“Do not watch these movies as an academic or as a historian. Have a couple of drinks, eat some some snacks, let your mind relax and let the verbal pyrotechnics just singe your skin off. These movies were designed to be frenetic and fast and silly, and the more open-minded and sillier you approach them the more fun you will have.”
This is the advice of Patton Oswalt in the introduction to the Criterion Channel’s library of screwball comedies, showcasing those of Columbia right now on the streaming service. It’s a reminder in such a time when anything outside contemporary monoculture is at risk of being labelled “pretentious”, that these movies of the 1930s and 40s were populist entertainments driven by goofy set-ups and witty dialogue more than anything that could be considered in any way inaccessible. And The Awful Truth, directed and produced by Leo McCarey in 1937, is about as spare and easy-going as one of these movies could be. It’s simply the story of a rich couple, played by Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, who decide to get a divorce over their constant distrust of one another, and how they subsequently interfere with each other’s successive romances. Honestly it’s like the platonic ideal of a screwball comedy, nailing the petty comedic conflict between spouses (or ex-spouses) that so much of the genre is remembered for now. And it happened to do so with the perfect team.
Neither Dunne nor Grant were primarily known for comedies at this time and this movie essentially made them genre stalwarts, rejuvenating her career and finding a definition for his. The pair worked excellently together as Lucy and Jerry Warriner who are introduced in the film having each lied to the other about their respective vacations. They repeatedly stress the importance of a foundation of trust in a marriage, and since they don’t have that they promptly divorce -and it’s amusing to see how neat the decision is come to. This was of course a movie made in the middle of the Great Depression, when escapism and levity were highly valued themes by Hollywood in addition to some gentle ribbing of the rich. There’s never any meanness between Lucy and Jerry, even as they constantly trade spats, and it’s highly charming in this context -especially at trial when they fight over custody of their dog Mr. Smith (played by Skippy, the fox terrier from the Thin Man series), itself a joke about the wealthy luxury of pets in the absence of children. In the test that has been homaged numerous times over which owner the dog is more attached to, Lucy cheats with a hidden dog treat to lure him to mother -and Jerry promptly counters with demands for visitation rights.
Per what Oswalt said it is this kind of silliness that drives the movie, an impression of elite society but also of these particular personalities, especially in their following relationships (entered into awfully fast during the divorce period) that can’t help but be entangled in their desires to one-up each other. Fairly immediately, Lucy begins seeing Dan Leeson, the lovesick and dopey heir to an Oklahoma oil fortune played by Ralph Bellamy. Counteracting this, Jerry romances Dixie Belle (Joyce Compton), the dimwitted singer at a nightclub where he ambushes Lucy and Dan hoping to embarrass them, only to very quickly learn that Dixie Belle is not a great singer and her act is far more openly sexual than he is prepared for. While this issue doesn't have the same potency today (except perhaps among that same company of prudish rich folks), it is the sharpness of the script's subversion and the stupendous comic reactions of the actors that make it one of the funniest beats of the film.
Dunne and Grant and really the whole cast take to the humour incredibly well, though it wasn't very easy. While the script is credited to famed writer Viña Delmar, much of the dialogue and even whole scenes were improvised just before shooting by McCarey and the cast -a favourite filmmaking method of McCarey, who honed his craft on Laurel and Hardy and Marx Brothers movies like Duck Soup; but one that neither Dunne nor Grant took to well at first, unaccustomed to such a loose production process -Grant even lobbied to be released from the film. Eventually though, McCarey's method, which ultimately won him the Oscar for Best Director that year, was proven sound: the cast all came around and it's likely the reason the film feels so spontaneous. It's why several comedy sequences seem tailor-made for Grant's strengths of physicality, which he hadn't much expressed on film before. In fact The Awful Truth is arguably the birth of Grant's early movie star persona, the one that would carry him through to Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and Arsenic and Old Lace.
Dunne doesn't get the kinds of pratfalls or absurd expressions that Grant does, but she's given some exceptionally clever dialogue to work with and a really tightly-developed rapport with Grant that is both stern and playful. She sells better than he the actual stakes and just the touch of emotional denial -she never convinces that she really likes Dan much at all. On the contrary, once she comes to acknowledge her real feelings for Jerry (and honestly even before that) she’s quite striking in her seductive glow -particularly the scene at the end that is packed full of sexual allusion and innuendo -I’m astonished a couple bits of it actually got past the censors. At the same time she is sly and sassy, certainly the smarter of the two in her deviousness. Dunne’s is a performance that you relish, in those scenes of her adolescent giggling in front of Dan because Jerry is tickling her out of sight, in those farcical bits where she is in turn the foil and the saboteur.
The fact that so much of this was built by the cast exploring their own comedic potential and interpretation of character (Grant based his performance on McCarey himself) is quite impressive. Often times with comedy movies constructed heavily by improvisation you can see the spotty patches in story and character, the side effect of an approach that is predominantly driven by the jokes -and the jokes may only be funny half the time. Unless Christopher Guest is involved, it may well be a recipe for disaster. But McCarey and the cast of The Awful Truth cared about structure, they did after all begin with a fully-written script based on a play. They just took the outline in their own direction. And they were a really funny collective too. The sequence in Lucy’s apartment where she first hides her music instructor Armand (Alexander D’Arcy) from Jerry -whose bowler hat looks the same but is slightly smaller- and then has to hide both of them from Dan, which of course culminates in some slapstick and a terrific spontaneous punchline from Lucy’s Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham), plays like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, which represents the best that the screwball genre aspires to.
And the episodes really do have that Looney Tunes kind of style to them, and as near to the pacing as can be achieved in live-action. From the assorted beats, McCarey is able to piece together a coherent story while Dunne and Grant are able to do the same for the characters' relationship, which is more strongly epitomized by the madness than it could ever be in relative stability. The ending, though its own little farce, feels arrived at organically as a place for the couple to finally hash out their warped but sincere feelings for one another -without the movie actually getting sincere itself. Even the title, The Awful Truth, frames their relationship in a sarcastic resigned light -it's not interested in a touching love story. But there is something sweet about the movie nonetheless -in seeing all these people -Dunne, Grant, Bellamy, Cunningham- find and express their own untapped comedic talent. By the end of the film you can tell they're all having fun ...and you are too, even if you can't help but analyze it along the way.
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