I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #123 - The Awful Truth (1937, dir. Leo McCarey)

                In 1937 Leo McCarey won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Awful Truth. Upon receiving the award he said “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” He was referring to the other film he released that year, Make Way For Tomorrow, and while Make Way is indeed a great film it’s also a downer that cost him his job at Paramount and allowed him to move to Columbia Studios to create the comic masterpiece that is The Awful Truth. And despite concerns from Columbia studio heads the film went on to become a huge hit for the studio and, as noted, netted McCarey a much-deserved Oscar – even if he deserved it for both films, rather than just this one.

            The film concerns the exploits of Lucy and Jerry Warriner (Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, whose on-screen chemistry is spectacular), a married couple who, like most couples, have their problems. But their problems revolve mostly around Jerry’s suspicions that his wife is cheating on him – which she’s not, as it happens – with her handsome European voice coach. Despite Lucy’s dismissal of his idea as ridiculous Jerry’s concerns escalate to the point where they decide to divorce, with a waiting period before things are finalized. They separate, Lucy gets custody of Mr. Smith the dog (though Jerry gets visiting rights), and each one goes on to date others. Naturally, this being a comedy – and a romantic one at that – it only takes a stroll through a few bad relationships and a few attempts at sabotaging their other romances for them to realize they’re right for each other and still in love.

I didn’t bother with a spoiler alert because this is the template for a thousand if not a million romantic comedies. And the film works better than most largely because of Leo McCarey’s improvisational approach to filmmaking. McCarey was known for arriving on set with no script whatsoever, just a general idea of what they were going to film for the day, and then working (and to read most accounts “working” might even be too strong a word, perhaps “playing” is more appropriate) with his actors to create the scene, having them improvise ideas while the cameras rolled and then as often as not putting those moments in the final cut so that the freshest ideas stayed in the film. McCarey is a subtle director of actors, not a visual stylist, even if he always places the camera in just the right spot. In his films glances and faces mean everything; dialogue too, though that of course isn’t as much planned out as spontaneous. It’s an approach he learned from working with comic actors from Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (who he is credited with first pairing onscreen), W.C. Fields, and The Marx Brothers. And his own personal comic flair can’t be understated – there is some scripted material of course (screenwriter Viña Delmar also got an Oscar nomination for this), but he’s funny enough himself that McCarey claimed after this film that Cary Grant had stolen his own persona to create the character he’d come to be known for (also the model of a persona Ian Fleming partially used as a basis for his James Bond character).

comedies, most of them far lesser than

             Given the improvisational factor and the smarts of everyone involved from McCarey to Grant and Irene Dunne, it’s hard to know how much of the fantastic dialogue was scripted, made up on the spot, or partly written and then modified. But I know that when the couple has an exchange that goes:

Jerry Warriner: But things are the way you made them.

Lucy Warriner: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.

that’s simply a great comic sequence, regardless of how it found its way to the screen. But experiencing dialogue like that and having it work, hearing the bon mots that they throw down but never throw away, seeing the chemistry than Dunne and Grant create on screen – that’s the fun of the film. And knowing that between the actors, Delmar’s screenplay, and McCarey’s penchant for doing things on the fly to keep things off-balance and exciting, it’s impossible to get to the root of where each laugh came from. It’s the collective art of filmmaking at its finest from the golden period of Hollywood comedies, and you can hardly do better in finding a great film. But be sure to see McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow and see for yourself just how well his approach works to drama and you won’t be sorry. He certainly wouldn’t think so.

       - Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #46 – People Will Talk (1951, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Cary Grant was the coolest, most suave dude to ever walk across the silver screen. It’s like he wasn’t even human, he was so perfect in posture, manner and good looks and good taste. Watching him act is like watching Michael Jordan on a basketball court or Jimi Hendrix with an electric guitar; he was one of those one-in-a-billion-billion people who was such a genius at what he did that he transcended even our notions of what is best, seemingly without effort. You really can’t go wrong with a Carey Grant film, and quite a few of them are essential viewing for any self-respecting cinephile – North By Northwest, An Affair to Remember, The Philadelphia Story, to name a few. I’m not sure if I’d add the 1951 comedy People Will Talk to this short list, because it’s not important in the way that those films are. But I’d still recommend highly, especially for people who like old movies for the way they offer a glimpse into the values and beliefs of bygone times, and for those who appreciate plotlines that are unwittingly, but undeniably, weird.

            Grant plays a young doctor named Noah Praetorius whose methods of medicine and style of teaching are unconventional but highly effective. He’s adored by his students and hailed as a hero in the larger community. But his success has made him the target of a jealous colleague, Dr. Rodney Elwell (Hume Cronyn), who is everything Dr. Praetorius is not – short, balding, undistinguished. Elwell hires a detective to dig up dirt on Praetorius in hopes of ruining him. Meantime, a student named Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain) faints in Dr. Praetorius’s class, and he examines her and determines that she’s pregnant. She’s not married, though, and the father of the child has died. This was, of course, a huge problem in 1951, and sparks a delightful chain of events between doctor and patient, professor and student, toward the inevitable romantic conclusion. The two stories converge in what is one of the most peculiar climaxes I’ve ever seen in a movie, a story within a story that’s so odd it makes the film worth more than the cost of admission for its oddness alone.

            As time capsules go, People Will Talk is better than most because it shows a period of transition. The tension that drives the romance plotline is borne of the social mores and taboos of the time: the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock. Yet Higgins and Dr. Praetorius are clearly the protagonists, despite Higgins’s supposed sin and the good Doctor’s aiding and abetting. So you can only conclude that the audience at the time – society as a whole – possessed a degree of acceptance for the whole situation. Otherwise the film’s producers wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, especially not in a romantic comedy, a genre that has natural limits on how far it can push viewers out of the confines of societal norms. So it’s weird because it’s OK that Higgins had sex and got pregnant, but, at the same time, it’s not OK, and the plot rides on the pressing need to suppress the facts at hand. Watching it in the 21^st Century, when the choices for women are, thankfully, far greater in number, you find yourself perplexed to the point of fascination as to why it’s an issue at all. But that makes the whole time-travel all the more interesting.

            As for the story within the story, I’ll say no more. I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it at all, because part of the thrill is the way it comes so unexpectedly and feels so outrageously out of place. But here, too, we get a snapshot of a period of time. People Will Talk is based on a play by German playwright named Curt Goetz, who was a relative of George Bernard Shaw, with whom he was often compared. Both were stalwarts of modern theater, and one of the hallmarks of modernism in drama and literature was the move away from strict chronological flow in story telling. So this film is a stark example of this, made all the more stark by virtue of its being a movie, which we tend to expect to unfold sequentially. So it gives you a satisfying aesthetic jolt that you ordinarily get from the escapist delights of a funny Hollywood romance, and this lifts the movie higher up the list of Cary Grant’s must-sees.

            - Joe Miller