A Film Canon

 

 

The Awful Truth brings a new card to the screwball table - Cary Grant's "Continental mind", defined against a series of hyperbolic American accents that range from the deep South to Oklahoma. This mind manifests itself as an understated murmur more redolent of W.C. Fields than earlier screwball protagonists, whose hyperactivity is deflected into a pair of extraordinarily restless eyes. Combined with a disorienting editing style, this gives the impression that Grant is never looking at the person he is speaking to, and vice versa; or, alternatively, that all his conversations are mere pretexts to exchange information, or even tone, with his soon-to-be ex-wife (Irene Dunne). For this reason, the most remarkable scenes occurs when Grant and Dunne are alone. Finding their usual middle men absent, they are forced to treat each other as both second and third party - or, rather, to simultaneously talk to and at each other - producing a conversational hide-and-seek for which the occasional physical gags are the mere literal corollaries, most notably an extended scene in which Dunne's attempt to hide her lover's hat from Grant is undermined by her dog, and her attempt to hide both Grant and her lover from her fiancee is undermined by the same hat. McCarey's point seems to be that conversation always involves a minimum of three participants, the third constituting the real or imagined audience, as evinced in Grant's observation that a private, wifely comment "wasn't a bad performance, considering there were no rehearsals or anything". Yet not everyone sees things as Grant does, such that performativity remains an open secret, analogous to the semi-improvised nature of the script, bolstering the comedy with a palpable awkwardness.