Leo McCarey | The Awful Truth / 1937

diverting the focus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Viña Delmar (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur Richman), Leo McCarey (director) The Awful Truth / 1937

 

Throughout these pages I have argued, somewhat facetiously, that Cary Grant seldom made a straight movie, particularly in the first 30 years of his film career, with the exceptions perhaps of Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) and, perhaps (I’ll come back to this film later), Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), both made during his marriage to Betsy Drake. That does not mean that in most if not all of his films that he was not the object of the lead female’s desire and, at least in terms of the plot, women were not the subject of his. Nearly all of his films were superficially heterosexual affairs.

      I have already pointed out in my discussions of Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932), Wesley Ruggles I’m No Angel (1933), Harlan Thompson’s Kiss and Make-Up (1934), George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935), and Norman Z. McLeod’s Topper (1937) how early in his career he was purposely paired with females who themselves read as lesbian or transgender individuals that rendered his romances with them as symbolic or were gently coded to make it clear that his attentions were really focused elsewhere. And in many of his films throughout his career, Grant’s characters not only met with the normal obstacles of heterosexual romances generally represented in Hollywood films, but was presented with what might even be described as diverting situations that permitted him to direct his attentions away from the female object for most of the film, arriving back into his heterosexual pursuits just in time for the closing credits. See my comments, for example, on Grant’s role in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

      But Leo McCarey’s screwball comedy of 1937 The Awful Truth is of particular importance in understanding Grant’s coded representation of queer sex in film, not only because McCarey helped him through the film’s largely improvised script to fully discover his cinematic persona—the bemused handsome hero gazing at the female sex with a distanced objectivity that didn’t generally include sexual union—but provided him with his first genre which, built around those diverting situations, permitted him to gaze elsewhere as the movie progressed.

     Instead of the handsome stud forced to stand beside or even slightly behind the female object of desire, in this film Grant was transformed in a truly handsome, well-to-do, highly well-mannered and groomed comic figure who was forced to match wits with a female accomplice, in this case a wife Lucy (Irene Dunne) from whom early in the film he gets a divorce with a court waiting period of 60 days before it becomes legal, the period in which the film allows for them to clumsily and sometimes even skillfully attempt to get back together just in time for the closing credits.

     Stanley Cavell described this subgenre of the screwball comedy, the “comedy of remarriage.” And since its characters are not seeking to find love or romance ending in a blissful marital ceremony, they are permitted to turn their attentions elsewhere, playing dirty tricks on one another and primarily focusing on the other mates their wives and husbands are attempting to court. In short, it permits a gay man such as Grant to spend all the film attending to, in this case, his wife Lucy’s supposed lover, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D’Arcy) and the Oklahoma oil tycoon she intends to marry, Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy)—a position from which Grant could act as a sardonic appreciator of their methods or even as a man in the chase of another, such as when, after discovering D’Arcy hidden away in Lucy’s bedroom where he himself been asked to hide, he supposedly attacks him (so the sound of breaking glass and grunts and groans suggest) and chases him out of the apartment, presumably down the hall, and possibly into the streets. His attention, accordingly, is taken up with something other than the female with whom he supposed be in love.

     It worked so well in this film, in fact, that Grant became almost the pin-up boy for this genre, performing again in similar roles in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) and  George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1941) as well as variations of it in Garson Kanin’s My Favorite Wife (1940) (the wife, declared dead returns at the very moment of his remarrying) and in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) (wherein the lover as spy marries another man, which leaves Grant free to focus on other things before returning to help her escape her slow death from poison).

      Certainly McCarey’s work is not as sophisticated as Kanin’s My Favorite Wife, in which Grant becomes fixated and utterly fascinated by his own gay lover of the time, Randolph Scott. And in that work the coding allows him to truly reveal his basic disinterest in the opposite sex and even hints at a fascination with cross-dressing.

      In The Awful Truth his attention refocused on the male figures doesn’t provide very much fodder for gay speculation, particularly since Bellamy’s Dan, just as his character in His Girl Friday, is such a country rube and the biggest mamma’s boy since Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy in 1922. Lucy’s singing teacher—the supposed cause of their divorce, Armand Duvalle, almost belongs to the species of males featured in Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat released just two years earlier, the gay dress designer Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes). Neither the sissy nor the mamma’s boy could possibly be Jerry Warriner’s type, so even if he momentarily chases one and toys with the other it is not a truly serious engagement, certainly not of the kind he had for Scott’s character in My Favorite Wife where he becomes so very obsessed over his physique that he hallucinates him as tiny swinging putti.

      Of far more comic interest is Jerry’s own first choice of a date with a young singer, Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton), who after introducing her to Lucy and Dan, gets up to perform a number, Ben Oakland and Milton Drake’s “My Dreams Are Gone with the Wind,” in which every time she mentions the word “wind” a whosh of air shoots up from under raising her dress similarly to Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch.

      So memorable is that comic scene that Lucy, in her attempt to bolix up Jerry’s later affair with the wealthy blueblood Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont), repeats it leaving the “gone with the wind” elements of her dress to their prurient imaginations. It works, and leads to a trip via a broken-down auto and a police escort—with each of them riding on front rim of the police motorbikes, the cops themselves seated as if ready for doggy-style sex and Lucy using the siren button like a whoopie cushion and encouraging Jerry to do the same—as they take them to Lucy’s aunt’s cabin where, just in time for Jerry and Lucy to return to the same bed, a scene predicated by the production code and general audience demands.

       There are numerous other hilarious scenes along the way as they both attempt to acclimate to others, the marvelous dance scene between a reluctant Lucy and Dan, the latter of whom suddenly on the dance floor turns from a mamma’s boy to ballroom terpsichorean; the instance where Jerry—hidden between the wall and Lucy’s open front door where Dan attempts to read her a love poem—pokes her in the ribs, producing a series of endless giggles instead of appreciative kisses; and the  moment when, believing Lucy is having a bedroom fling with Duvalle, Jerry rushes into a room wherein Lucy is performing a vocal recital which results in Jerry embarrassedly attempting to sit down on one of the small chairs which collapses and brings down other pieces of furniture, as well forcing Lucy to finish up her song with, instead of trill, a guffaw.

       Together the two perform in such a perfect back and forth match of wits, the statement on one being echoed in the grunts, groans, and under-the-breath repeats of the other that we know, what we always knew, that they are absolutely perfect for each other.

       But back to that divorce which begins the film. Much attention has been given by the story itself and by the commentator’s responses to Jerry’s suspicions regarding Lucy’s affair with Duvalle, which we know, despite his and her quite seemingly unlikely claim that their car broke down and they were forced to stay the night in a nearby inn, that she, in fact, is innocent, one of the several “awful truths” of the film. As even she unintentionally states early on, Armand is certainly not a great lover. And, as I mentioned previously, he is not even Jerry’s sort of man, just as Dixie Belle Lee and Barbara Vane are not his kind of women.

      But what of Jerry’s whereabouts? In the very first scene of the film he is observed in his club attempting to get a solid tan, the kind Lucy might expect him to having just spent a week in Florida. But he has not been to Florida as he admits to a friend who attempts to interest him in squash game, a fact reconfirmed when awarding Lucy a basket of Florida fruit wherein she discovers an orange that declares itself a product of California. So where has Jerry been? Has he truly cheated on his wife, created a reasonable cause for the divorce they impose upon one another despite their love?

      No one I’ve read has seemingly been interested in Jerry’s “awful truth.”  Trevor Berrett writing in on-line The Mooske and the Gripes simply argues that Jerry has “presumably been somewhere else, with someone else.” Since we have no real information on where and who that someone might be, we have to assume that it is something deleted by the censors, which given Joseph Breen and the Hays Code of the day might suggest an affair with either a woman or a man.

      We have utterly no evidence, however, that Jerry is interested in another woman, certainly not even the obvious false evidence we do have with respect to Lucy and Armand. And given his later choices, the women he seems interested in are not those who might encourage a week-long affair. Dixie-Belle is far too conventional and dumb, while Barbara Vane so very properly terrified of gossip and scandal that she would never involve herself in such torrid matters.

      Besides, Jerry doesn’t seem the type either. As he suggests to his friend at his sports club, he should come by the house later so that after a drink or two they might steal away from the women for some golf. He clearly enjoys the company of men. The extensive and highly knowledgeable Wikipedia entry for this film simply states in the very sentence of the plot summary: “Jerry Warriner (Cary Grant) tells his wife he is going on vacation to Florida, but instead spends the week at his sports club in New York City.” Presumably a summary of the studio promotional material, that may well solve our problem.

     But frankly that explanation is even more troublesome. Why if he simply wanted to get away with a few friends for sporting events at the club would he lie to his wife? What possible guilt might he have for hanging out with male friends at his club? Unless of course, it wasn’t just a few games of squash and tennis, a daily round of laps in the pool, or a hard work-out with the weights that enticed him into the all-male get-a-away. Had he discovered some ur-version of My Favorite Wife’s Stephen Burkett (Scott)? McCarey produced the latter film, and the similarities between the two works are notable and often mentioned.

      Yes, these are just conjectures about something that is never explained in the movie. But I can’t help asking, why isn’t it explained? If her side of the story is clearly laid out, why not his? Since McCarey allegedly tore up Viña and Eugene Delmar’s script, and tossed out earlier versions by Dwight Taylor, Mary C. McCall, Jr., and Dorothy Parker, perhaps even McCarey and the cast never knew, winging it beyond the basic outlines of the earlier attempts at a script.

      Although Dunne immediately took to McCarey’s improvisatory methods, Bellamy and Grant where highly uncomfortable with them, Grant being described in the first days becoming physically sick. He worked to have McCarey fired. He attempted to buy out his contract just to free himself from the film and when that failed tried to switch roles with Bellamy. True he wasn’t at all used to working, given his Paramount experiences, without a full script and blocked out actions. But what made him so terrified? That the improvisatory method might reveal too much?

      Of course, eventually, it did reveal a great deal about the actor and established, as I reported, his persona as he grew fond of the more open experience of the set and hit it off immediately with his co-star.

      Late in the film, the two actors, speaking of the problems they’ve having throughout the film express themselves in an almost philosophical language using generalities to describe their specific issues, which not only summarize the character’s situation, but perhaps the actor’s experiences as well:

 

Lucy: Yes, it’s funny that everything’s the way it is on account of the way you feel.

Jerry: Huh?

Lucy: Well, what I mean is, if you didn’t feel the way you do, things wouldn’t be the way they are, would they? I mean, things could be the same if things were different.

Jerry: But things are the way you made them.

Lucy: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn’t make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you’re the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.

 

As commentator Chuck Bowen has nicely summarized this oddball, and yes, somewhat queer film:

 

“Grant and Dunne forge a subliminal language, performing a series of riffs that indicate the many private things that we will never learn about this or any other couple. The Awful Truth is one of the great American comedies, but it’s also a mighty and mysterious film about relationships, which are composed of nesting negotiations—performances—that leave scars.”

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).