The Awful Truth (1937)

User Rating:

8.0/10   

Director:

Leo McCarey

Writers:

Viña Delmar (writer)
Arthur Richman (play)

Release Date:

21 October 1937 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Romance

Plot:

Unfounded suspicions lead a married couple to begin divorce proceedings, whereupon they start undermining each other's attempts to find new romance.

Plot Keywords:

Divorce | Remarriage | New York | Heiress | New York City

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 1 win & 5 nominations

Cast

Irene Dunne	...	Lucy Warriner
Cary Grant	...	Jerry Warriner
Ralph Bellamy	...	'Dan' Leeson
Alexander D'Arcy	...	Armand Duvalle
Cecil Cunningham	...	Aunt Patsy
Molly Lamont	...	Barbara Vance
Esther Dale	...	Mrs. Leeson
Joyce Compton	...	Dixie Belle Lee
Robert Allen	...	Frank Randall
Robert Warwick	...	Mr. Vance
Mary Forbes	...	Mrs. Vance
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Leonard Carey	...	Butler (scenes deleted)
Vernon Dent	...	Police Sergeant (scenes deleted)
Byron Foulger	...	Secretary (scenes deleted)
Bobby Watson	...	Hotel Clerk (scenes deleted)

Runtime:

91 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording)

Certification:

Australia:G | Finland:K-16 | Germany:12 | UK:U | USA:Approved (PCA #3602)

Filming Locations:

Big Bear Lake, California, USA

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Tay Garnett turned down an offer to direct the movie.

Goofs:

Continuity: Just after Irene Dunne introduces herself as 'Lola' Warriner to the Vance family, she sits down next to Mrs. Vance, her handkerchief and purse quickly passed from her left hand to her right hand. As the camera shifts towards Grant, Dunne bends over, making a quiet exclamation ("Oh" or "Uh"), and appears to grab at something she has dropped on the floor. After the camera cuts back to Dunne, she is sitting up straight, her handkerchief in her left hand and caught underneath her left side.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Jerry Warriner: Come on, Haig, get that sun lamp ready.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Waltons: The Rebellion (#5.14)" (1976)

Soundtrack:

Home on the Range

We're In On the Joke

This movie is exquisitely directed and acted. The "fourth wall" is gone; the movie rides so high and smart that we as audience can be subtly acknowledged throughout and made complicit in the production, while we continue to believe in the characters and care about what happens to them.

Much of the important dialogue is "throw-away" dialogue, in a sense. It's clear to the hearing, but lines are often spoken by the characters to themselves, for their own (and our) amusement, or delivered in very deftly choreographed "simultaneity," each speaker maintaining an independent point of view in rapid-fire repartee. Implications are understated. We are expected to expect the unexpected, to listen to every line.

The plot is composed like a piece of music. Each scene takes moment from the time-line established by the impending day and hour and minute at which a husband (Cary Grant) and wife (Irene Dunne) become legally divorced, and the movie ends at precisely the stroke of midnight which marks that moment. They clearly want each other back, but will they cleave together or cleave apart as the clock strikes midnight?

One extended "movement" of the movie lets Cary Grant charmingly undermine his wife's new relationship. In corresponding scenes later, Irene Dunne brilliantly plays a dumb floozie, pretending to be the husband's sister and demolishing in one evening his reputation and his prospects for marriage in respectable society. In these later scenes, in another of the movie's nice compositional touches, she does a reprise of a hoochie musical number performed earlier by a girlfriend of her husband's, and then falls into her husband's arms, apparently drunk. He gestures for her to look back and say goodnight to the horrified guests (and to us) as they do a wonderful little wobbly dance out the door, having burned their bridges behind them.

I found the opening few scenes of the movie unlikable, but with the entrance of Irene Dunne, the movie gets us on board. There's so much great understated visual and verbal double entendre (in the best sense) that I want to go back and see if there's more that I missed. In one scene, Cary Grant has brought to Irene Dunne's new fiancé the paperwork on a coal mine the divorcing couple still own. Interrupted by a visitor while advising the fiancé on where it would good to sink a shaft (har!), he explains that he and the fiancé (brilliantly played by Ralph Bellamy as a very successful bumpkin businessman) are transacting a business deal. The movie moves along briskly and doesn't play up the point, but we catch, for a fraction of a second, Irene Dunne squirming as she finds herself looking like the business transaction in question. The movie moves through moments like this quickly, with high respect for our intelligence and our capacity to get in on the joke.