Bette Davis: The Queen of Hollywood's Golden Age

Between 1931, when she appeared in her first film, The Bad Sister, and 1989, when she received her final screen credit for Wicked Stepmother (which she walked out on midway through shooting), Bette Davis appeared in nearly 100 movies. She received 10 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress (winning twice) and was named one of the Top Ten Box Office Stars four times—in 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1944. Of all the major female stars of the Hollywood studio period, she was one of the most idiosyncratic and unique. And her total concentration on the job of acting, apparent in every scene she ever filmed, was equaled only by the most intense of her contemporaries—actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck.

Although not a classic beauty, nor an object of the camera's adoration like Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, she could with the right makeup, hairstyling, wardrobe, and lighting look quite attractive. But it was her distinctive mannerisms—her bold, unblinking stare, her hyperactive hand gestures, the way she could aggressively spit out a line, even her manic way of puffing on a cigarette—that made her instantly identifiable and in time became fodder for countless comic impressionists and drag queens. Even playwright Edward Albee paid her homage in his Tony Award-winning play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In that play the lead female character Martha mimics Davis in her unforgettable first appearance, when she walks into her living room and memorably quotes Davis's line in Beyond the Forest: "What a dump!"

Bette Davis was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1908. She traveled to Hollywood in 1930 after being invited by a talent scout for Universal Studios to make a screen test. After a second, apparently more successful screen test, she was hired by Universal Studios. But after only a few months and several inauspicious roles, she was dropped by Universal. Luckily chosen by George Arliss, who had just won an Oscar for Disraeli, to costar with him in The Man Who Played God, she finally received good reviews and was given a five-year contract at Warner Bros. where she remained for the next 18 years.

Davis's relation with the studio, and particularly with its head, Jack Warner, was a stormy one. After being cast in a series of forgettable pictures, Davis finally was offered a role she could sink her teeth into—the sluttish and unsympathetic Mildred in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage—after Katharine Hepburn turned it down. Davis seized the exaggerated qualities of the character with relish and delivered an unforgettable portrayal of a manipulative and neurotically self-centered woman, receiving the most enthusiastic reviews of her career. Powerful the performance was; subtle it was not. Expected to receive the Oscar in a walk, she was not even one of the three actresses nominated. (At that time, nominees were chosen by a committee, not by voters in the appropriate branch of the Academy, as they are now.) A write-in campaign by her supporters was unsuccessful: Davis came in third, after winner Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night) and Norma Shearer (The Barretts of Wimpole Street).

Still, Davis expected her success in Of Human Bondage to lead to better roles. It did not. Like most studio heads, Jack Warner considered actors employees, and like most tyrannical employers, he took particular pains to remind them of their subservience. He consistently refused to lend her to other studios for roles that would clearly further her career, including It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind. He worked her hard; in 1935 alone she starred in five films for Warners (one of which, Dangerous, did win her an Oscar for Best Actress, which even Davis herself recognized was a consolation prize for having been overlooked the previous year). He forced her to appear in roles she detested and refused to cast her in roles she coveted. In 1936 the headstrong Davis attempted to break her contract by going to Britain to appear in two movies. Sued in the British courts by Warner Bros., Davis lost the case and had no choice but to return to the studio.
Yet in the next few years Davis did manage to turn in impressive performances in some impressive movies for Warners and won a second Oscar (for Jezebel, the award this time well deserved) in the process. And in those roles she managed to show her remarkable acting range. In 1936 she played a naive but culturally ambitious young waitress in The Petrified Forest; in 1937 a courageous prostitute who testifies against a racketeer and pays dearly for it in Marked Woman; in 1938 a rebellious Southern belle who defies the conventions of polite society and loses her fiancé for it in Jezebel. In 1939 she played the hedonistic but fatally ill socialite Judith Traherne in Dark Victory, as well as the rather frumpish and sexually possessive middle-aged Queen Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. From the Cockney waitress Mildred to the aging Queen of England in just five years—that is a remarkable progression.

What all these roles do have in common, though, is a spirit of independence and determination, the sense that the character is taking life quite seriously and approaching it, at least in the end, without frivolity. These qualities mirror the approach of Davis herself to her profession, which she seems to have genuinely considered both a calling and an art. This was certainly the impression she gave in her 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show on television. She came across there as a consummate professional almost religiously devoted to her work.

A telling indication of Davis's dedication to her craft is her choice of what were really secondary roles in order to appear in, and to aid in the production of, what she considered quality films. One example is The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), a movie dominated by Monty Wooley's flamboyant impersonation of the lead character Sheridan Whiteside. Another is Watch on the Rhine (1943), in which the main character is actually Davis's husband in the film, an anti-Nazi Resistance fighter played by Paul Lukas in an Oscar-winning performance. In both instances the nature of her part made it inevitable that she would be overshadowed by her male costar.

One element of Davis's career that is often overlooked is that she did some of her most interesting work when playing a character who is opposite in temperament to a female costar. Davis was memorable when playing subdued against the other actress's bitchy (Miriam Hopkins in The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance or Mary Astor in The Great Lie), or histrionic against the other's restrained (Olivia de Havilland in In This Our Life or much later Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?).

That Davis was able to successfully portray such a range of personalities is important to keep in mind because it defies the stereotyped image of her that most moviegoers retain. We tend to remember those distinctive mannerisms and forget how truly versatile an actress she was. Yet no matter what the role, Davis always projected decisiveness, strength (usually tempered with a measure of vulnerability), and persistence. Sometimes that strength is turned to good ends, as in The Great Lie (1941) and The Corn Is Green (1945), in which she plays noble and selfless characters. In other films it is used malevolently, as in The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), in which she plays calculating and icy villains.

Bette Davis also set the model that informed the trajectories of other Hollywood studio actresses as they matured. In the 1940's she specialized in the "woman's picture" genre, exemplified by Now, Voyager (1942). In this film, a sort of post-Freudian Cinderella/Ugly Duckling story, she plays a dowdy woman dominated by a hateful and repressive mother who is brought out of her shell and given self-confidence, independence, and maturity by psychoanalysis and a brief shipboard affair with a married man (Paul Henreid, pictured above with Davis). (A beauty make-over and new wardrobe also help.) This general career path of specializing in the middle-aged woman's picture was later followed by actresses like Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, Lana Turner, and Susan Hayward. And in 1962 when she pulled out all the stops to play the freakish title character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (playing the role with almost desperate ferocity, much as she had nearly thirty years earlier in Of Human Bondage), she established a trend of older actresses playing monstrous characters, a trend that apparently continues to this day, judging from recent roles by Diane Keaton and Jane Fonda.

The definitive Bette Davis performance is universally recognized as Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950). So closely identified with this role is she that it is unimaginable that it was conceived with someone else in mind. Yet that is indeed the case, for Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote the part for Claudette Colbert. When Colbert injured her back while filming Three Came Home on location in Southeast Asia, Mankiewicz began looking for someone else to play Margo. The British actress Gertrude Lawrence, who had played Anna in the Broadway production of The King and I (and was herself portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1968 movie biography Star!) first accepted the role and then backed out. Darryl F. Zanuck, who produced the movie for Fox, reportedly wanted Barbara Stanwyck for the part. (He also proposed that Jeanne Crain play Eve Harrington.)

Somehow Davis's name was mentioned and she was eventually cast. In his autobiography, Mankiewicz writes that, given Davis's reputation for being difficult on the set and for disagreeing with her directors, he had misgivings, but that in fact she behaved herself perfectly during filming. This good behavior was almost certainly the result of Davis's respect for the writing. She has said that All About Eve, which Mankiewicz wrote, was the best screenplay she ever read. Margo Channing is a fascinating character as written, and Davis's magnificent performance does this complex, larger-than-life woman full justice. She seizes the challenge presented by the brilliantly conceived character and, her creative abilities fully engaged, forges a wholly convincing and unforgettable experience for the viewer.

Margo Channing is a person of opposite qualities, of conflicting needs and desires. On the surface an acerbic and outspoken person, she occasionally allows an underlying vulnerability to emerge. She is clearly competitive with other women but relies on the companionship and loyalty of her best (and unthreatening) friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm). A dedicated careerist, she nonetheless finds herself tiring of her profession and wanting a relationship with her director, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill, who later did marry Davis). She would like to keep working but realizes that at her age appropriate leading roles are unlikely to come her way, and she already feels uncomfortable with her latest role, a Southern belle much like Davis's Julie in Jezebel and clearly much younger than Margo herself. Her need for status and professional recognition drives her to want to hold on to her position as Broadway's leading actress, yet she knows that eventually she will be replaced by a younger actress whose ambition matches her own, although she doesn't expect it to be so soon, and she doesn't expect that person to be the outwardly adoring but secretly scheming Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter).

It is impossible not to recognize in Margo Channing elements of the screen persona associated with Davis, whether she intentionally sought to create that effect or not. Moreover, the character of Margo Channing and the real person Bette Davis share similarities that cannot be missed. When All About Eve was made, the direction of Davis's career was uncertain. She had just left Warner Bros. after eighteen years, having received probably the worst reviews of her long career for Beyond the Forest. ("Davis pants and rants her way out of Warner Brothers in an unfortunate finale to her brilliant career there. . . . No night club caricaturist has ever turned in such a cruel imitation of the Davis mannerisms as Bette turns on herself in this one," wrote the movie critic for the Los Angeles Examiner.) Davis was just a little over forty when All About Eve was made. While it is one thing for a younger actress to play middle-aged women—and Davis had been doing this off and on for a good ten years—it is quite another actually to be a middle-aged Hollywood actress in search of good starring roles. The conventional progression of other aging actresses to playing mothers, often in supporting roles, was not in the prevailing screen image, or apparently in the professional plans, of Davis.

Davis's personal life had also been problematic. By the time she made All About Eve, Davis had been married three times. Her second husband died and the other two marriages ended in divorce. She seems to have been attracted to hard-drinking, ultra-masculine men, hardly the type likely to defer to a famous, and famously assertive, female. While filming All About Eve Davis began a romance with her co-star, Gary Merrill, and they were married in 1950. They later appeared together in two other movies and two television episodes. But the marriage, Davis's fourth, was at times a difficult one, and the two finally divorced ten years later. Like Margo Channing, Bette Davis seems to have led a life in which personal and romantic relationships, no matter how they began, inevitably became secondary to her career.

All About Eve didn't really revive Davis's career as one might have expected. She did continue to make movies regularly, but few of these were constructed around her character, and she never again was given the opportunity to play a character of the originality and complexity, not to mention the glamor, of Margo Channing. Her best post-Eve role was as a has-been movie actress in The Star (1952)—another part that seemed awfully close to her real life—for which she received her ninth Oscar nomination. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she did not eschew television work, appearing in more than thirty television episodes between 1956 and 1986, everything from episodes of Wagon Train and Perry Mason to made-for-television movies like Madame Sin (1972). She continued to work in film and television, to appear on talk shows, and to make personal appearances even after being diagnosed with cancer and suffering several strokes in 1983. She died in France in 1989 while returning from the San Sebastian Film Festival, where she had received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1982 Bette Davis succinctly summed up her approach to her profession and to living: "Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life."


My personal list of favorite performances by Bette Davis:

1. All About Eve (1950)
2. The Little Foxes (1941)
3. Dark Victory (1939)—Davis's own favorite role
4. The Letter (1940)
5. Jezebel (1938)
6. Now, Voyager (1942)
7. Marked Woman (1937)
8. The Star (1952)
9. The Corn Is Green (1945)
10. The Petrified Forest (1936)

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Edward Albee has said that when he sold the screen rights to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Warner Bros. he was told that the studio planned to star Davis and James Mason as Martha and George. According to the website notstarring.com, Davis turned down roles in the following films: Mildred Pierce, The Glass Menagerie, The African Queen, and Come Back, Little Sheba. She called the last decision "one of the really great mistakes of my career."

Chaplin Talks!

When in the late 1920's the entire movie industry raced to embrace and adapt to the addition of sound to the movies, one notable film artist, Charles Chaplin, resisted. Chaplin's 1931 masterpiece, City Lights, was made without dialogue, although Chaplin did compose an orginal music score for the film. Chaplin's next film, Modern Times, was not released for another five years, and still Chaplin resisted the pressure to add dialogue to the story.

By 1940, Chaplin was ready to tackle the task of incorporating dialogue in his next project, the political satire The Great Dictator, and to audiences and critics of the time his efforts proved successful. Chaplin received the Best Actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle (which he declined). The movie was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture of the year, and Chaplin received nominations for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. A great fan of the silent movies of Chaplin, I recently had the opportunity to see The Great Dictator for the first time. My expectations were hopeful. The movie is loved by many knowledgeable critics and filmmakers and rated highly by users of the Internet Movie Database. But I found the experience ultimately to be a disappointing one.

I found parts of the movie appealing in the ways Chaplin's silent movies are, alternately touching and funny. The opening sequence, in which Chaplin plays a Jewish barber fighting in what is understood to be the German Army (although here the country is called Ptomania) in 1918, could have been lifted from one of his early silent short films. Here is a version of the Little Tramp, the meek and compliant anonymous man pushed around by overbearing, bullying officers. He is the comically inept enlisted man ordered by his superiors to perform the dangerous tasks that they avoid, the one whom they clearly consider insignificant and dispensable. So unimportant is dialogue in this sequence that I kept expecting to see title cards.

When the war ends just as he completes a dangerous mission, Chaplin receives a head wound that leaves him with amnesia and spends the next twenty years or so in a military hospital. Released in the late 1930's, he finds the world to be a changed place. His country is now ruled by a megalomaniacal dictator named Adenoid Hynkel (also played by Chaplin), who is clearly intended to be Adolph Hitler. And his people, confined to the Ghetto, have become the powerless victims of gangs of uniformed thugs who berate and terrorize them mercilessly.

Chaplin was taking a risk in using current world events as fodder for satire. We know now that the situation he made fun of was far worse than he ever imagined at the time and that Chaplin has said that he regretted making light of what were later revealed to be some of the most vicious and heinous acts of atrocity in human history. But even on its own terms, for me the movie often falls short. The addition of dialogue to situations that were often not that different from those found in Chaplin's great silent films make the pitfalls inherent in Chaplin's sensibilities all the more apparent. In The Great Dictator the dangerously sentimental attitude of Chaplin toward his characters too often crosses the line into the maudlin. His depiction of the heroine Hannah, played by Paulette Goddard, is a good example of this. I could see that Chaplin envisioned her as a successor to the heroines of his silents, but the addition of speech makes obvious the shallow and vague nature of her character. She seems more a type than an individual, a conceptual deficiency that works to the film's detriment.

Chaplin's depiction of the dictator, who (apparently unnoticed by other characters) strongly resembles the little barber, is a very mixed one. Chaplin has all the physical attributes of Hitler down pat. His mimicry of Hitler's facial expressions, posture, gestures, and way of speaking are brilliant But the pidgin German he uses to mock Hitler's speeches quickly grows tiresome, an initially good joke stretched far, far too thin. Again the addition of speech diminishes a character rather than enhancing it. By contrast, Hynkel's silent ballet with the globe is a great pantomime bit. Here Chaplin is in his familiar element, satirizing Hynkel's egomania so brilliantly with movement that no words are necessary.

Even the deficiencies of the screenplay seem amplified by dialogue. It is often easy to overlook the gaps and lurches is the narrative logic of some of Chaplin's silents. Sometimes his silents really are collections of nearly independent sequences that can be shuffled around because their function is self-contained and not really causative. In The Great Dictator these deficiencies in the narrative structure are glaringly obvious.

The buildup to the big finale, when the little barber stands in for the dictator to make a globally broadcast policy speech, turned into a big letdown when I actually heard the speech. It is too long and embarrassingly unsubtle. There is no denying the sincerity of the sentiments Chaplin expresses, but as Martin Scorsese (an admirer of the movie) observes, "It does sound like preaching." In narrative terms it is incomprehensible how events would proceed from this point, so Chaplin seems merely to have arbitrarily ended the film, bringing the film to a dead stop without any sense of resolution. And it is the use of words to make Chaplin's idealistic beliefs explicit that exposes the weakness in the narrative strategy of using this speech to conclude the movie.

My overall assessment of the movie is that it is brilliant in parts but uneven as a whole. I get the feeling that Chaplin believed that the addition of speech required him to outdo himself, and that his way to respond to this self-imposed imperative was to make a Big Statement. In doing so, he forgot what it was that made his best silent films great: the small but universal details. In The Great Dictator he miscalculated by going for the too specific and too grand, and the elements that were always his strengths simply got overwhelmed. Chaplin seems to have thought that he could merely graft words onto what he was already doing without rethinking his approach to comedy or screenwriting. The resulting movie seems faltering and anachronistic.

When I watched Chaplin's second sound film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a few nights later, I was apprehensive. But what a contrast that movie is to The Great Dictator. In seven years Chaplin seems to have totally mastered the art of writing comedy for sound films, and I found the movie, which took Chaplin four years to write, to be a complete delight.

This was not the way audiences and critics felt at the time of its initial release. Monsieur Verdoux (the name translates from French as something like "mild-mannered worm") was savaged by critics of the time. In the movie Chaplin plays a victim of the Depression who, unable to find work, becomes a bigamist who maintains marriages with several wealthy women and, when he needs cash for his stock purchases, murders them for their money and property. He does this not so much for himself as to support his disabled wife and young son. The movie's subject, a serial wife-killer, and its approach, to make this seem funny, were perceived as a mismatch when it was released. It is perhaps understandable that in the aftermath of World War II critics and audiences were uncomfortable with the depiction of murder as funny.

When it was rediscovered in the 1960s the film was proclaimed a lost masterpiece. By then critics and audiences had become familiar with the concept of black comedy, even in popular entertainment like motion pictures. In fact, it did not take long for other filmmakers to follow the example set by Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux. Only one year later Preston Sturges made a very black comedy called Unfaithfully Yours, based on an idea he had first conceived fifteen years earlier but never followed through on, in which orchestra conductor Rex Harrison fantasizes about taking revenge on his unfaithful wife in three different ways, each method inspired by a piece of music he is conducting in a concert. And in 1949 the British comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which a distant relation to nobility methodically murders the eight relatives who stand between him and the title, became a cult favorite and launched the heyday of the Ealing comedies. Monsieur Verdoux paved the way for these and subsequent black comedies.

From beginning to end Monsieur Verdoux is a film of great assurance: Chaplin knows exactly the effect he wants to create and is in full control. Never before had Chaplin used irony to such an extent or to such comic effect. He carefully calibrates the exact proportions of opposing elements and blends them flawlessly. In the opening scene the foppish Monsieur Verdoux fastidiously cuts roses in the garden of his villa on the French Riviera, almost prissily sampling their fragrance, while in the background the incinerator, apparently containing his murdered wife's body, spews black smoke into the air and the next-door neighbors complain of the stench. Elements that might have seemed bizarrely incongruous in other hands are mixed by Chaplin to create a humorously ironic counterpoint. Verdoux is immediately established as a man of great sensitivity—and equally great ruthlessness. Like so much else in the film, Verdoux is a fusion of opposites. The simple Little Tramp has been transformed into something complex and paradoxical—a genteel monster.

In Mosieur Verdoux Chaplin masterfully uses dialogue to give his characters individuality and to create scenes that define them. Directly after the opening sequence, Verdoux impetuously selects at first sight his next mark, the wealthy widow who has come to view the villa, which he has just put on the market. His unsuccessful attempts to seduce Mme. Grosnay (gros nez is French for "fat nose") are entirely verbal, the effusive flattery of a would-be Lothario. His unctuousness is so hilariously over-the-top that it immediately arouses the suspicion of Mme. Grosnay, who skillfully parries his every attempt at the rhetoric of seduction. Chaplin allows himself one pratfall at the end of this scene, when in his enthusiasm he falls backward from the second-story window of the bedroom to which he has guided his intended prey. In his zeal has he fallen to his death? No, for there is a roof outside the window and after a moment Chaplin hauls himself back through the window, regains control of himself, and abandons his plan—at least for the time being.

Another telling detail that shows how far Chaplin has progressed since The Great Dictator is his use of Martha Raye as the most hilariously awful of the many wives of Monsieur Verdoux. In The Great Dictator Jack Oakie was able to steal every scene he was in with Chaplin (as Hynkel) because Chaplin had written the part, a spoof of Mussolini, as a rival to Hynkel who is supposed to upstage him. In Monsieur Verdoux he does something similar with Raye, an apparently hare-brained lottery winner, but instead of making the two characters rivals, he makes Raye's Annabella in every way opposite and complementary to Verdoux. He is worldly, she is provincial. He is controlled, she is impulsive. He is subdued and refined, she is raucous and vulgar. The appalled expression on his face each time she addresses him with the pet name "Pigeon" is priceless.

He carefully lays plans—at first to fleece her, then out of desperation to murder her—and watches helplessly as time after time she thwarts them with her spontaneity born of her belief in her infallible good luck. Her unpredictability and complete self-absorption deflect his designs every time. She may appear stupid, but she is actually the shrewdest of all his victims, and Verdoux's underestimation of her is his greatest miscalculation in the movie. And aside from the one very funny sequence on the lake when he tries unsuccessfully to drown her (she ends up saving him from drowning), the humor is almost entirely derived from their verbal encounters. Even Raye's voice is funny.

Chaplin uses the irony that pervades the movie as the means of bringing it to its conclusion. Most of the movie occurs during the early 1930's. Near the end, the movie jumps ahead several years, presumably to 1947. Verdoux's wife and son are now dead (victims of the war?) and he has lost all his money in a stock crash. Years before he had encountered a homeless young woman on the street late at night and taken her home with him. His aim was to test a new poison on an anonymous stranger, someone new to Paris whom nobody would miss. When he finds that she has been driven to despair by a husband wounded in WW I (gassed?) who later died, he suddenly relents and instead of poisoning her, gives her money and sends her on her way.

Years later they meet again by accident on the street. Now the rich wife of a munitions manufacturer, she insists on treating the penniless and emotionally broken Verdoux to a lavish meal. But Verdoux's earlier act of kindness to her rebounds with irony when she becomes the unwitting agent of his destruction, for while dining, Verdoux is spotted by the obnoxious and vengeful relatives of one of his early victims. He is arrested, tried and convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. On his way to the guillotine, Verdoux makes a brief statement to a reporter: "Wars, conflicts, it's all business. One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow."

What a contrast this speech is to the one that ends The Great Dictator. There is nothing didactic or prolix about this statement, and it is delivered to a reporter, not spoken directly to the camera as in the earlier movie. But what really distinguishes this statement from its predecessor is its tone. This is not an impassioned Big Statement, but a detached observation. Verdoux's final statement is one of calm acceptance of the duplicity inherent in codes of morality and the hypocrisy inherent in judging the actions of others. And Chaplin's perception of war as business, which at the time must have seemed sacrilegious, seems today more prescient then ever.

I did not get the impression, as some viewers might, that Chaplin was attempting to justify the actions of Verdoux. Verdoux seems fully aware of the nature of his crimes, but equally aware that in other circumstances they would be acceptable. The Little Tramp has become, if not exactly a cynic, at the least a moral relativist who recognizes that right and wrong are no longer absolutes, but rather are defined by circumstance. It's a very modern attitude and a world away from the simple and hopeful optimism of Chaplin's earlier work. "I know what I am," Verdoux seems to be saying to the viewer. "What makes you think you are any better?" Chaplin is no longer offering solutions, only asking questions, for there are no longer any easy answers.

The Awful Truth: The Definitive Screwball Comedy

A few weeks ago I wrote about the classic American screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"). In that post I described the typical dilemma of the genre: a character must choose between two possible romantic interests who represent on the one hand safety and conformity and on the other hand risk and idiosyncrasy. In 1937, only three years after the original screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, was released, a movie came along that for me represents the apogee of the genre, The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey.

At the beginning of the movie the two main characters, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne), the type of urban sophisticates who routinely populated the screwball comedies of the 1930's, are already married. Jerry, just returned from a trip to Florida, finds that in his absence Lucy has been enjoying herself with their friends and immediately notices that she seems to be receiving a great deal of attention—and returning it—from a suave Continental bachelor who has "gigolo" written all over him. His jealousy aroused, Jerry refuses to believe Lucy's protests that that her actions have been entirely innocuous. As the squabble between the two escalates, Lucy, dismayed and frustrated with her husband's lack of trust in her, files for divorce and the two separate.

In typical screwball fashion, each soon becomes attached to someone else. Lucy becomes engaged to a new neighbor, a rich oilman (and mother-dominated hick) from Oklahoma. This character, played by Ralph Bellamy, is in every way the opposite of Jerry—slow-witted, unsophisticated, and unimaginative. Jerry is at first desperate to win Lucy back before the divorce decree becomes final and does everything he can think of to sabotage her engagement, including becoming attached to an embarrassingly tawdry nightclub performer named Dixie Belle Lee in an effort to make Lucy jealous. When all his efforts fail, he gives up and becomes engaged to a dull and conventional heiress. It is just at this point that Lucy finally realizes that she still loves Jerry and that her oilman is all wrong for her. She breaks off her engagement and lays plans to get Jerry back. Her scheme succeeds with hilarious results and the two are reunited just before their divorce decree becomes final.

What makes The Awful Truth the definitive screwball comedy is not just its archetypal plot, which the brief synopsis above hardly does justice to. What really makes it special is its perfect confluence of star power, inspired direction, and tremendously entertaining situations. It is in this movie that the Cary Grant persona as moviegoers came to experience it over the next three decades emerged fully formed. Cary Grant had been working in movies for five years before making The Awful Truth, which was his thirtieth film credit. Yet seeing him in movies like Sylvia Scarlett (1936) or the two Mae West classics She Done Him Wrong or I'm No Angel (both 1933), one might find it hard to believe that this is the same actor. In The Awful Truth he is relaxed, urbane, slyly witty, subtly funny, slightly disreputable, everything that one associates with the screen personality "Cary Grant." The screen persona of the comic Cary Grant was born in this movie and continued with little alteration until he retired in the mid-1960's.

Like Grant, Irene Dunne was an experienced movie performer when she made The Awful Truth, but unlike Grant she was already a major star and two-time Academy Award nominee. She had appeared in just about every kind of Hollywood movie, from Westerns to musicals and especially ultrasentimental tearjerkers. She had a lovely soprano singing voice and an affinity for the songs of Jerome Kern, playing Magnolia in the 1936 version of Show Boat. Yet she had her first major comedy role, in Theodora Goes Wild, just the year before. In The Awful Truth she shows a real affinity for both sophisticated and physical comedy, and it's hard to imagine an actress who would have been so perfect as Lucy. At key moments she gives what I think of as the Irene Dunne reaction, a slightly vacant expression of wry surprise and disbelief that in its way is as distinctive as Grant's familiar recoiling, wide-eyed double-take. Her ability to balance, and sometimes to project simultaneously, conflicting emotions made her one of the most versatile and talented actresses of the studio era. Her seriousness in this movie is tempered with lightheartedness, and her whimsicality with restraint. Like Grant, her frustration is comic, and her comic behavior is a response to emotional turmoil. The interaction of these two actors makes it clear to the viewer that the characters they play are ideally suited to each other and that their notions of incompatibility are complete nonsense.

Those familiar with the later work of director Leo McCarey, swamped in heavy-handed sentimentality and a curiously outdated sensibility, might find it difficult to believe that he was responsible for The Awful Truth. In fact, McCarey had previously worked with many notable Hollywood comics, including Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Harold Lloyd. He was responsible for two of the funniest movies ever made, the Marx Brothers' zany Duck Soup (1933) and the delightful Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The Awful Truth is masterfully directed, with a sure command of controlled comic invention and a light touch throughout. It is packed with clever sight gags and moments of restrained physical comedy that stop just short of farce. And as in the best movie comedies, these humorous bits always seem to grow from the plot and never to be arbitrarily imposed on it. For The Awful Truth McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director, an award that was well deserved.

Three sequences in the movie are especially memorable. Early on, Jerry and Lucy go to court to see who will get custody of their dog, Mr. Smith, played by the same fox terrier that played Asta in the Thin Man series. The judge decides that he will let the dog make the choice, and both Jerry and Lucy begin frantically calling him to come to them. But Lucy has a trick up her sleeve (or in this case up the muff she has carried into court): Mr. Smith's new toy, a ball shaped like a bulldog's head, which, without letting either Jerry or the judge see, she uses to get the dog to run to her. Mr. Smith is really Jerry's dog, so why is she so determined to get custody of him? Is she just being competitive, or is she unconsciously seeking a way to keep Jerry connected to her (he is awarded visiting rights)? Either way it's a very funny sequence, directed and performed with precision timing.

Later in the movie, Lucy hits upon a clever ruse to break up Jerry's engagement. She turns up at the swanky party Jerry's snobbish fiancée and future in-laws are giving on the very night that the divorce decree is to become final. Pretending to be Jerry's fictitious sister, Lola, she appears as a garishly dressed, bubble-headed lush, a professional singer clearly based on Dixie Belle. She pretends to get drunk and insists on performing the tasteless and risqué musical number she saw Dixie Belle do in the nightclub, correctly predicting that the humiliated Jerry will rush her out of the party and drive her home. To see the refined Lucy as performed by the refined Dunne cut loose like this, a departure into controlled slapstick so out of character for Lucy, is the high point of the movie. And to know that Lucy's gauche behavior is all a pretense just makes the whole episode all the more funny.

But Lucy's plot is not yet over. She contrives to have Jerry drive her to her aunt's country cabin instead of to her own apartment and further contrives for the car to break down so that they will be forced to spend their last night together as husband and wife in the remote cabin. What ensues is another bout of hilariously restrained slapstick that involves adjoining bedrooms, a connecting door that refuses to stay shut, and a mechanical clock with male and female figures (actually Grant and Dunne in Alpine costumes on a huge mock-up of the clock) emerging from and returning to separate doors as the clock ticks away to midnight, when the divorce decree becomes final.

Will Jerry give in to temptation and sleep in Lucy's room, which will invalidate the divorce decree? Will she let him? Of course, but not until they have negotiated a truce. The suspicion and jealousy that wrecked their relationship will be banished; their renewed marriage will be based on the principle of mutual trust. Theirs will be a modern marriage in the style of Nick and Nora Charles, one of partnership combined with independence. Just as the mechanical clock strikes midnight the two figures emerge from their separate compartments, but this time they both return to hers, an ingenious sight gag concocted by McCarey not only to skirt Production Code issues but to indicate visually the reconciliation of Jerry and Lucy.