Here are the movies to which he devotes chapters: "The Lady Eve"; "It Happened One Night"; "Bringing Up Baby"; "The Philadelphia Story"; "His Girl Friday"; "Adam's Rib"; and "The Awful Truth." This last (Leo McCarey, 1937) he considers especially fundamental. ("On certain screenings, I have felt The Awful Truth (1937) to be the best, or the deepest, of the comedies of remarriage" [231].) As to me, I can barely watch it. Not because of Irene Dunne's brittle, mannered, frankly irritating performance as Lucy: I have accepted enough Hepburn (K.) movies that I have no right to complain on that basis. Not because the emphasis, throughout the movie, is on Lucy's purported dalliance with her music teacher when "their car broke down" on the way home from a trip and they spent the night together at an inn, although Cary Grant's Jerry seems at least as likely to have strayed, given that we know and Lucy knows that his two-week "trip to Florida" at the beginning of the movie was nothing of the kind, and we aren't told what it was. I have forgiven that sort of guiding double standard for men and women in more movies than I can count. It mars them, but need not ruin them. (Though perhaps I would love "Trouble in Paradise" a little less if Lubitsch hadn't revisited the theme of a beloved choosing between two lovers the following year, in "Design for Living," with a woman, one of the lovers in "Trouble in Paradise" in fact, as the chooser.)
Not because the movie argues explicitly and implicitly throughout that the basis of marriage is trust, and that the protagonists had lacked that at the beginning but have built it by the end, although the events of the film hardly give either or the viewer any reason for trust -- though that's getting close. (More specifically, the mantra is that a marriage is based on faith, but I'm not interested in McCarey's aggressive Catholicism here.) What the film offers instead is a sequence of pratfalls and humiliations, dealt out to Lucy and Jerry and to any poor innocent who happens into either of their paths. What brings Lucy and Jerry back together by the end of the film is a combination of two things, both represented by Mr. Smith, the dog because of whom they met and whose custody they share after the divorce: the nostalgia raised by their time apart, and the recognition that after all they can put up with each other (and the increasing recognition that no one else can). In other words, they deserve each other. Not they've earned each other, as McCarey and Cavell propose, but they deserve each other.
Each relishes nothing more than embarrassing the other: this is the main substance of their bond. McCarey conceives of romance as a hazing ritual. But let me show rather than tell -- though the showing be in the manner of my telling.
Jerry's attempt to show Lucy that he's got a shoulder as warm to lean on as she's found in Ralph Bellamy ends when the showgirl he's picked up performs at the night club they are all at. Lucy and Jerry look away from the distasteful spectacle of a gust of air blowing up her skirt at regular intervals (when she reaches the line "my dreams are gone with the wind"), though Ralph Bellamy's Daniel Leeson assures them that it "would go over big out West!" Of course, the showgirl's stage name (Dixie Belle Lee or some such) and Southern accent (which she tells Jerry she's exaggerated for the sake of business) are meant to have alerted us from the first instant that she is unworthy of our main couple. Leeson's Oklahoma roots, his appreciation of Dixie Lee's dance, his enthusiastic, gussied-up, jitterbuggy waltz with Lucy later at the same club, and the awful list of rhymes he calls a "poem" to her are sufficient proof of his unsuitability, though we know that he is, actually, kind and decent and devoted -- and, since it matters so much to the characters, terribly wealthy as well. For a supposedly moralized account of love, this is not very rational or charitable.
After a while Jerry (with the unwitting help of the despised music teacher) engineers a spectacle that sends Leeson back to Oklahoma. Lucy has already told her aunt that she's realized she couldn't have married him anyway, as she's "still in love with that crazy lunatic." So it is Jerry's turn to find another option, and Lucy's turn to intervene jealously.
Since Jerry's new paramour is a Manhattan debutante, she can't be disqualified immediately on class and regional grounds. Therefore, and also perhaps because he has no judgmental aunt, Jerry will not realize his error on his own. Therefore Lucy must help him. She chooses familiar mechanisms. First, pretending to be Jerry's sister (in from Paris), she pops in on his fiancée and family, acts like her idea of a vulgar showgirl, drinks ostentatiously, implies that their father had been a groundskeeper at Princeton, and performs the same "gone with the wind" number ("there were wind effects, but you'll have to imagine them for yourselves") as Dixie Rose Lee (who, incidentally, had seemed "like a nice girl" to her earlier). When Jerry tries to take her home, she gets them pulled over by the police and then pushes the car off the road, so that they have to stay at her aunt's cabin (not, as with the music teacher, an inn: because Jerry is part of her family, you see). And that's it. There they reconcile and decide to be remarried. They become officially divorced, after the ninety-day waiting period, only that night at midnight, after the remarriage has been assured.
****
And this is a romance? The protagonists are awful people -- I complain not of this, but because they are awful people with no redeeming features. (Was Grant ever otherwise so charmless in his black-and-white days? One can't blame Dunne but only the person who cast her in the first place.) The film ends with conversation about whether things are different or just the same as before -- Jerry's declaration that "you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different, except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool" -- and their joint resolution to make it "the same again ... only a little different." Admirable enough, if we had only been given a smidgen of reason to believe that either of them had changed a bit or learned a thing beyond the depth of each other's schadenfreude. But now McCarey wants to have it both ways: all those pranks, all that embarrassment, and now they're ready to be a little different -- only, really just the same again.
Here "The Awful Truth"'s close cousin "His Girl Friday" (Howard Hawks, 1939) is more honest, and consequently more brutal and more persuasive. Hildy (Rosalind Russell) comes back to Walter (again Cary Grant) and the newspaper he edits and she reports for not because either of them has changed but because she has realized that she is a more awful person than she had imagined -- that is, closer in character to Walter than to her fiancé (Ralph Bellamy as another simple, decent, rich hick). That self-knowledge is Hildy's gain, not Walter's, and it is her choice to come back to him: she is the one with alternatives (Bellamy and a quiet life outside of New York), the one who is able to imagine herself living a different life, the one for whom learning about herself is painful and for whom staying is a sacrifice. Walter can't imagine any other way. He expresses no regret and only superficial apology for the repeated humiliations he's imposed on Hildy, for his disrespect of her stated choices and decisions, for his neglect, for the way he uses her for the sake of the paper (and thus for his own sake), even for having her taken prisoner by his mob connections and leaving her alone with an armed convict on death row. Hildy has already divorced him for his neglect and exploitation and the instability of their life together, and repudiated him again because of his delight in humiliating her and deceiving the guileless, hapless, and feckless Bellamy. Over the course of the movie she learns that she is not much bothered by humiliation and doesn't much need stability, so long as she has excitement and power; and that she will have to find other ways of getting Walter's attention. She learns that she would rather be married to Walter and have to do all the work of the relationship, than not.
"His Girl Friday" is a difficult movie because Hawks asks us to accept that nevertheless marriage to Walter and to the paper is the best choice that Hildy can make for herself. What should we say of a movie that asks us to imagine that the best and truest marriage -- "based on faith" -- is a marriage between two Walters?
