The Awful Truth (1937)

Matthew Harrison

The Awful Truth is a comedy about Jerry and Lucy Warriner (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, respectively), a married couple in New York. Jerry is supposedly returned from a trip to Florida, and arrives to find his wife absent. Lucy arrives home, explaining that she was forced to spend the night with Armand, her music teacher, after the car has broken down. When she discovers that Jerry did not actually go to Florida, their mutual suspicions lead them to file for divorce, though they contest custody of their dog. During the period before the divorce becomes final, Lucy moves in with her Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham) and meets their neighbor Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), an oil man from Oklahoma. Jerry becomes engaged to Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont), a wealthy high-society heiress.

The soon-to-be divorcees, neither one entirely over the other, then do their very best to embarrass each other in front of their potential new spouses. Dan and Lucy encounter Jerry and a date, and after Jerry is embarrassed by his date’s risqué performance, he watches Lucy awkwardly dance with Dan, and then tips off the band for a repetition of the same song for an encore. Jerry discovers Lucy has another appointment with her teacher, and goes to catch them in the act, only to interrupt her in the middle of a musical performance. Armand comes to discuss explaining things to Jerry, but must hide in the bedroom when Jerry arrives. Dan and his mother come to visit Lucy, and Jerry hides in the bedroom, fighting and chasing out Armand when he discovers him there in the room with him. Lucy crashes a party Jerry is attending with Barbara and her parents, pretending to be Jerry’s sister, and acts like a drunk and a showgirl, implying that Jerry’s father was a gardener, and otherwise disrupting the entire scene. Jerry escorts Lucy out, and because of her sabotage of the car, they must spend the night together at her aunt’s cabin. There they talk and ultimately reconcile with each other, just after their divorce finalizes.

I thought that this was a particularly interesting film to watch in light of our discussions about the Production Code and its implementation. It seemed especially significant to me that nothing was directly stated regarding the circumstances leading up to the divorce, nor in any of the conversations that followed. The final scene, with both leads coincidentally in adjoining rooms with a door that keeps getting blown open by the wind, shows this especially well. Jerry and Lucy have a brief conversation each time the door is blown open, ending with a shot of a clock chiming as two figures, a man and a woman, step out of separate doors with the chimes and then walk back into the doors. After the couple reconciles, the two figures step out and then both go back into the same door.

I found myself enjoying this film thoroughly. It was genuinely funny through a mix of dialogue and physical comedy, employing a great deal of wit.