“Among other things, the Hollywood Production Code....aimed at a decorum and respectability suitable for ‘family' viewing.... Screwball comedies were not so much defying the Code as attacking (and kidding) the respectability that it insisted on.... The desire to shock, create a reaction, is at the heart of many films like Theodora Goes Wild.” (William K. Everson)    Irene Dunne gives a deliciously undecorous performance as Theodora, an outwardly prissy small-town librarian who gives vent to her libidinous fantasies in a steamy novel which she writes under the pseudonym Caroline Adams. Full of the shamefully lurid goings-on in a small town much like her own, the book quickly becomes a national best seller, while “Adams” becomes an anathema to Theodora's outraged aunts and literary society compatriots. Sneaking off to New York to meet her publisher, Theodora encounters an urbane artist (Melvyn Douglas), who attempts to chip his way through her icy exterior, only to find...well, Caroline Adams. Theodora Goes Wild did shock one outraged New York Times reviewer, not, however, with its subject matter, but for one of screwball's most delightful aspects, the tendency to put serious actors known for tragedy (or at least for serious comedy!) into the screwball mode: “Although she goes wild,” reads the complaint, “she also goes silly; and farce does not set too well upon the lovely shoulders of Irene Dunne.” Viewers now, as then, will beg to differ, and probably appreciate the challenge the dignified Dunne faced “going silly.” Theodora Goes Wild is presented in a newly struck, 35mm print.