Cette sacrée vérité

Nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Screenplay) and a huge box office hit when originally released, THE AWFUL TRUTH is a screamingly hysterical marital comedy that hasn't lost one iota of its punch in the seven decades since it's release. Irene Dunne is amazing in a layered performance that is both subtly affecting and side-splittingly funny - sometimes within the same scene! The scene in which Dunne masquerades as Grant's floozy, night club dwelling sister is one of the brightest highlights in film comedy history. Dunne received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her inspired work in this film, which endures as a reminder of why she was one of Hollywood's top actress during the thirties and forties.

After flirting with success in SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933), SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935), and TOPPER (1937), Cary Grant finally became a bonafide superstar with his performance in THE AWFUL TRUTH. Grant was an absolute master when it came to delivering one liners, and the prowess that he displays in the film's many moments of physical comedy is nothing short of phenomenal. Exceptional performances are also delivered by the rest of the cast (including Best Supporting Actor Oscar Nominee Ralph Bellamy), but the film's real scene stealer is the incredible canine performer Asta as Mr. Smith, which is easily the best performance by a dog ever! Leo McCarey won a much-deserved Academy Award for his frenetic direction of what is surely one of the all-time greatest comedies.

The Awful Truth is one of the best comedies of the 1930s and ever. Irene Dunne and Cary Grant star (in the first of 3 pictures together) as a divorcing couple who really love one another, but they're just so darned sophisticated! Lucy (Dunne) moves in her Aunt Patsy (the underrated Cecil Cunningham) who gets Lucy introduced to a hick millionaire from Oklahoma (Ralph Bellamy). Meanwhile Jerry (Grant) gets hooked up with a grasping socialite (Molly Lamont). The "love birds" continue to peck away at each other and get entangled in each other's new "romances." The chemistry is just wonderful between Grant and Dunne, and the supporting cast is first rate. Highlights include Grant playing the piano while Mr. Smith (the dog) does a barking routine, but Dunne gets her chance, singing "Gone with the Wind" at a high-toned party. Great fun. Cunningham and Bellamy are terrific, but so are Esther Dale (Bellamy's ma), Joyce Compton (Dixie Bell), and Mr. Smith (who I suspect was really Asta from The Thin Man). The film, Dunne, and Bellamy scored Oscar nominations, and Leo McCarey won for direction. Filled with snappy one liners and hysterical situations. Best scenes may be the night club sequence when Dunne gets stuck dancing with Bellamy, and the party where Dunne pretends to be Grant's sister and yells out, "Hey wait a minute! Somebody stole my purse!" to snooty Mary Forbes. Very funny.

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne catch each other in a white lie and the quarrel leads to a marriage breakup. The only bone of contention is that there's a dog who is a family pet that they both love. They go to court and Dunne with a bit of trickery wins the custody battle.

This is one of those comedies where the people can't live with each other or without each other and both are too stubborn to admit it. Cary gets himself involved with society debutante Marguerite Churchill and Irene takes up with mother fixated oil millionaire Ralph Bellamy.

Any fan of old Hollywood films can tell you how this one will end. My favorite bit is when Irene crashes the Churchill household with Cary there and pretends to be his drunken floozy of a sister.

Leo McCarey won an Oscar for Best Director and Irene and Bellamy were nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. McCarey keeps the laughs coming and takes advantage of the talents of all his players, Irene's voice and Cary's gift for physical comedy.

And as for Mr. Smith the little terrier who finds out he's not all that Cary and Irene have in common. Well he's one lucky little fellow to be in a classic comedy like this.

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.

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.