The Awful Truth

Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) stands among the signal achievements of classical Hollywood romantic comedy: a film that takes the potentially dreary subject of marital discord and transmutes it into something effervescent, mischievous and, beneath all its comic legerdemain, unexpectedly tender. Starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, the film ostensibly chronicles the disintegration of a marriage amid mutual suspicion, jealousy and misunderstanding. Yet beneath its elaborate machinery of farce lies a remarkably perspicacious study of intimacy: of two people who know each other so profoundly that even their attempts to escape the marriage inexorably draw them back into each other’s orbit. The Awful Truth demonstrates just how intellectually sophisticated a romantic comedy could be without ever succumbing to ponderousness. Its intelligence is smuggled into the narrative beneath laughter, flirtation, humiliation and a succession of exquisitely orchestrated misunderstandings.

Jerry Warriner (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) are wealthy, attractive and, at least superficially, happily married. Yet the foundations of their relationship have begun to fissure. Jerry suspects Lucy of infidelity, while Lucy harbours similar suspicions about him. When neither can offer an explanation sufficiently persuasive to dispel the other’s doubts, they decide to divorce. What follows, however, is anything but a straightforward separation. Their divorce becomes an extended emotional chess match in which both discover that terminating a marriage on paper is considerably easier than disentangling oneself from the person with whom one has shared a life.

Lucy becomes involved with the earnest and somewhat stiff Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), whose conventionality provides a deliberately comic counterpoint to Jerry’s irreverent sophistication. Jerry, meanwhile, becomes increasingly intent on reclaiming Lucy — not through the conventional machinery of pleading or penitence, but through teasing, provocation and calculated embarrassment. The brilliance of the film resides partly in its refusal to make either protagonist entirely innocent, entirely culpable or entirely rational. Their marriage has become a battlefield precisely because neither has ceased to care about the other.

Cary Grant’s performance is one of the principal reasons the film remains so irresistibly pleasurable. Jerry Warriner is fascinating because Grant never reduces him to the archetype of the immaculate romantic hero. Jerry is vain, jealous, childish, exasperating and occasionally downright insufferable. His charm does not efface these defects; rather, it becomes one of the very instruments through which the film interrogates them. Grant’s physical comedy is particularly masterful. His pauses, gestures, glances and minutely calibrated facial expressions frequently communicate more than entire stretches of dialogue. He possesses the rare comic gift of turning a look into a paragraph.

If Grant supplies much of the film’s flamboyant comic electricity, Irene Dunne ensures that The Awful Truth never degenerates into a mere showcase for its male star. Lucy Warriner is intelligent, self-possessed and entirely capable of returning Jerry’s provocations with interest. Dunne’s performance is wonderfully modulated. She can traverse indignation, amusement, vulnerability and mischief without any of the transitions appearing contrived. Most importantly, Lucy is not merely waiting passively for Jerry to reclaim her. She is an active participant in their emotional contest, and frequently an ingenious one.

Dunne also possesses an extraordinary aptitude for musical and verbal comedy. Her performance of “My Dreams Are Gone with the Wind” is a particularly memorable illustration of the film’s use of performance within performance to illuminate character. Lucy’s ostensibly innocent act becomes yet another weapon in her continuing campaign of psychological attrition against Jerry. It is in such moments that the extraordinary chemistry between Dunne and Grant becomes unmistakable: they seem not merely to love one another, but to derive genuine pleasure from irritating one another.

Director Leo McCarey brings something distinctive to The Awful Truth: an apparent looseness that conceals an almost mathematical precision in the construction of comedy. Rather than making every scene appear mechanically choreographed, McCarey allows moments to breathe. Characters interrupt one another, hesitate, improvise, react and make spectacular fools of themselves. The resulting spontaneity is one reason the film retains an almost startling modernity.

Much of the comedy derives not from elaborate verbal jokes but from the incorrigible absurdity of human behaviour. People misunderstand one another. They become jealous. They attempt to preserve their dignity and fail with magnificent regularity. They say one thing while their faces betray another. McCarey understands that the funniest circumstances are often those in which everyone behaves with utter seriousness while the audience is permitted to perceive the ridiculousness of the situation in its entirety.

At the heart of The Awful Truth lies a delicious paradox: Jerry and Lucy spend their energies attempting to prove that they can live without one another, while devoting almost all their time to demonstrating that they cannot. Their divorce consequently becomes a species of courtship in reverse. Every new romantic possibility is subjected to the scrutiny of the former spouse. Every attempt to move forward provokes jealousy. Every supposed rival is transformed, often unwittingly, into an accomplice in the Warriners’ continuing emotional warfare.

Dan Leeson is particularly effective in this regard. Played by Ralph Bellamy, he embodies the respectable and conventional alternative to Jerry. He is sincere, decent and earnest; but it is precisely these virtues that make him such an irresistible object of Jerry’s mischievous attention. The film thus establishes one of the enduring dialectics of romantic comedy: security versus excitement, propriety versus spontaneity, respectability versus chemistry. Bellamy understands that Dan is funniest when played with complete sincerity, never allowing the character to become a mere caricature.

One of the film’s most endearing virtues is its willingness to permit its protagonists to look foolish. Jerry and Lucy repeatedly lose control of situations they imagine themselves to have mastered. Their dignity is punctured; their jealousy exposed; their supposedly sophisticated conduct reduced to the childish competitiveness of two people who cannot bear to see the other move on. They do not fall in love because they suddenly become different people. Rather, they rediscover the affection that has existed all along, beneath the irritation, vanity and mutual exasperation.

The film’s most memorable comic sequences are those in which social performance itself becomes a battlefield. Lucy finds herself performing simultaneously for Jerry and for everyone else; Jerry is scarcely less theatrical. Their public behaviour is often meticulously calculated to elicit a private response from the other. The result is quintessential screwball comedy: characters communicating through elaborate deceptions while maintaining the fiction that they are behaving with perfect candour. Dunne’s comic timing is particularly impressive in these passages. Her ability to preserve an expression of impeccable seriousness while participating in increasingly preposterous circumstances is one of the film’s enduring delights.

The supporting performances furnish the film with much of its texture and tonal variety. Ralph Bellamy is excellent as Dan Leeson, his straight-laced sincerity providing the ideal counterweight to Grant’s anarchic charm. Bellamy understands that the character’s comic potency derives precisely from his refusal to recognise the absurdity in which he finds himself. The film is further enriched by a gallery of eccentric secondary characters who populate the social universe surrounding Jerry and Lucy. They prevent the narrative from becoming merely a two-person drawing-room exercise and provide McCarey with opportunities to generate comedy from encounters that initially appear incidental.

It would be tempting to classify The Awful Truth simply as a screwball comedy, but such a description, though accurate, scarcely exhausts its achievement. The film unquestionably belongs to the screwball tradition: rapid misunderstandings, social satire, romantic warfare, physical comedy and exaggerated personalities abound. Yet beneath this exuberant façade lies an unusual degree of psychological acuity. Jerry and Lucy understand one another’s vulnerabilities because they have lived together. Their arguments possess a specificity that would be impossible between strangers. They know precisely which buttons to press, which insecurities to exploit and which provocations will produce the desired reaction. In this curious sense, their intimacy is expressed not merely through affection but through their unparalleled capacity to annoy one another.

The title itself is deliciously ironic. What, after all, is the “awful truth”? Perhaps it is that Jerry and Lucy are imperfect. Perhaps it is that marriage demands compromise, patience and the surrender of certain vanities. Perhaps it is that jealousy is frequently irrational. Or perhaps the awful truth is simply that the two people who insist they are finished with one another remain, despite themselves, hopelessly in love.

McCarey wisely refuses to transform this insight into a solemn philosophical proposition. Instead, he allows the audience to discover it organically through laughter. And therein lies one of his greatest achievements: he permits emotional truth to emerge from comic behaviour rather than imposing it upon the narrative. The sentiment is earned because it is never announced.

The Awful Truth is therefore a superb exemplar of Hollywood at its most sophisticated, buoyant and entertaining. Leo McCarey combines an apparently improvisational looseness with an almost impeccable command of comic construction, while Cary Grant and Irene Dunne fashion one of the screen’s most memorable romantic partnerships. Its greatest accomplishment, however, may be that it makes marriage itself the principal source of comedy without ever becoming cynical about marriage. Jerry and Lucy are selfish, jealous, manipulative and frequently ridiculous; yet they are also affectionate, intelligent and indelibly connected. Their relationship survives not because they are ideal spouses, but because beneath all the quarrelling and gamesmanship there remains an unmistakable reservoir of tenderness.

We laugh at Jerry and Lucy because we recognise them — not necessarily in their particular circumstances, but in the universal absurdity of loving someone whose capacity to infuriate us can be exceeded only by our inability to stop loving them. That is the quietly profound truth concealed beneath The Awful Truth: that intimacy is rarely immaculate, love is seldom logical, and sometimes the surest evidence that two people belong together is the astonishing extent to which they refuse to leave each other alone.