-Devdutt Trivedi
A review by Bert for Variety on October 20, 1937 was all praise for Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth and pronounced it a ‘smart screwball comedy from the 1930s that's given the Lubitsch touch’ which mentioned that it was ‘patronized by payees attuned to smart comedy in the modern verve.’ The film is a ‘screwball comedy’ a term used by a spectator to define the humour in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) which adapted the sexual innuendo laden discourse of Ernest Lubitsch. It resulted in the late ‘30s to a discourse on zany masculinity best defined, as in The Awful Truth, by the body and voice of Cary Grant.
Director Leo McCarey whose ‘work and reputation are today among the most popularly and critically neglected’ had already worked with the best film comedians of the time including Laurel and Hardy (he was responsible for pairing Laurel with Hardy at Hal Roach studios), The Marx Brothers (on Duck Soup (1933)), W.C. Fields (Six of a Kind, 1934) and Harold Lloyd (The Milky Way, 1936). The Awful Truth launched Cary Grants screen persona which the great star would continue to use across his comedies as the aggrieved or jealous bachelor/ex-husband with his staccato delivery of one-liners with his trademark sarcastic voice. Grant launched his screen persona in McCarey’s 1937 screwball comedy which was invented more by the efforts of McCarey with Grant often imitating McCarey’s personal mannerisms. In the words of Hollywood great Peter Bogdanovich :
After The Awful Truth, when it came to light comedy, there was Cary Grant and then everyone else was an also-ran.
The film was also the first of a series of collaborations between Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. The pair would follow up The Awful Truth with My Favourite Wife (1940) and Penny Serenade (1941).
The film is inspired by the films of Lubitsch in the way it uses interior spaces, usually belonging to characters who are part of the upper class, in order to do away with the all vestige of theatricality and replace it with a movement laden mise-en- scene complete with Lubitsch’s own brand of close ups. The story centers around the couple Lucille and Jerry Warriner who start dating other couples, but are unable to decide the ownership rights to their dog named Mr. Smith. The dog serves as a quirky movement in an otherwise studio designed film. Howard Hawks’ would borrow McCarey’s use of the element of randomness through the movement of the dog in his masterpiece Bringing Up Baby (1938) where the dog is replaced by Baby, the baby leopard. In this way Hollywood transforms Eisenstein’s use of animals as devices to set up milieu and instead gives them a free movement to break out of social formations. The dog playing Mr. Smith continued his run at the silver screen playing Asta in the Thin Man Series.
McCarey also borrows from Lubitsch, the approach to set design which was in the Art Deco style, an international style which was created by directors, mainly from Europe migrating to America because of the war and adding the aesthetic approach of European modernism to studio produced Hollywood films. Much of the film was improvised on the
sets by McCarey with his cast and Grant, who was sure that a lot was amiss, even insisting that he be released during the film’s production. The film had already been made twice before by Columbia, first in 1925 as a silent and then as an early talkie in 1929. It was remade as Let’s Do It Again (1953) with Ray Miland and Jane Wyman.
The film had its original material in a Broadway play which opened on Sept. 18, 1922 at Henry Miller's Theatre in New York and ran for 144 performances. The film was broadcast on the Lux Radio Theatre as a 60 minute adaptation on September 11, 1939, March 10, 1941 and January 18, 1955 with either Grant, Dunne or Bellamy taking up their screen roles.
Several of the ideas from the film were carried forward in subsequent comedies by Columbia also starring Grant. Irene Dunne refers to Grant’s character as ‘Jerry the Nipper’ suggesting that he was fond of drinking. In Bringing up Baby (1938) the scene when they're all in the 'lock up' 'Katherine Hepburn' says "Haven't you heard of Jerry the Nipper?" Grant replies saying that "She's making it up out of Motion Pictures she's seen".
The film transforms the function of cinema through language with its play on words with visual cues which again come from Lubitsch. When the couple enters the elevator, McCarey focuses on the lift meter instead of denoting the action inside the elevator. When Jerry keeps his fingers crossed when praising Lucy, McCarey breaks away from theatrical action to cinematic fragmentation. The fingers crossed become a spatial tool within the realms of the frame. Later when Lucy finds out Grant is having a new affair through a photograph of Warriner with his beloved; we are confronted with an image of Cary Grant, the actor out of his screen role, a meditation between reality and screen roles that existed throughout screwball comedies, but particularly in the films of Preston Sturges.
The film was chosen by Premiere as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time" in 2006.
References:
Internet Movie Database
James Berardinelli
Brian Koller
Steven D. Greyanus
Ed Howard
Cary Grant.net