The Awful Truth
9 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4
(TCM)
The centerpiece of The Awful Truth, a screwball comedy that still sparkles as brilliantly as it did in 1937, is the embattled married couple of Jerry and Lucy Wariner, played by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Oklahoma viewers, however, might be slightly more interested with Ralph Bellamy as the movie’s requisite dope, a rich Oklahoma oilman named Dan.
“Oklahoma’s pretty swell,” Dan tells Lucy in his best aw-shucks drawl. “I got quite a ranch down there. I got cattle and horses and chicken and alfalfa …”
That’s all Lucy, a New York sophisticate, needs to hear about Oklahoma to know the Sooner State isn’t her idea of pretty swell.
That’s the entirety of Oklahoma’s cameo here, but everything else in The Awful Truth is pretty swell, which posits: What’s the big deal with some infidelity here and there when the straying marrieds are this witty? Grant and Dunne are terrific as the warring Wariners, who agree to a divorce shortly after the film begins. After all, Lucy has been out all night with her singing instructor, while Jerry is scurrying to get a fake tan to go along with the fake alibi that he’s been vacationing in Florida these past two weeks.
But the Wariners must wait 90 days to finalize the split. That delay gives them enough time for the requisite straying — such as Lucy’s would-be dalliance with the aforementioned Bellamy — before the pair realizes they’re crazy about each other.
Don’t worry, that’s no spoiler. The Awful Truth’s ending is never really in doubt. The fun is in the getting there.
Although director Leo McCarey had rich source material in Arthur Richman’s smash Broadway play, he also encouraged a fair amount of improvisation from the cast. Grant wasn’t a fan of the process; he pleaded to be let out of his contract. But McCarey held firm, and it’s a good thing he did, too. McCarey won the Academy Award that year for Best Director, while the movie boosted Grant’s rising popularity and helped create the archetype of the lovable cad ex-husband he would portray in The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday. Like I said, pretty swell.
