MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW AND THE
AWFUL TRUTH:
LEO MCCAREY AND THE SACRED REGION OF
ROMANTIC LOVE
By Damien Bona
The opening shot of Make Way For Tomorrow shows a sturdy, comfortable-looking house in the snow, smoke emanating from two chimneys--it could be the picture on a sentimental Christmas card. But director Leo McCarey knew how to set up audiences and then undercut their expectations. From this idyllic opening he was about to confront audiences with a plangent deconstruction of the myths Americans like to hold dear about familial relations. What is particularly striking, though, is that, while criticizing the specious, bathetic tenets of what decades later came to be known as "family values," McCarey also indelibly panegyrized the transcendent power of romantic love between a married couple.
Make Way For Tomorrow tells the story of Lucy and Bark (Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore), an elderly married couple who must give up their house because -- with the husband having been out of work for several years -- they can no longer make their mortgage payments. The result is that, for the first time after fifty years of marriage they'll have to be apart for a spell; each will stay with one of their five grown-up children, none of the offspring having the space -- or, more accurately, the inclination -- to take in both parents. As the film continues, it becomes clear that, through a confluence of events, the couple will permanently spend the rest of their lives away from each other, except for a single last day together in New York City, the place where they spent their honeymoon a half-century earlier. This "second honeymoon" portion makes up the emotional apogee of the movie.
Make Way For Tomorrow's reputation is as the saddest, most poignant portrayal of old age ever put on film. It is that, but also much more. Although the picture is at times almost painful to watch, it is also strangely exhilarating because, in the context of a social drama, McCarey ultimately created an unexpected love story.
McCarey was a hard-core Republican and he doesn't lay blame for the couple's travails on the economic woes of the Depression, from which the country had still not yet fully recovered in 1937. Whereas a Frank Capra would inevitably have featured a pompous windbag of a banker (Edward Arnold, of course) as the avatar of capitalism and the cause of the couple's predicament, in McCarey's world it is human nature and the personal choices freely made -- not the cruel indifference of free enterprise -- that is responsible. In fact, in one of the film's many sly touches, reference is made that as a young woman Lucy had been courted by the town's banker, and she could now be enjoying a life of easy affluence. But she was in love with Bark -- a bookkeeper -- because he made her laugh. Bark even refers to this man who is foreclosing on their mortgage as "a nice guy." And although Bark and Lucy knew of the threat to their home for six months, they didn't tell their children until a few days before eviction proceedings -- they didn't want the brood to be bothered, which speaks both to the couple's irresponsibility and to their knowing exactly what kind of children they raised. In the opening minutes of the movie, before they are faced with any genuine responsibilities towards their parents, the children go through the motions of looking like dutiful offspring; before hearing the news of their parents' new homelessness, the youngest son, the happy-go-lucky Robert (Ray Mayer) even sings that most artificial and treacly of songs, "Mother." ("’M’ is for the many things she gave me . . . ."). In a film that is permeated with ironic motifs, one of the most witheringly paradoxical is that while this first scene consists of a family reunion -- albeit a rather unsettling get-together, as the offspring are noticeably stiff with one another -- it also marks the first step of the dissolution of the family unit.
Lucy moves into the New York apartment of her upwardly mobile son George (Thomas Mitchell), who is the most decent of the five offspring, and his wife, Anita (Fay Bainter). As the narrative begins to unfold, one is not completely certain of the tone of the film -- and McCarey was a master of seamlessly combining dramatic and comedic elements in his work. In fact, the early scenes in which Lucy and Anita are interacting, the soundtrack consists of jaunty music that would befit a light comedy soundtrack.
Anita truly tries to be a kind and dutiful daughter-in-law, but McCarey in no way idealizes Lucy in her dealings with Anita, George, and their rambunctious teen-age daughter, Rhoda (Barbara Reed). Lucy is not the archetypal sweet old granny in a shawl, knitting in a rocker with a cat on her lap, but is rather a classic passive-aggressive, and a viewer is not being honest if he doesn’t acknowledge that this woman would be an enormous pain to have around. One can palpably feel the strain George and Anita are under with her in their home. Lucy does sit in a rocker, but the creaking noise thechair makes interrupts the bridge lessons Anita conducts to bring in money for the household.
Bark is no prize either. Although one doesn't envy him having to live with his dour daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon), he gives as good as he gets and goes out of his way to be disagreeable and peevish. When a good-natured young doctor (Louis Jean Heydt) comes to treat him for a cold, Bark is not simply uncooperative, he bites the physician. It's a master stroke on the part of McCarey and scenarist Viña Delmar that the two old people aren't particularly likable. Such a strategy eschews easy sentimentality but also makes the intense love they feel for each other seem all the more profound in its mysterious workings.
The only times Bark is at ease is when he visits his friend, Max Rubens (Maurice Moscovitch), who runs a general store. Max lives in an apartment connected to the store, and being in his environment is the closest Bark can come to replicating his previous homelife. When McCarey's camera focuses on Max, a tea-kettle is seen steaming away nearby -- a symbol of the domestic tranquility and comfort he enjoys. Having broken his glasses, Bark asks his friend to read him a letter from Lucy. Max complies, but stops in the middle, when Lucy, despairing of their situation, begins to express the depths of her love; Max knows that some spheres of coupledom are so intimate that their boundaries should not be intruded upon by a third person. (In a parallel scene, the members of Anita's bridge class react with discomfort when they are privy to a phone conversation between Lucy and Bark.) Max says of his own children, "They leave me alone. They don't need me and I don't need them," a startling statement from a likable and sympathetic character in a 1937 Hollywood movie. Max adds that he's content because "I got my Sarah" -- his wife. There’s a quietly rending moment when Bark is preparing to leave Max's and he wraps his scarf around himself -- we know that HIS wife, who was always concerned about his catching cold, should lovingly be doing this. Later, the tenderhearted Max takes Sarah's homemade soup to Bark, trying as best he can to fill the uxorial gap in the old man's life.
In one of the loveliest scenes in the movie, Max calls to his wife after Bark has departed. Slightly exasperated at being interrupted from her chores, she asks what he wants. "I just wanted to look at you," he explains. "I wanted to make sure you were there." In this scene--which lasts all of 25 seconds--McCarey crystallizes his belief in the thaumaturgical nature of a marriage founded upon an impassioned love. Max and Sarah Rubens are old, homely people, and yet their ardor has remained unshaken over the years; in its simple and quiet non-erotic way, this exchange constitutes one of the great love scenes in the movies.
With Cora fed up with her father's presence, a confab among the children decides that Bark will be shipped off to another sibling out in California. In a time when coast-to-coast travel was a luxury, this decision seals their parents' fate -- their separation will be permanently. Meanwhile, Lucy has inadvertently been responsible for some serious problems in granddaughter Rhoda's behavior, and Anita argues accusatively with her. McCarey conveys the hopelessness of the situation, and says all that needs to be stated through a series of devastating reaction shots, in which faces of the old woman and her daughter-in-law reveal their despair in realizing that while no one is truly at blame, things cannot remain as they are.
Anita convinces George that his mother has become such a disruptive force that she should no longer stay with them. When, truly shaken, he tries to tell Lucy that they must put her in the Idylwild Home For Aged Women, she pre-empts him -- in a quiet act of heroism -- saying that she wants to go to the Home, and sparing him the necessity of speaking the worst he dreads having to say. Having earlier referred to that institution as "dreary and dismal," she has concluded that if she is not going to be with Bark she might as well just be out of the way. McCarey had Thomas Mitchell play this scene hunched over, as if George were actually crushed by the weight of circumstances, and when Lucy tells him a secret, that he was always her favorite, he breaks down completely.
Bark and Lucy's day together in New York is punctuated by the benevolence of strangers who come across the couple's path, including the nicest car salesman who ever lived. Mistaking them for an eccentric rich couple, he gives the pair a ride in a new coupe hoping to make a sale. When he discovers the truth, he's not put off in the slightest. Contrasting such a kind soul to the Coopers' children, McCarey acknowledges one of life's contradictions: for some people it’s easier to be magnanimous to individuals they don't know -- Humanity in general -- than to their supposed loved ones. During the Coopers' sojourn in Manhattan the tension is almost unbearable as our emotions are split between the warmth engendered by these kindnesses and the agonizing realization that Bark and Lucy only have five hours together, with the clock ticking. Theirs is not a typical "second honeymoon" because, rather than being a rite of renewal, this time together is marking, officially, the end of their physical relationship, of their sharing space. It is a reunion for Bark and Lucy, but just as the family reunion at the beginning of the film was a perversion of what such an event usually signifies, so too is their rendezvous because it will complete the severance that started in the first reel. As if to emblematize that fact, the day starts off with the self-recriminating Coopers verbalizing their shortcomings. Bark says, "The trouble is I was a failure." And Lucy, thinking of their children ruminates, "You don't sow wheat and reap ashes."
While the first hour of the film has been focused on the uprooting of a marriage, the last half-hour allows the audience to bear witness to the strength of that union. A sense of fatalism obviously hangs over their day together, but what is most remarkable is how, by being with each other again, the couple's personalities are transformed. As opposed to her waspish ways when she was living with George and Anita, Lucy is now lovely and graceful and generous of spirit. The change arises for the simple reason that being with Bark is her natural state. And similarly, Bark is the fun-loving man with a rascally sense of humor that he must have been when he was young. As for McCarey himself, even in handling this bittersweet occasion, he is not above injecting some gallows humor: The couple pass a bank with a sign, "Save money while you are young." Bark and Lucy are able to laugh at the inappropriateness of the admonition.
On this last day, Bark and Lucy are together in every frame except for two occasions; this pair of brief sequences have great weight because they each feature a representation of the forces that have pulled them apart. The first is when Bark goes into a men's clothing store while Lucy waits outside. He is, thus, stepping into the world of commerce -- finance and business, of course, constituted an arena in which he couldn't keep up, setting the foundation for Lucy's and his situation. Significantly, Bark ends up not buying anything in the store. The second instance of separation is when Bark goes into a phone booth and, in one final act of defiance, tells daughter Nellie in no uncertain terms that they are not going to bother attending the dinner she and the other children had planed.
Bark and Lucy instead go to the hotel where they stayed 50 years earlier. Their fate continues to hover around them -- across the street from the hotel is another bank. McCarey illustrates the emotional dislocation caused by being in a world so different from when they were just starting out by having Lucy take the arm of a stranger after entering through the hotel's revolving door. The hotel scenes contain the only overhead shots in the movie, the elevated camera causing Bark and Lucy to be momentarily diminished and lost amidst the changes wrought by the years. But each time, the generosity and caring of those in the hotel sets them at ease and returns the camera to eye-level again. The hotel has been completely remodeled since their honeymoon, but a patient coat-check girl restores their memories by showing them a photo of how the lobby used to look, and the hotel manager treats them as honored guests. When Bark and Lucy are about to begin dancing to a waltz, the orchestra switches to a newfangled dance number. Seeing that they are at a loss, the band leader has the musicians play "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." But just as it was inevitable that Cinderella would hear the clock strike midnight, the spell is broken for Bark and Lucy when the bandleader announces, "It's 9 o'clock. Is everybody happy?"
The hotel dining room sequence also contains two moments that again proffer McCarey's attitude that the essence of a marriage is inviolate. At one point, Bark and Lucy lean in towards each other to kiss. But just then, Lucy looks at the camera and "sees" the audience. Blushing, she pulls away -- it is another example of the film's bellief that conjugal love is a privileged region. Bark mentions Lucy's favorite poem, a piece about a couple beginning a life together and not knowing where their marriage will lead. Lucy owned a book containing the poem, and had marked the page with a rosebud. Bark wonders if the book is still in her possession, or perhaps the bank gotten that, too. Her response is "They took the book, but they couldn't take the poem from me," and she recites it perfectly from memory -- in McCarey's universe the emotional rudiments of love outlast all accompanying material trappings.
Before boarding the train Bark -- attempting to defy fate -- vows that he'll get a job and then send for his wife. Lucy tells him, "It's been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole 50 years. I'd sooner be your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth." As the train, pulls out, Lucy waves, looks down, and then she turns around and, determinedly, walks off, prepared to start the rest of her life.
Jean Renoir famously said that Leo McCarey understood people better than anyone else in Hollywood, and it is undeniable that his characters are always recognizably human, with the kinds of shadings to their personalities that result in a shock of recognition for audiences. Throughout his career, McCarey imparted his sagaciousness through a combination of leisurely long takes -- which enable the viewer to study the chharacters at length and catch nuances about them -- and his skill in drawing out subtleties from his actors, with their small gestures speaking volumes. It is not hyperbolic to say that the expressions on the faces of his actors in Make Way For Tomorrow -- particularly Victor Moore and the astonishing Beulah Bondi -- cover every conceivable mood and emotion of human experience.
At the end of Frank Borzage's films, lovers often had to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, the survivor keeping the relationship alive as a precious treasure for as long as he is on the earth. There are no such comforting mystical leaps of faith available for Lucy and Bark to indulge in. They must endure the more mundane knowledge that they are divided not by different worlds that can be linked through romantic metaphysical notions, but by simple physical space. We have seen, however, that neither their original separation, their failings as parents, nor a half-century's worth of societal changes as embodied by the remodeled hotel, could affect the depth and strength of their devotion. Leo McCarey's confidence in the indomitability of romance is so persuasive that even as we cry at the Coopers' plight, we know that somehow the couple's love will transcend their sunderance and will endure in their hearts.
* * *
Make Way For Tomorrow was a commercial failure--so much so that Paramount bought out McCarey's contract (even though, reportedly, he took no salary for the movie). The director moved over to Columbia, to make a movie he intended to be far removed from Make Way For Tomorrow. A screwball comedy about a soon-to-be-divorced couple, The Awful Truth would be his second release of 1937. If the immutability of connubial love is the narrative subtext that becomes the ultimate thesis of Make Way For Tomorrow, it's the pervasive theme of The Awful Truth and the movie proves the point in the funniest ways imaginable.
The Awful Truth deals with a couple going through divorce proceedings even though they have a nagging suspicion--which blossoms into full recognition--that they're still crazy about each other. "Crazy" is the operative word here, because each spouse behaves absurdly and is willing to appear absolutely ludicrous to prevent the other from making the mistake of ending up with someone else.
Although it's a hilarious comedy with slapstick elements, The Awful Truth is a very adult movie, one that possesses a mature and clear-eyed attitude towards the vicissitudes of domesticity brought about by all-too-human behavior. One indication of this outlook is that in most comedies when one spouse accuses the other of unfaithfulness it's entirely a matter of misunderstandings and ensuing complications, all of which are cleared up in the final reel. Here, however, Jerry (Cary Grant) unequivocally has been having an adulterous affair, and the film opens with his engaging in a ruse -- spending time under a sun lamp--intended to fool his wife into believing that he was away in Florida on business, when he had really remained in New York having a dalliance. Whether Irene Dunne's character, Lucy (same name as Beulah Bondi in Make Way For Tomorrow) was actually enjoying a fling with her very continental voice teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D'Arcy) is more ambiguous, but she never is proven innocent of the charge.
Lucy goes on the rebound first, pairing up with Oklahoma oil tycoon, Daniel Leeson. As unabashedly portrayed by Ralph Bellamy, Dan is one of the all-time great saps of the cinema (the actor was so persuasive in the part that the character of the hapless Other Man in screen comedies became known generically as "the Ralph Bellamy role.") He's a Mama's boy and a hick, but is also undeniably good-hearted, and Lucy spells out the difference between her suitor and her soon-to-be ex-husband as "sane and considerate" vs. "insane and inconsiderate." Confiding in her Aunt Patsy (the incomparably wry Cecil Cunningham) but actually trying to convince herself, Lucy says of Jerry, "I don't love him and what's more I probably never did. I'm sure I never loved him. Now I hate him." As she is proclaiming thus, a toaster to her right is burning -- the toaster is positioned similarly to the tea pot in Max Rubens's home in Make Way For Tomorrow; as opposed to the sense of comfort brought by the kettle, the smoking, malfunctioning machine serves as a visual correlative to the disruption of the natural flow of domesticity brought about by the divorce proceedings.
The thing is, Dan may be a prize boob, but even he isn't so stupid that he can't recognize what Lucy and Jerry's pride prevents them from acknowledging. Seeing how the two of them interact after Jerry barges into Lucy's apartment, the oilman asks her, "Are you sure you don't like that fella?" When the three of them meet up at a supper club, Jerry has his own date, Dixie Bell (Joyce Compton), the singer at the club. Dixie Bell performs a musical number which involves her dress being blown up by a blast of air when she sings the lines "Gone with the wind." Lucy is frankly embarrassed, not for Dixie Bell, but for the mortified Jerry, who tries to explain "I just met her." As for Dan, he can't believe he's actually seeing such a sight, but that's New York for you. When Dan brings Lucy to the dance floor, he's like the world first jitterbugger, unselfconsciously engaging in a hebephrenic set of moves, and literally making a spectacle of himself and Lucy -- the other couples stop dancing to watchh. It's Dan in a nutshell, naive, unsophisticated and wildly out of his league. So, in a nice bit of symmetry, Dixie Bell and Dan have each performed publicly in a manner that's incompatible with the sensibilities of Jerry and Lucy.
In one of the film's pivotal scenes, Lucy doesn't want Dan to know that Jerry is at her place (even though he had come in uninvited). She keeps her suitor at the threshold of the apartment, while he reads her the corny love poetry he's written. Hidden behind the door, Jerry begins tickling her arm, getting her to chortle so that it seems as if she's critiquing Dan's earnest doggerel. This is McCarey's economy of expression at its most astute, the tickling his subtle way of evidencing the natural physical intimacy shared between Lucy and Jerry, a holdover from their marriage and something that Dan has not earned. At the end of the scene, Dan does receive a chaste first kiss from Lucy, and his exaggerated delight (declaring himself to be the happiest man in the world) at something so inconsequential is anything but natural.
Jerry has made Lucy laugh, and jollity is seminal to the relationships in The Awful Truth. (Just before the tickling incident, Lucy cracked up when a piano lid crashed on Jerry's hand.) More laughter arises in the following scene. At Lucy's vocal recital, Jerry's chair falls back and he lands on his ass, causing her to chuckle as she finishes her song. Just as Dan was on hand in the previous bit of risibility, this incident occurs at the salon of Armand Duvalle, the man with whom Jerry accused her of having an affair. Each time Jerry and Lucy's rapport and emotional connection is rekindled through laughter, it is in defiance of the presence of someone who threatens to make their fissure permanent.
The first scene after the recital finds Lucy reminiscing wistfully to Aunt Patsy about life with Jerry: "We've had some grand laughs together." This acknowledgment -- and realization -- breaks down Lucy's self-imposed barrier and immediately thereafter -- 50 minutes into the movie -- she admits, "I'm still in love with the goofy lunatic and there's nothing I can do about it." McCarey and screenwriter Viña Delmar -- the same woman who scripted Make Way For Tomorrow -- knew that shared laughter is one of the intangible connections that define a couple, and that private jokes become totemic in defining a relationship. A tension had been building up within the movie, resulting from the fact that we in the audience know that Jerry and Lucy should be together again and we've been anxious to see how the film resolves that imperative. It is laughter that effectuates the release. Recall that the reason that Make Way For Tomorrow's Lucy married Bark rather than a wealthier, more promising suitor was that Bark made her laugh. For McCarey, a man who had directed the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor and Burns and Allen, and who is credited for bringing together Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, mirth and a zest for life plainly are among the most essential attributers a person can possess. When Armand, who is actually quite gallant, comments to Lucy that Jerry is "a very funny man," she responds, "I'm convinced he must care about me, or he wouldn't do the funny things he does." (McCarey told Peter Bogdanovich that The Awful Truth was based on his own experiences with his wife, although he pointedly emphasized that the adultery angle was not autobiographical.) At one point Jerry and Lucy "celebrate" their impending divorce decree with a bottle of champagne -- the beverage that traditionally makes yyou giggle not only because of its alcoholic content but because of the bubbles that tickle your nose while drinking it. The divorce is a foolish mistake. The champagne is flat.
There's still Dan to be disposed of, though, and he's taken care of by his overbearing and clinging mother (Esther Dale) and her calculated insinuations of Lucy's "lack of character." Like the parent/child relationships in Make Way For Tomorrow, the bond between mother and son here is a distortion (although comical in its extremity) of the expected healthy and mutually-respectful interaction between two familial generations. The mother's proddings are aided and abetted by the tandem of Jerry and Armand when they emerge frantically from Lucy's bedroom in the midst of a contretemps, Jerry still being very much capable of jealousy at finding another man in his soon-to-be ex-wife's boudoir. Dan has seen enough. His last lines in the picture are to Lucy: "I guess a man's best friend IS his mother. I certainly learned about women from you."
The best friend comment is telling because it was a dog -- the proverbial "Man's Best Friend" -- who had brought Jerry and Lucy together in the first place. They had both wanted to buy the same terrier at a pet shop, and the disagreement led to their having lunch together and so on . . . . The dog, Mr. Smith, was also instrumental in getting Dan out of the way, because his shenanigans with a hat (this is a screwball comedy after all) lead to the row between Jerry and Armand which then leads to Dan's departure. McCarey's films rarely feature traditional family units of loving parents and children. (Probably the most fully realized rendering of a nurturing cross-generational -- i.e. familial -- relationship in any of his films is, interestingly, that between the community of nuns and their grade school students in The Bells of St. Mary's). In Make Way For Tomorrow, the children are ultimately extraneous to the love that exists between Bark and Lucy Cooper. In The Awful Truth, kids play no role in Jerry and Lucy's relationship because they are childless; a comedic inversion of the norm occurs because they nevertheless do have a custody battle . . . over the dog.
Lucy has been liberated from the foolish anger she harbored at her soul mate and she's ready to reunite with Jerry. But Jerry's hubris still stands in the way, and the next portion of the film mirrors earlier sequences, only now it's Jerry who's involved with a potential new spouse. His fiancé, Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont) is referred to in the press as the "Madcap Heiress -- millions of dollars and no sense," but in actuality, she comes across as dour and jealous. She's a completely humorless woman, and in McCarey's world that, more than any other trait imaginable, makes her unworthy. Just as Jerry purposefully portrayed himself as the worldly antithesis of the rube Dan, Lucy's scheme involves upping her own effervescence to the nth degree, so that she's the giddy opposite of Barbara. She poses as Jerry's non-existent sister, creating a ditsy young woman who is so free-spirited and uncouth that there is no way Barbara's parents would allow their daughter to become related to such a person. The chief characteristic of this "sister"'s personality is, of course, her laughter, and she even imitates Dixie Bell's dress-raising song-and-dance number with gleeful abandon.
The final sequence of The Awful Truth finds Jerry and Lucy at Aunt Patsy's country house at night, with less than a hour to go before the divorce decree becomes official. This last portion is one of the most erotically-charged to be found in any Hollywood film during the reign of the Production Code. Lucy and Jerry are in adjacent rooms, each lying in bed (Jerry's wearing a comical over-sized nightshirt), and though they've said good night, neither is trying to fall asleep. The door between the two rooms is an obstacle between them -- and thus a metaphor for the divorce as well as a real object that is keeping them apart. But true to the spirit of the movie, the door refuses to stay closed, rattling back and forth impatiently in the wind, and occasionally opening. At one point, Jerry says about the lock, "I told you we'd have trouble with that," and by extension "that" also refers to their decision to end their marriage. When the door finally does seem to be holding fast, though, Jerry tries to get it ajar again by opening his window, hoping that the increased wind might do the trick. When that's not effective, he tries pushing the door open, but it's blocked by a cat -- the antithesis of Mr. Smith the terrier. Lucy does her bit for eliminating the impediment by shooing the kitty away. All of these carryings-on are punctuated by cuts to a Swiss clock which, instead of a cuckoo, features a man and woman who emerge on the quarter hour and then return to their individual compartments. At 11:30, with a half-hour remaining in their marriage, Lucy engages in some doubletalk about what led to their separation and how it's too bad things couldn't be different, a spiel which makes no sense to the audience, but which Jerry, because he occupies that unique role of her husband, understands perfectly. At 11:45 it's his turn to speak in riddles that only a life partner could comprehend. Lucy gives a come-hither look, and then he puts a chair up against the door -- from the inside of her room. This take-charge action -- appropriately -- causes her to burst out laughing, but, to his chagrin, she bids him, "Good night." Not to worry. In the final shot of the film, we see not Jerry and Lucy but, rather, the clock at the stroke of midnight. This time, the male figure doesn't go back into his designated space, but follows the woman into hers. Visual double-entendres don't got much more graphic than this.
Domesticity never seemed as romantic as in The Awful Truth. In this film, having an intimate relationship means living life lightly and with utter joy and reveling in being silly. The movie is very sexy because being in love looks like so much fun. This outlook is partially conveyed through the manner in which Leo McCarey shot the film: he'd come up with a basic situation for a scene and then have his cast extemporize from that premise, so that the spontaneity on screen reflectively presented life as being a lark of an adventure (even though an insecure Cary Grant was not at all happy with McCarey's approach). In fact, the acting, characterizations and situations in The Awful Truth ring so true to life that, in an odd way, the film almost seems like cinema vérité.
McCarey would win the Academy Award as Best Director for The Awful Truth. In his acceptance speech, he said, "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture," still smarting over the financial failure of his beloved Make Way For Tomorrow. In actuality, there was no "right" or "wrong" movie for McCarey in 1937, for Make Way For Tomorrow and The Awful Truth are two different expressions of the same leitmotiv. One employed tears, the other evoked laughter. But both films manifested -- exquisitely -- Leo McCarey's firm belief that there is nothing more sacred than the love shared by two people who have made a commitment to spend their lives together, and that being part of a couple is what makes a person whole.