Die schreckliche Wahrheit

Plot- A married couple go their separate ways with new partners, but can't get over their former attachment as they try to sabotage each other's new ones in hilarious fashion.

It's a flaky Cary Grant, a conflicted Irene Dunne, and a frisky doggie that should have gotten triple kibbles. I can see why the comedy was 1937 Oscar bait. It's finely acted, scripted, and performed, with director McCarey getting a well deserved statuette.

Now if only Jerry (Grant) and Lucy (Dunne) can get over their bruised egos, maybe they can get back together. But where would that leave Lucy's "other man" Daniel (Bellamy) and Jerry's dignified girl Barbara (LaMont), who are now the new squeezes. Then too, it doesn't help that goofy Dixie Belle (Compton) can't keep her dress down in a real laugher. And catch Lucy's nimble knee as she side-kicks the misbehaving Jerry as he stumbles out the door. And to top it all off there's that cleverly finessed final scene that must have given the censors fits.

Anyway, the elements are briskly blended, antics included, while Grant's comedic turn boosted him way up the Hollywood ladder - too bad he never got the Oscar his exceptional career deserved. Sure, times have changed, but this is still ace entertainment courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Meanwhile, I'm checking my wall clock. After all, as the movie shows, it may suddenly have developed an x-rated mind of its own.

A fine cast and director Leo McCarey's expert sense of the absurd make this a very amusing classic comedy. It is a good example of what master craftsmen can do to turn a thin and deliberately implausible plot into a fun movie.

The actual story is pretty simple, serving only as a setup for a lot of pleasant nonsense - Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play a couple who get divorced, and then make each other jealous when they pursue other relationships. Both leads are excellent, and they are helped by a good supporting cast. Ralph Bellamy is well-cast as a bumpkin who starts a relationship with Dunne, and Alexander D'Arcy has some very funny moments with Grant, as Dunne's voice teacher who provokes Grant to fits of jealousy. Not an awful lot really happens, but there are a lot of zany moments.

If you enjoy these 30's 'screwball comedies', "The Awful Truth" is one of the best ones, and you almost certainly won't be disappointed with it.

Irene Dunne is luminous in what critic Andrew Sarris called one of the finest comic creations in film history. Dunne and Grant (this film launched him as a huge star) play a couple who hastily divorce and then alternately take turns trying to win each other back. Ralph Bellamy has the Ralph Bellamy role and plays it perfectly. This was the first of three great pairings between Dunne and Grant (My Favorite Wife and Penny Serenade being the others).

Dunne is THE great overlooked movie star - primarily because so many of her films were remade with the originals being taken out of circulation by the film studio (e. g. Show Boat, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Anna and the King of Siam, Cimarron, Back Street, Magnificent Obsession, Roberta, Love Affair among others). She was nominated for 5 Academy Awards for Best Actress (2 comedies- TAT, Theodora Goes Wild, a western - Cimarron, a character role - I Remember Mama, and a romance - Love Affair) but never won. I can only imagine that politics played a part in her not getting a special lifetime achievement Oscar later in her life (she was a strong Republican), after all Ralph Bellamy himself got one and his film career paled next to Dunne's.

Watch Theodora Goes Wild for another great Dunne Screwball performance.

Jerry and Lucy, a mutually distrustful couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) agree to divorce, only to end up sabotaging each other's attempts at new romances. The film is one of the best of the 'screwball comedies' to come out of the 1930s (and, like so many of the good ones, was based on a play). Grant is very good in his second major comedy (after 'Topper', 1937) and director Leo McCarey's film (for which McCarey won an Oscar) established him as a comic star (although apparently little love was lost between the two). Oscar-nominated Dunne is excellent. The scene she where meets the wealthy family of Jerry's current flame (a celebrity heiress) and pretends to be a brassy burlesque singer is priceless. Ralph Bellamy is also very good as Lucy's wealthy, earnest, 'aw-shucks' Oklahoma oil-man beau who lives with his Ma (Bellamy plays a similar character in the classic Grant comedy 'His Girl Friday', 1940). Like all the top comedies of the era, the clever, often rapid-fire script sparkles and the characters' delivery is impeccable. The film also co-stars Hollywood A-list dog 'Skippy', best known for his portrayal of Asta in the 'Thin Man' series . All in all, the film is a clever comedy that has aged well due to the quality of the script, and the talent of the director and the players.

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.