Bob Frame and Lypsinka (John Epperson) | Anything Goes / 1991

golden day, olden days

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lypsinka (performer), Bob Frame (director) Anything Goes / 1991

 

Like a few of the early drag artists, the 1980s, 1990s performer Lypsinka (John Epperson), who began his career as a pianist at The American Ballet, prefers to be described as an actor.   

     Anything Goes, performed in 1991 at a nightclub in the West 40s in Manhattan, quite brilliant displays Epperson / Lypsinka’s talent, as she sings a jazz medley of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes dressed in a Dietrichesque rhinestone gown, but also playing a Vernoica Lake-like beauty surrounded by several handsome gay boys, a cigarette girl, a 1960s mod customer, also surrounded by men, and a 1920s era vamp in the manner of Nazimova.

     The truly handsome gay boys, businessmen, sailors, and officer are played by Robert Floydd, Tony G., Joel, Tony, and Jack.

     Although we know that Lypsinka is merely mouthing the words from a version by Lisa Kirk who performed in several Broadway musicals such as Kiss Me Kate and sang regularly in clubs and other venues in Manhattan throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, someone not in know might certainly be convinced that Lypsinka was actually singing along with her sexy dance-like moves. But the point in nearly all of Lypsinka’s work is that she is a grand illusion of the female in the manner perhaps of highly trimmed-down, buxomless, pencil thin Mae West or even Bette Midler, but with the style of a true diva.

     Frame’s 1991 version of her theater pizzaz as well as her many-faced illusions of female greats is nearly perfect. More than an imitator, Epperson as Lypsinka becomes one of the female legends.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Victor Fleming | Test Pilot / 1938

some immodest questions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Hawks, Vincent Lawrence, John Lee Mahin, and Waldemar Young (screenplay, based on the book by Frank Wead), Victor Fleming (director) Test Pilot / 1938

 

Just prior to what was perhaps the most fabulous year in film director Victor Fleming’s life, 1939, when he finished The Wizard of Oz and replaced George Cukor in directing Gone with the Wind, the renowned “man’s director” had another hit with his tale about the wildly adventurous test pilot Jim Lane (Clark Gable again), performing with his partner mechanical specialist Gunner Morris (Spencer Tracy) and the film’s love interest whom he quickly turns into his wife, Ann Barton (Myrna Loy).

       Loy, with good reason, since this film represents one of her most witty and enthusiastic acting stints of her long career, described it as her favorite movie, as Tracy similarly spoke of it was one of his most memorable, any qualifications probably having to do with the fact that he evidently had a testy relationship throughout the shooting with his co-star Gable. I’ll come back to that. In short, a good time seemed to be had by all, director, audience, and stars.

      Today, reviewers of the DVD and those simply reassessing older films seem not to have as much enthusiasm for the work. Critic Matt Hinrichs, for example, describes it:

 

“As much as Test Pilot appears to be about derring-do in the air, mostly it stays grounded in a soapy story that focuses purely on the three main characters. Despite being too long and dialogue-heavy, it soars purely on the film's casual vibe and the palpable chemistry of the lead actors (especially Gable and Loy, scintillating in their sixth and final screen teaming). Gable's infectious enthusiasm betrays the fact that he's playing a charming scamp for the umpteenth time, while Tracy does a valiant job of giving his rather flat character real meaning and motivation. Perhaps most surprising is Myrna Loy's radiant, vivacious portrayal—she's never been this loose and uninhibited onscreen, which might explain why the actress chose this over other, better-known projects as her favorite film.”

 

And Dennis Schwartz, writing in Ozus’ World Movie Reviews, has similar reservations, awarding the film only a C+ for good effort:

 

“It’s hard to believe this so-so action pic was nominated for three Oscars, including for Best Picture, original story and editing, and that this was Myrna Loy’s favorite movie role (like what was she smoking!). Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind / Captain Courageous / Red Dust) directs the great name cast of Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy with noisy ease, but the weak story by former Naval Captain Frank ‘Spig’ Wead that’s written by Vincent Lawrence, Waldemar Young and Howard Hawks never kicks in with interesting dramatic excitement or a romance story that matters. It all feels mechanical like the experimental flying machines. Nevertheless, it was a big commercial success, giving the public the kind of dashing romance, easy-going comedy, first-rate aerial sequences and daredevil heroics it found uplifting. The film tries to make it alone on star power, and almost does.”

 

     Even the more enthusiastic reviews of the day spoke mostly of it as an “romantic thriller” most notable for its adventurous aviation scenes.

     Meanwhile, my first question, surely an odd one given these typical commentaries, was how did this wonderful film squeak by the Hays board? Had Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926) and William A. Wellman’s brilliantly coded “aviation thriller” Wings (1927) so convinced his US audience that the kind of male camaraderie practiced by their central characters was such normal behavior in the military that this post-military buddies’ relationship was nothing out of the ordinary? Or was I reading in, as I sometimes have been accused, in imagining that Gunner Morris kept hanging around his old friend Jim because he truly—not just in the friendly in “pat-on-the-butt” sense—in love with Gable’s character?

      I suppose lots of test pilot mechanics paste their gum to the top of the planes every time their friend sails off to the “woman in the sky” just to protect him, planting his spit from his mouth upon the symbolic “forehead?” Maybe most mechanics live with their pilot friends, hang out with them day and night, wake them carefully to make sure they keep their flying appointments, and make sure night and day that they’re sober enough to take off?

      Doesn’t just any good friend suffer every second that his buddy is challenging the flying machines to do things beyond even their designer’s imagination? When his best chum brings home women, isn’t it fairly normal for the mechanic to get a little testy over the whole issue of “women?”

       And when Lane’s plane nearly crashes into a Kansas wheat field, what else is a friend mechanic to do but pay out-of-pocket expenses to travel there to fix it up? So what if he’s miffed that another woman is mixed up in the whole affair, and he gets particularly irritated when he hears how his pal has taken a shine to her? Surely it’s common sense to try to hurry him off the next morning and get him back to where he can have him all for himself?

     When it’s clear that he’s lost his best friend to marriage, it’s totally appropriate, isn’t it, that a mechanic, in this film Gunner, won’t take up Jim’s invite to live with them in their new little apartment, but still makes close friends with what has become a trio, Gunner, Ann, and Jim, a kind of threesome who now show up everywhere together?

        When it becomes apparent that Jim hasn’t any idea how to treat a lady, let alone his wife, I should imagine itis generally up to his friend to suggest that he might buy her at least a negligee to sleep in, and go shopping with his pal for that item?

         And when the dense-headed boyfriend doesn’t have a clue of what his new wife is feeling about his dangerous flights, it’s inevitable, I should imagine, that he become her sounding board, someone to whom she can share all of her worries, recognizing that living with a fool like Jim, there are only three roads to take: leave him immediately; insist that he quit his profession to take on a safer job which he would hate and hate her for demanding he do it; or live everyday knowing that it might probably be her/his last with the man she/he loves? And naturally, when Jim takes up the plane high into the sky again, cracking it into pieces, it’s standard that a friend like Gunner should intensely scold her for her behavior with tears pouring down from his eyes that reveal his own feelings of fear for losing the man he also loves? I have a picture in case you missed that, American viewers.

       The following conversation must be a typical one between test pilot “bros”:

 

Jim Lane: (asking Gunner) “Who do you love sweetheart?”

Gunner Morris: (spoken in a straightforward manner) I love you.

        When your buddy finally breaks the records and goes on a bender, what comrade wouldn’t fly all over the country to find him in a flophouse in Chicago, having just spent—to his knowledge—all of the $10,000 he’s just be awarded, including the $5,000 he was to have paid to you, and take him quietly home to his desperate wife?

        If your comrade continues his daredevil flying, wouldn’t you start swigging down whisky direct from the flask, get drunk, and mutter endlessly on about the “three roads” that Ann described were the only choices someone who loves Jim Lane can take? Wouldn’t you shout out that all three of you are doomed?

         And feeling that way doesn’t every friend join his risk-taking buddy on a test ride in a new Boeing bomber knowing that it’s finally his time to die, throwing the gum to the ground instead of planting on the airplane roof to protect the man who will never be able to respond in kind?  Just as such a pal might have suspected, the beloved can’t be bothered to even grant him a kiss as he dies.

    If such a character—in one of the best and most understated performances of Spencer Tracy that I have ever seen—represents a “flat character without real meaning and motivation,” then I better give up writing about film after all these years.

      I have a theory that while making this movie, just as William Wyler did with Stephen Boyd before the major early scene in Ben Hur, the manly-man’s director Victor Fleming took Spencer aside and told him that the whole movie was one big love scene between him and Gable, but warned him, as Wyler had Boyd concerning Charlton Heston, not to let Gable know. As if Gable was ever a smart enough actor to realize how to play anything but a dumb heterosexual womanizer, despite the rumors that early on in his career he worked both street and casting couch to work his way up. Nonetheless, as Rick Burin, writing on this film for Letterboxd observes, Test Pilot represents, “the last movie in which...Gable dared to emote, before the need to protect his macho image rendered him dramatically immobile.”

       More likely, the script writers, the brilliant Howard Hawks (who certainly knew how to write and direct movies about queer camaraderie; see my comments on his Red River), Waldemar Young (who, incidentally, was Brigham Young’s grandson), Vincent Lawrence, and John Lee Mahin didn’t bother to tell Fleming, and Tracy, rumored to be bisexual off the screen, didn’t have to be told anything.

      Unfortunately, they also forgot to tell Ann Barton, Jim’s wife in the movie, who despite her remarkable perceptions about the man she has wed, doesn’t seem to truly comprehend just how much Gunner loves the same man. At one point, despairing of her situation with the man who constantly is taking chances with his life, she cries on Gunner’s shoulder, pleading “Gunner, don’t ever fall love, don’t ever.” Too late, I’m afraid. Even Jim, tired of Gunner’s pained looks of suffering suggests: “Why don’t you be gay for once and give yourself a shot.”

      We all know that being “gay” here was meant to suggest its old meaning, “happy, bright, carefree.” But given the situation he might as well have been saying, “isn’t it time that you come out?” and leave me out of your sexual imagination, please.

      As I previously mentioned Hollywood lore is that Tracy and Gable had an increasingly uneasy relationship throughout filming, and when it came for Tracy to die after their plane had crashed, Gable reportedly shouted out: "Die, goddamn it, Spence! I wish to Christ you would!" dropping Tracy's head with a thud. Perhaps Gable finally began to sense his co-star’s situation in this work, and being homophobic—it was he, so it has been rumored, who demanded that the queer Cukor be relieved of his Gone with the Wind directorial responsibilities—could no longer restrain himself.

      Nonetheless, to me and several of my gay friends, there is no question but that Test Pilot is hardly a work that “never kicks in with interesting dramatic excitement or a romance story that matters.” For the LGBTQ community, Gunner Morris’s unrequited love for Jim Lane very much matters, and takes this film to a different level from which, apparently, most of the audience past and present are perceiving it. Like Wings before it, Test Pilot is one of several Hollywood films that truly reveal love between “masculine” males that stands fully apart from the dozens of films portraying homosexuality as an effeminate farce.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2022

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review, February 2022).

William Wyler | Jezebel / 1938

an intimate conversation between two women

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clements Riley, Albern Finkel, and John Huston (screenplay, based on a stage play by Owen Davis), William Wyler (director) Jezebel / 1938

 

Everyone remembers William Wyler’s 1938 film Jezebel for Bette Davis’ masterful performance (she won her second Oscar for the movie), and, in particular, for the bright red dress she wears to the ball celebrating the eligible young women of New Orleans—this, despite the fact that the movie was filmed in black-and-white. Although Davis’ character, Julie Marsden, has decided on the red dress—despite the requirements that all young women appear in white—to stand out from the others and, so it appears, to punish her fiancé, Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda), for putting his banking business ahead of their planned shopping trip, she is so shunned at the event that her usual disdain for what others think forsakes her. Ready to flee the event, she is forced by Dillard to play out the dance; and when the event is over, so is their relationship.

     So dramatically compact is this series of events, which represents approximately the first third of the film, that we might almost perceive this sequence as a movie unto itself. But to do so would be to miss the point of the picture. For Jezebel is not just a film about a high-spirited and independent-thinking woman—although those issues are of crucial importance to the entire film—but is an indictment against a whole way of thinking that Julie represents. As a member of the Southern patrician class, Julie, like her alter-ego Buck Cantrell (the dashing George Brent), waltzes through life with entrenched values that are unable be swayed by others. If Cantrell uses his in-bred sense of privilege to dismiss (and even kill) those men around him who speak against his values, Julie uses that same sense of superiority to manipulate the men courting her, gradually teaching and inculcating within them not only the values of her world—values, which as we witness in the incident of the red dress, she is only too ready to dismiss—but forcing them to bow before the shrine to femininity that she has manufactured for herself. Julie is not so much an individual, despite her spirited expression of self-will, as she is an institution, a representative of the Southern Belle—always a dangerous figure in literature and film, most likely even in reality!

    But in this film, Julie is becomes also something else that, although quite coded, reveals to the viewer able to read the message, that this strong woman is an outsider, a being who on one level of the story is filled with heterosexual desire, but on another is a woman who stands strongly against and outside the patriarchal system in which she and her values are embedded as a symbolic lesbian, or, if nothing else, a female of the unmarrying kind, a woman able to accomplish all sorts of things that previously were perceived only achievable by males while, accordingly, alienating nearly every male in the film.

      If Cantrell shares her closed and archaic values, he is unwilling to publicly express his independence from them. He refuses to take Julie to the ball, not only because she is dressed in red, but because she is already committed to Dillard. Like all the others, he too refuses to accept her as a partner in dance. The only time he allows himself to be used in her personal machinations—in the purposeful taunting of Dillard and his Yankee wife, Amy (Margaret Lindsay), over their Northern thinking patterns—results in his death. But that too, after a meaningless gun duel between himself and Dillard’s brother, Ted (Richard Cromwell), is a complication of his doomed cultural perspective.

     In Julie’s contradictions, in her insistence upon the old order while simultaneously refusing to behave by its precepts, she is not only marvelously unpredictable—always the perfect role for Davis—but is immensely powerful. In a world in which men and women behave only according to tradition, her self-motivated willfulness sets her apart, while marking her as a figure not only of power but of danger, a woman who not only can manipulate those around her but destroy them. As the writers make clear, however, it is just such values and the possibilities of manipulating those who hold them that dooms the South in the years ahead.

     Unlike the movie for which Davis had just been passed over, Gone with the Wind, Jezebel chooses not to focus on the inevitable North-South war but plays out an even grander struggle between human will and fate. Fate, hovering over every frame of Jezebel, metaphorically exists in the very land itself: an over-heated, below sea-level country plagued with mosquitoes, the then unknown cause of the Yellow Fever outbreak of 1853. To quickly summarize the spread of the disease:

 

     Cases of the fever began to appear in May of that year, but were ignored because the numbers were similar to the quantity of annual outbreaks. But by June, when the cases increased, the city council had still failed to act and had adjourned. By July, with the increase of extremely hot weather and rains, the fever grew into plague-like dimensions. Believing that the major cause of the disease was the lack of ozone in the air, heavy cannons were ordered to fired off at regular intervals to purify the air by the Board of Health. Barrels filled with tar were burned throughout the city after sunset. Both of these incidents are portrayed in the movie without explanation.

     Most of the sick were sent away to the Leper Island, since authorities believed that contact with the sick spread the fever. The fever killed as many individuals as the Great Plague of London: in all, 7,849 people. (my summary of the Wikipedia entry)

 

     It is within this context that we witness the major actions of Wyler’s film. Once Dillard, the man whom Julie still loves—despite and, in her warped view of reality, perhaps because of his marriage—falls ill, this forceful woman suddenly comes into her own, working with her servant as opposed to merely overseeing his labors, in order to return to the city, circumventing roadblocks by journeying via boat through the swamps. If previously she sought to dominate and control Dillard, she now transforms herself into a Florence Nightingale-like nurse, sitting up throughout the night to care for him, placing wet towels upon his forehead and applying drops of water to his lips. It is far sexier than their earlier attempts to kiss because we now recognize her acts as lying outside of conventional heterosexuality.

     The arrival of Dillard’s wife, brother, her aunt, and others does not deter her, but Dillard’s doctor-friend (Donald Crisp) has already reported the illness to the authorities, still obedient to tradition and the rules like those of his ilk—even though we know his science was mistaken. Amy’s sudden decision to travel with him to Leper Island, however, almost changes everything, revealing her to also be a strong woman, willing to give up her own life to succor her husband. And at the moment Julie is finally forced to face the fact that she has met a woman as powerful as she is, someone whom she herself must admire and perhaps even love.

 

    The stand-off between the two women on the staircase of the Marsden mansion is the focal-point of this near operatic melodrama. If Ernst Lubitsch is a director of doors, as I argued (see my essay on his film Angel), Wyler might be described as a director of staircases—a central place of action or movement in nearly all of his films. The director poses these two feminine forces in a significant placement, the pure and innocent Amy higher than the guilty, plotting, and now imploring Julie. Julie hopes to convince Amy that she, herself, should accompany Dillard instead of his wife, who has no knowledge of the conditions she will encounter or of the culture (evidently involved with knowing ways to cajole the needed help from the blacks) of the South. She will be more able to help Dillard, Julie argues, than the well-intentioned wife.

     Julie has previously bowed to a man (Dillard), but throughout the film she is nearly always positioned above and in front of the women figures. Although nothing is truly altered in possessing the information that both Davis and Wyler would have had—that Margaret Lindsay, within Hollywood circles, was recognized as a lesbian—the intensity of the two actors’ relationship on the stairs is subtly fraught with issues of sexuality, power, and liberation in way that is as meaningful as perceiving, I would argue, that Cary Grant, while performing in films like Bringing Up Baby and My Favorite Wife, was actively gay.

     Amy, no longer playing the polite innocent, however, recognizes that in her plea Julie is also attempting to conquer and control Dillard even upon what may be his death bed. And, accordingly, she demands to know whether or not her husband still loves Julie. The interchange is a tense one, for even we are not certain whether Dillard still loves the spiteful woman in red, despite his obvious loyalty to Amy. This scene represents why Wyler was so often described as a “women’s director,” for it portrays quite an exceptional encounter between the women—what we might describe as an intimate conversation about a man—that generally does not exist between two straight men. (Just such a conversation between men, in fact, would likely have resulted in a challenge to duel within the context of this film, and, outside the fiction, might have brought on a fight with the Hays code.) And Julie’s answer, after her opening statement, “We both know the answer to that question, don’t we?” is somewhat shocking, for if Amy is uncertain, so too are we; even if she is lying, Julie’s insistence that Amy still remains at the center of Dillard’s life frees Amy to give over her husband to Julie’s care, and, just perhaps, represents the first unselfish act of Julie’s life. In that admission, moreover, Julie bows to a woman who has more power than she.

     We still don’t quite know, as Julie joins Dillard on the wagon to what we can imagine may certainly be death, whether this woman is seeking a perverse kind of revenge against Amy, or whether, having truly met her match, she is now attempting to “cleanse” her life, as she expresses it, to come to terms with the fact that she is a true outsider, even within her soon-to-be ostracized culture. The fact is that, whether or not Dillard survives, Julie has stolen at least his body from Amy even in the process of admitting her defeat. And the final ending credits leave us with one of the most open-ended of films of the period.

     A few years later, Lee would surrender to Grant, but the values that Lee expounded, would not entirely be laid to rest until at least a century later, the remnants of which exist even today alas. But this film reveals another way out through sexuality which, in the end, permits the coded character a far more important mode of sacrifice than the forced abandonment of the Southern way of bigotry and isolation.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2014).

 

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).