When The Awful Truth won the best director Oscar for Leo McCarey in 1937, McCarey straight-up said it wasn’t the best directed film of the year. It wasn’t even, he said, his best directorial effort of the year – he rated Make Way for Tomorrow more highly (and so has posterity).
It’s easy to see why. Make Way for Tomorrow tackles a serious issue, with subject matter that’s even more relevant now than it was then – ageing parents abandoned by adult children. But The Awful Truth can claim a stake on glory, a more frivolous though still valid one, being the first time that the full Cary Grant persona – a balletic lightness of movement, supreme relaxedness in front of the camera, superb comic timing – appeared on screen. Grant had been working at it, with varying degrees of success, over the years but it was Leo McCarey who first enabled its full expression. The Awful Truth is the film that made second-billed Grant an A-list star. He stayed at the top until he decided to retire almost 30 years later.
McCarey’s trick was to throw away the script for the latest adaptation of a stage farce which had been made into a movie twice already, thus forcing the actors to improvise. Or that’s how the story goes. Semi-improvised might be nearer the mark. You can see Irene Dunne stifling a smirk at an occasional line out of Grant’s mouth, for instance. But while this comedy is loose, it’s not that loose. The story also goes that the scene where Dunne plays piano and Ralph Bellamy bellows Home on the Range in a tuneless baritone was shot without either being aware that the camera was running. From the way the pair of them are behaving – performing – this seems bogus, but then so many stories about Hollywood are.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The plot: he and she, terribly rich Mr Jerry and Mrs Lucy Warriner (Grant and Dunne) decide to get divorced, become entangled in new relationships, then realise they were right for each other all along. Standard Comedy of Remarriage stuff, really, with Grant as an acknowleded playboy who likes to play the field, Dunne as the wife who might or might not be having an affair with her music teacher (Alexander D’Arcy), Bellamy as the good-natured, very rich chump she is courted by, and, belatedly, Molly Lamont as the rich heiress Jerry starts lining up as the next Mrs Warriner.
As a film it’s slow to get going, with much setting up of its premise and a dog to be included in the mechanism – it’s the same dog as featured in the Thin Man movies – the canine Mr Smith being a bone of contention (woof!) when he and she go before the divorce judge for their decree nisi.
But Act II hurtles along in screwball comedy style, with Grant getting the biggest laughs thanks to a series of quizzical looks, side-of-mouth line readings and some physical comedy which reminds us that he arrived in America as part of an acrobatic troupe. Watch him fall off the chair while his wife is belting out an operatic aria (Dunne had wanted to be an opera singer) to a roomful of grandees.
McCarey directed lots of Laurel and Hardy films, and Duck Soup for the Marx brothers, so knows his comedy, and there are plenty of reminders in The Awful Truth that he started out in the silent era. That scene where rivals-in-love Jerry and music teacher Armand get into a kerfuffle over whose hat is whose is lifted wholesale from Laurel and Hardy, right down to the style of hat – a bowler.
Though The Awful Truth is often bracketed as a classic, it isn’t. Much of the comedy hasn’t aged well and is too coy for modern tastes, with the humour often turning on things that no longer matter, like a lady’s honour. And while Grant is great and gets the best lines, he also wrings comedy from lines that aren’t obviously funny (watch Dunne nearly corpse on “You’re sitting on my prospectus.”). Dunne just doesn’t get as much opportunity to shine, and even though she gets a comedy musical number all of her own – as befits the top-billed – this is his film not hers.
The Criterion version is the one to watch. The grain is intrusive and it’s not particularly sharp – as if it’s been scanned off second or third generation material – but the contrast is good, the image is stable and the image is clear enough, good enough. A bit like the content of the film itself.
The Awful Truth – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
