1940 Production Code wouldn’t have permitted, which is at least one reason this film is duller than it should be. After an unnecessarily protracted series of misunderstandings, including Irene’s engagement to the wrong fellow (Alan Marshall), they finally yadda yadda yadda.
Also in the picture are Billie Burke as her typical flighty socialite, Arthur Treacher as his typical butler, May Robson as Irene’s old-fashioned grandmother, Roland Young as a British businessman, and Marsha Hunt as the wrong fellow’s true love.
The 1919 hit had been, in its day, Broadway’s longest running musical. Here, the songs are dropped aside from background numbers at balls and clubs, except for the scene when Irene sings “Alice Blue Gown” after returning home from being a hit at the high society ball where she’s taken for a socialite and becomes the talk of the town. As one might tell by this point, the story is partly modeled on Cinderella. That ball is the big setpiece, as emphasized by the fact that it’s suddenly in Technicolor so we can appreciate the magical appearance of the blue gown before the film reverts to black and white. (The 1926 silent film version also used a Technicolor sequence.) Another technical effect is the use of slow-motion for a shot of Irene dancing; it’s unusual to see this device used so self-consciously in 1940.
There’s another musical sequence, a movie within the movie that takes place in a cinema where the characters watch a short subject with an elaborate number set in Harlem. Featured prominently are the Dandridge Sisters, including future Oscar nominee Dorothy. Typical of the way Hollywood shoehorned great African-American performers as specialties into the middle of movies that had nothing to do with them, it’s by far the liveliest scene in the picture.