The Awful Truth (1937) - film review

Jerry Warriner returns home after his holiday to find that his wife Lucy has apparently got herself romantically involved with her music teacher, Armand Duvalle.  Lucy suspects that Jerry also has something to hide, because he clearly hasn’t been to Florida as he claims.  The couple agree on an amicable divorce, and Lucy moves out to live in an apartment with her mother.  With what seems to Jerry like indecent haste, Lucy soon finds herself another man, leaving Jerry free to play the field and link up with a wealthy socialite.  Of course, Jerry and Lucy are still secretly in love with one another and each sets about sabotaging the other’s new love life...

The film that catapulted Cary Grant from virtual obscurity to stardom is one of the first great Hollywood screwball comedies, a genre that proved to be extraordinarily popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  This is the film in which Grant perfected his now familiar screen persona and also marks the first of the actor’s appearances along side Irene Dunne.  They made a memorable screen couple and would subsequently work together on My Favorite Wife (1940) and Penny Serenade (1941).

The Awful Truth began life as a popular stage comedy, first performed in 1922, and had been previously adapted for cinema, once in 1925 (starring Agnes Ayres and Warner Baxter) and then in 1929 (with Henry Daniell and Ina Claire).  The film was remade, unsuccessfully, as the musical comedy Let’s Do It Again in 1953 (with Jane Wyman and Ray Milland).

Director Leo McCarey initially had a poor working relationship with Cary Grant, which came to a head when the former decided that Grant and the supporting actor Ralph Bellamy should switch roles.  The two men patched things up and would work together on two subsequent films, Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) and An Affair to Remember (1957).  The film won McCarey the Best Director Oscar. 

A seductive melange of sophisticated comedy and riotous slapstick, The Awful Truth is one of the funniest films to come out of Hollywood in the 1930s.  Perfectly paced and with hilarious comic situations that have a touch of the old Feydeau farce about them, the film is a classic that is just as entertaining today as it was when it was made.   The real star of the film is neither Grant nor Dunne, but rather a delightful fox terrier named Asta, who featured in The Thin Man series.

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