Back in the 1930s, comedies usually featured overactive comics garbed in outrageous getups and funny costumes (the Marx brothers, Mae West, Wheeler and Woolsey, two-thirds of W.C. Fields). But the shift was on by 1935 to a new type of comedy on the horizon -- Capra's It Happened One Night fused the romantic couple with the comic relief and A Night at the Opera relegated the Marx clan to do-gooder support for Alan Jones and Kitty Carlisle. But it took the crackbrained genius of Leo McCarey to completely transform the attractive romantic couple from not just good-looking people who traded funny quips but good-looking people who traded funny quips and fell on their asses. After The Awful Truth, the wild marital comedy written and directed by McCarey and starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant (in a star-making role -- the first role in which Grant officially began acting like Cary Grant), film comedy would never be the same again.

As the template for a comedy style that would come to be known as screwball comedy, The Awful Truth is screwball comedy at its most minimal. The plot is virtually nonexistent as Grant and Dunne engage in a master class on comic technique and timing. They play a married couple soon to be divorced and spend the entire film taking turns busting up each other's dates. That is until they find themselves in cramped overnight accommodations and realize 15 minutes before the divorce decree goes into effect that they really love each other and don't want to get a divorce at all.

McCarey's direction incorporates comedic flourishes hewn to a fine gloss, lessons learned at the feet of Laurel and Hardy when he was their producer and director. And much like a Laurel and Hardy short, The Awful Truth feasts upon the expertise of the two leads to expand basic comedy situations into extended riffs, punctuated by hilarious reaction shots and double takes. And without a hard-nosed genre story to hang these comic turns onto (as in the mystery plot in The Thin Man or the picaresque missing heiress and cynical reporter story of It Happened One Night), the film is a comic high wire act, pure screwball.

Leo McCarey won an Oscar that year as Best Director for The Awful Truth but McCarey, when accepting the award, grumpily addressed the Academy members and complained that he won the award for the wrong movie -- he was expecting one for his sentimental Make Way for Tomorrow (which you've undoubtedly never heard of). But McCarey has always been his best when left unrestrained (see Duck Soup). Although corniness and pretension were in his future (Going My Way, My Son John), as a final belt of pure comedy from McCarey, The Awful Truth is as good as it gets -- straight, no chaser.



He can't handle the truth.