by Pat Perry
A few years back, when memes were passed around the film blogosphere like a flu virus, I was invited to name my ten favorite film characters of all time. Right at the very top of my list, I placed Lucy and Jerry Warriner, the sparring, on-and-off spouses played by Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth. In retrospect, that was a telling choice.
With the possible exception of the Thin Man movies, I can’t think of another screwball comedy whose principal characters are so much fun to watch regardless of what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. Screwball comedies aren’t typically character-driven; their motors run on intricately structured plotting and razor sharp, rat-a-tat dialogue. The Awful Truth, by contrast, belongs wholly to the screwball genre, and yet stands apart from it in significant ways, and its character focus is the least of it. Its loose, free-wheeling style is a result of its being made without a completed working script; bits of comic business were improvised and McCarey notoriously wrote much of the dialogue while on the set. Thus the film is a bit short on plot, but very long on brilliantly funny, sketch-like scenes that could each, more or less, stand on their own. You could dive into the film at say, the beginning of the nightclub scene where the estranged Warriners and their ill-chosen new partners end up at the same, uncomfortable table, and still follow and laugh at the proceedings. (more…)
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