Leo McCarey (director) THE AWFUL TRUTH [1937] Film script

[Los Angeles, 1937]. Vintage original screenplay, 11 x 8 1/2″ (28 x 22 cm), onionskin typescript, 152 pp., with 12 pp. of “retakes” bound in at end dated 9/15/37. Very good+.

Remembered as one of the funniest and most beloved screwball comedies of the 1930s, The Awful Truth (1937) was also among the most honored. Producer/director Leo McCarey won the Academy Award for Best Director. The movie also received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress (Irene Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Bellamy) and Best Adapted Screenplay (credited to Viña Delmar, but largely the work of director McCarey and the improvisations of his stars). For leading actor Cary Grant, it was a landmark film, the one that most fully established his star persona.

The basic story, quite simple, concerns an affluent married couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), who divorce, battle over the custody of their dog (Mr. Smith), comically sabotage each other’s attempts to form relationships with others, and ultimately reconcile.

The completed film conforms to the Final Draft screenplay more or less, except that McCarey actively encouraged his actors to improvise around the scripted dialogue. Also, the 152-page screenplay is noticeably talkier than the tightly-paced completed film.

In one scripted sequence omitted from the film, an elevator boy describes how Grant tried to break into Dunne’s apartment and steal back Mr. Smith, the dog. The police are called, and Grant ends up hiding in the apartment of the “other man” played by Ralph Bellamy.

An example of the kind of thing McCarey added during shooting is the moment where Grant starts playing the piano in Dunne’s apartment, musically accompanied by the barking dog.

This script also has a 12-page addendum of “Retakes”, a sequence replacing some duller material in the middle and setting up the tour-de-force comic scene where Dunne meets Grant’s new girlfriend and her upper crust family while pretending to be Grant’s brassy sister. The sister sequence was almost entirely reconceived during shooting, and quite a lot was trimmed from the script’s third act. The film was released on October 21, 1937, and so those retakes date from just a month before the film’s premiere.

One of the reasons the film’s comedy works as well as it does is because, underneath the pratfalls, the audience senses that the divorcing Grant and Dunne characters are genuinely attracted to each other, genuinely love each other, and their not getting together at the story’s conclusion would be a tragedy.

While the screenplay has more than its share of funny dialogue and farcical situations, comparing the written screenplay to what was ultimately filmed is a testament to the extraordinary comedic and improvisational skills of director Leo McCarey in his prime.