The Awful Truth (Columbia, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 3) my husband Charles and I watched three films from an all-night tribute to Columbia Pictures Corporation on its 100th anniversary. Columbia Pictures was formed by brothers Harry and Jack Cohn and Joe Brandt, a friend and business partner of Jack Cohn. Like Harry Warner of the Warner Brothers, Jack Cohn ran the business end of the company from New York; and like Jack Warner, Harry Cohn lived in Hollywood and ran the actual production end of the studio. The company was originally named CBC Productions, but too many jokesters called it “Corned Beef and Cabbage Pictures” and so they looked for a more grandiloquent name that would be harder to ridicule. They hit on Columbia, but that didn’t stop the wags; the studio’s new nickname became “Columbia, the Germ of the Ocean.” Its production facilities, such as they were, were on Gower Street in Hollywood, well known in the business as “Poverty Row” where a lot of small, independent, low-budgeted companies had their headquarters. Unlike most of the people who ran these studios, Harry Cohn was determined to build his company into a major enterprise with the ability to hire major stars and directors and make big-budget films. And he achieved it, thanks largely to a director he picked up on the rebound from Harry Langdon’s independent studio: Frank Capra. Harry Cohn was notorious as a bully – in his autobiography Capra said Cohn didn’t judge directors, writers or actors on the quality of their work, but on how well they stood up to Cohn’s bullying – but Capra thrived under Cohn’s abuse and had a level of independence well beyond what most major-studio directors had. Capra had been a physics major in college before he drifted into films, and when sound came in for some reason other studios tried to hire Capra away from Columbia on the ground that his scientific background made him better able to direct talkies. But so many critics, reviewing Capra’s films, wrote, “Capra is Columbia,” that Cohn became bound and determined to hire other directors and show that Columbia could make great movies without Capra.

Cohn also liked to hire stars who had burned out at other studios to see if he could create comeback vehicles for them; he failed with John Gilbert (who made his last movie, The Captain Hates the Sea, for Columbia in 1934) but succeeded triumphantly with Grace Moore, Southern-born opera singer who had flamed out at MGM but scored big with a Columbia musical about opera, One Night of Love, also in 1934. (It helped that the director Cohn hired for it was Victor Schertzinger, a trained musician himself and just about the only filmmaker who wrote music for his own movies between Charlie Chaplin and Clint Eastwood.) By 1937 Cohn was producing major movies like Capra’s Lost Horizon – based on a fantasy novel by John Hilton and budgeted at $2 million, four times what any previous Columbia film had cost to make – and the first film we watched on last night’s tribute, The Awful Truth, also from 1937. The Awful Truth was directed by Leo McCarey, who had started out at Hal Roach Studios and had been the man who had the bright idea of co-starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and turning them into one of the greatest comedy teams of all time. In the early 1930’s Paramount had lured McCarey away from Roach and he made a number of major films there, including the Marx Brothers’ greatest movie, Duck Soup (1933); Six of a Kind (1934) with W. C. Fields, Alison Skipworth, George Burns and Gracie Allen; Belle of the Nineties (also 1934) with Mae West; and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), with Charles Laughton as an über British butler and Charlie Ruggles as the uncouth American Westerner who wins him in a card game. Then McCarey made a poignant drama called Make Way for Tomorrow in 1937, about an elderly couple who are forced to separate when they lose their home to foreclosure. They each move in with a family headed by one of their children, and their kids just find their presence disruptive. The film was a major flop and Paramount fired McCarey.

Enter Harry Cohn, who was always looking for major talents who had burned out at larger companies, who signed McCarey to direct The Awful Truth, which had started life as a play by Arthur Richman in 1922. It had already been filmed twice by Pathé Studios, as a silent in 1926 and an early talkie in 1930, and the 1937 version was originally supposed to be written by Dwight Taylor (whose main credits these days are the two films he was involved with that starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: The Gay Divorcée and Top Hat) and directed by Tay Garnett. Then McCarey got hold of it and put on Viña Delmar, his writer on Make Way for Tomorrow, though much of The Awful Truth was improvised on set by McCarey and his stars, Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy. McCarey had used improvisation back in his days at Hal Roach and he loved the freedom and spontaneity of it. Harry Cohn didn’t; he was furious from the first day of the shoot, when McCarey had Bellamy sing “Home on the Range” with Dunne playing piano and singing backup (Dunne was actually a professionally trained mezzo-soprano and had auditioned for the Met before she chose to go to Hollywood instead, and she gets a scene later in the movie in which she sings a quasi-classical selection, “La Serenata,” quite beautifully, but in the al fresco duet on “Home on the Range” she’s clearly dumbing down her voice to match his). McCarey didn’t even tell Bellamy and Dunne that the cameras were rolling, though his intention all along was to use the scene in the film. The Awful Truth was an example of a genre that flourished in the 1930’s called “screwball comedy,” which essentially democratized filmed humor. Until then, film comedians had been separate from the rest of the movie world; comedies had been made by specialists like Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd in the silent era and the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields in the early sound period. “Screwball” created a sort of comedy which could be played by actors who did other kinds of roles as well, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, William Powell, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert and Katharine Hepburn.

The Awful Truth is about the destructive power of jealousy and what it can do to an otherwise good relationship; the principals are Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne), her husband Jerry (Cary Grant), and Daniel Leeson (Ralph Bellamy). Lucy and Jerry have just reunited from supposed out-of-town trips they lied to each other about; we first meet Jerry when he’s taken a sunbathing treatment at his sports club because he’s supposed to be coming back from a week in Florida but he’s really been at the club all this time. Lucy shows up after a weekend supposedly with her Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham – that’s right, a woman named Cecil) but really spent with her voice teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D’Arcy) – and she’s “outed” when Aunt Patsy herself shows up at the Warriners’ home just after Lucy has supposedly returned from her weekend at her place. The Warriners have a no-holds-barred argument (though blessedly without the domestic violence Arthur Richman had written in his play) and end up in divorce court, where they receive an interlocutory decree and are told their divorce will become final in 90 days (though later in the film that changes into 60 days), after which they’ll be free to marry other people. Jerry starts dating a nightclub singer named Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton) – at least that’s her stage name – and Lucy and her new boyfriend, Oklahoma cattle rancher and oilman Daniel Leeson, show up at the club where she performs and sings a song called “My Dreams Are Gone With the Wind.” At the end of each chorus an air blower goes off under her and literally pushes her dress above her head – 18 years before Marilyn Monroe and director Billy Wilder pulled off that gag in The Seven-Year Itch. Lucy gets serious about Daniel Leeson even though his mother (Esther Dale) doesn’t like her. Jerry starts dating heiress Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont) and the two start going to various sporting events represented by a montage of stock footage (remember this was directed by Leo McCarey, who had inserted into Duck Soup a long montage sequence spoofing the whole idea of stock footage). Ironically, in a case of life imitating art, five years after he made The Awful Truth Cary Grant would marry a real-life heiress named Barbara – Barbara Hutton – though their marriage lasted only three years (1942-1945), and Hutton’s biographers have suggested the reason it failed was that Grant was the first self-made man she’d ever been involved with: all her others had been born into money and had never had to work, just like she.

In The Awful Truth Jerry and Barbara break up when Lucy shows up at his dinner date with her family, posing as Jerry’s sister (and affecting a Katharine Hepburn accent; Grant and the real Hepburn had already made a film together, Sylvia Scarlett, and would go on to make three more) and scandalizes them with her version of Dixie Belle Lee’s nightclub dance. When director McCarey wanted Dunne to do a stripper-style bump-and-grind in the sequence, Dunne told him, “Never could do that,” and McCarey used the line in the film. Ultimately there’s a bizarre scene in which Jerry and Lucy end up stranded in a cabin in the country and, though they’re supposed to be sleeping in separate bedrooms, the lock on the door between them doesn’t work. There’s an odd scene in which two human figures emerge from a cuckoo clock (I suspect McCarey had a giant cuckoo clock built so he could use genuine humans as the figures, the way he’d done with the Laurel and Hardy film Brats, in which using giant-sized sets Laurel and Hardy had played their own children) at 15-minute intervals, the final gag being that Mr. and Mrs. Warriner reconcile and reconfirm their marriage just five minutes before their divorce was supposed to become final. The story also called for a dog to act – Jerry and Lucy were supposed to have got together in the first place when they were visiting a pet store and both were interested in the dog, and it threatens to derail the amicability of their breakup when the two get into an argument in court over who gets custody (and the dog was played by Asta, the terrier from the Thin Man movies, whom Grant would encounter again as “George” in Bringing Up Baby) – and a running gag in which Lucy breaks the car radio so it won’t turn off, a recycling from a famous gag in McCarey’s Duck Soup.

McCarey and Cohn fought throughout the film’s 37-day shoot, with Cohn coming to the set one day and saying, “I hired you to make a great comedy so I could show up Frank Capra. The only one who’s going to laugh at this picture is Capra!” At several points Cohn was determined to fire McCarey, only he couldn’t because nobody but McCarey could make sense of what had been shot so far. When Cohn learned from one of his spies on the set that McCarey was throwing a cocktail party for his actors on the set, he ran down and started chewing McCarey out for wasting the company’s time and money. McCarey said, “Hold on to your bowels, Harry. We’re finished.” “Well, in that case,” Cohn said, “pour me a drink.” Ironically, The Awful Truth actually finished ahead of schedule and $200,000 under budget, and it turned a profit of $500,000 (a good chunk of Columbia’s total $1.3 million profit for the year). But Leo McCarey so hated the experience that he never worked for Harry Cohn again. McCarey also won the Academy Award for directing The Awful Truth, but rather oddly he kvetched and said that if any film he’d made deserved that award, it was Make Way for Tomorrow!