Cary Grant and Irene Dunne star in this richly sentimental drama, directed by George Stevens from a screenplay by Morrie Ryskind, about a childless couple who adopt a little girl who later dies. In a recent reassessment in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen call Penny Serenade “a typical but by no means trite example of the evolution of '30s farce-comedy into the sentimental melodrama of the wartime '40s. Before the movie establishes itself as a meticulously detailed domestic epic about raising children, Grant as a rising reporter and Dunne as a record-store salesgirl exude a powerful and urgent sexual hunger that is extraordinary for its time. They end up in charge of a low-profit rural newspaper, and there's a great incongruity, of course, between their elegant, big-star iconography and the pitifully bedeviled characters they play. The trick is that Grant starts out more carefree than Dunne, but ends up more heartbreakingly vulnerable by the finale. Stevens provides a marvelously modulated direction despite the beginning of his problems with overlong features.... The convoluted flashbacks...are innovatively based around a series of pop records, with accompanying iris fade-ins and fade-outs for individual episodes on the surface of the records.”