The Awful Truth (1937 film)
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The Awful Truth (1937 film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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The Awful Truth is a 1937 American screwball comedy film directed by Leo McCarey, and starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. Based on the 1922 play The Awful Truth by Arthur Richman, the film recounts a distrustful rich couple who begin divorce proceedings, only to interfere with one another's romances.
This was McCarey's first film for Columbia Pictures, with the dialogue and comic elements largely improvised by the director and actors. Irene Dunne's costumes were designed by Robert Kalloch. Although Grant tried to leave the production due to McCarey's directorial style, The Awful Truth saw his emergence as an A-list star and proponent of on-the-set improvisation.
Why It's Not Awful
- For the film, McCarey retained the basics of the original play, which centered around an estranged husband’s doubts over his wife's relationship with another man. But he dropped almost all of the plot incidents, which dealt with mining interests, a fire in an apartment building, and a midnight assignation at a luxurious mountain camp. McCarey focused instead on the key element in all of Hollywood’s romantic comedies: sex. Or, more correctly, the inability of the leads to make love to each other. Hollywood romances resorted to endless variations on why men and women couldn't “get together”: another spouse, a disapproving parent, a previous engagement, even amnesia. But in this film, Lucy and Jerry Warriner are married, and remain married for almost all of the movie. By having them remain husband and wife, McCarey removed all the plot twists and embroideries that other directors rely on. For him, it’s only pride keeping Lucy and Jerry apart, and few human failings are funnier.
- While McCarey had done numerous films in the past, the majority of them were pure comedy. The death his father was implied to be a key reason he wanted to do something more serious. Hints of longing and dislocation are apparent in some of McCarey's earlier work, but the theme of loss comes explicitly to the fore in his twin masterpieces of 1937: Make Way for Tomorrow, and this film, which is essentially its comic counterpart. Though Cary Grant as the philandering husband and Irene Dunne as the possibly adulterous wife keep a light tone throughout, the comedy mirrors the more somber film in showing lovers finding their way back to each other through shared memories of the past.
- Lucy and Jerry Warriner are a complex pair of characters and lovers, with a unique position in their society. They may belong to the right clubs, know the right people, and appear on the society pages, but they are not quite upper-crust, not the cultural arbiters or rich blue bloods who have to be careful of their position. They are scapegraces, his gentlemanliness no less in question than her virtue, orphans in each other’s care. The viewers can really feel these two lovers, on the verge of divorce, rediscovering each other and their love as they go along, bound together by a matching sense of humor.
- Great acting from Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy.
- This is the pretty much the film in which Grant came into his own, although insouciant wit occasionally came through in some of Grant's earlier films. While he'd subsequently go on to star in a handful of poor pictures, this film turned Grant one of Hollywood’s most incandescent stars. No one else made so many successful films so consistently, or retained the affection of his audience for such a long time.
- The film's is also significant for cementing the persona of Ralph Bellamy, who in this era had a field day playing the big, well-meaning, but incredibly boring oaf in movie after movie. Here he got a potentially thankless role from which he drew huge amounts of comedy, such as laughing heartily at a line of Grant’s that isn’t funny, or bringing an enthusiasm to his lousy dancing that makes it all the more amusing.
- McCarey was famous for improvising on the set. With the right performers, his technique made his films seem more natural and lifelike than almost anything else coming out of Hollywood. He trusted his instincts more than his scripts, and therefore often stumbled into material too arch or coy to stand up, notably some treacly business with a cuckoo clock that closes the film.
- The plot that the director and writer settled on mimicked stage musicals, and in a sense the film is closer to Top Hat and its ilk than to screwball comedies. McCarey even staged sequences like musical numbers, with little bits of libretto to tie them together.
- The director's not afraid to use some trademarks from his silent roots either. Grant’s bit with a bowler hat was based on a fundamental Laurel and Hardy gag.
Bad Qualities
- Cary Grant didn't like improvising, and was frustrated by McCarey's habit of scribbling lines, to the tried (and failed) to get taken off the film. Part of Grant's frustration seems to have effected his on-screen performance. His character, Jerry Warriner, often seems fed up with the people him.
- One drawback to the director’s methods was an inattention to detail that can be its own source of humor. McCarey went for the emotional moment rather than one that fit the narrative, and alert viewers can almost always spot rafts of gaffes in his films. Watch how Cary Grant seems to be standing and sitting at the same time during the courtroom scene, for example.