Richard Schickel describes the acting in The Awful Truth
… no one overplays their underplaying and … the pace is all of a piece. In the little world that the director, Leo McCarey, created for thisfilm — and he won an Academy Award for his work — everyone is at all times just slightly unbuttoned, so that the stage is always set for the logicallyimprobable. Which means that there is no need ever to descend to the impossible in desperate search for a laugh.
It is hard to think of a film that has a steadier, more reliable comic pulse, or of one that more sweetly insinuates itself into memory.
And now onto Grant’s acting in the film:
The secret of [Grant’s] success here and later was well-defined by George Cukor: “You see, he didn’t depend on his looks. He wasn’t a narcissist; he acted as though he were just an ordinary young man. And that made it all the more appealing, that a handsome young man was funny; that he was unexpected and good because we think, ‘Well, if he’s a Beau Brummel, he can’t be either funny or intelligent,’ but he proved otherwise.”
The art was all based on his developing confidence in himself. He could throw it all away– the humor and the intelligence as well as the looks. He had the art just to be, and no compulsion to prove anything to anybody. He could steal scenes if he wanted to, but he did not … He was not afraid to pull back into a funny distractedness, a way of talking to other people as if he were talking to himself, and that quality was unique — impossible to find in anyone else in the movies.
[Ed: Isn’t that a perfect description of the Grant energy? That “distractedness”, and his way of always seeming that he was carrying on a running dialogue with himself about the absurdity of the situations he finds himself in. In a comedic context, that quality is what makes him so damn funny. The little sounds he makes – “Tsk tsk tsk”, “Oh dear”, “Hm”, “Er …” It’s a riot. Yet in a dramatic context – say in, like, Hitchcock’s Suspicion – that very distractedness can seem ominous, and make him seem distinctly untrustworthy. Oh boy. I am struggling with embarrassment at how insane I am right now. But I will continue on. Life is beautiful.]
It was not disociative, a ploy akin to the slight holding back from full commitment to farce that often actors and actresses – especially the handsome ones – sometimes employed toindicate to their fans that they were not really as undignified or stupid as the role seemed to indicate they were. It was certainly not like the good sport air that sometimes developed around a normally more heroic or romantic performer when the indignities started to heap up.
No, Grant had a way of being bemused by the lunacies with which he was involved that did not set him apart from them butin the end allowed him to plead innocent on the grounds of temporary insanity. “Look at me,” he seemed to say, “I’m too intelligent to be doing this. Oh well. Here goes.” We can identify with that. It’s what we are compelled to say to ourselves all the time when events get out of hand.
Distractedness. That was something he did better than anyone. In fact, it became a kind of comic signature for him. But it was only something that curled about the edges of his performance in The Awful Truth. It took Howard Hawks to bring it all the way out in him. The occasion, of course, was Bringing Up Baby. Who was a leopard. Who belonged to Katherine Hepburn. Who was a spoiled rich girl. Who decided that it would be fun to play around with a paleontologist as absentminded as Grant’s David Huxley. Whose plans to marry a terrible stiff of a girl, and to obtain funding for his museum, and to finish reconstructing the brontosaurus of his dreams, are always getting derailed by Hepburn. [I am laughing just remembering this damn movie.] There is a terrier in this picture, too, and it is he who steals and buries the intercostal clavicle that gets everybody chasing around in the middle of the night in Connecticut looking for the fool thing, and the leopard, of course, which has escaped.
Well, it’s preposterous. And, in a way, it is Hepburn’s picture. As Ferguson said at the time, she is “breathless, sensitive, headstrong, triumphant in illogic and serene in the bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very, very well bred.” The mess she makes must not seem to be a result of scheming or malevolence, but the natural outcome of her blithe imperviousness to the normal niceties.
Hawks liked to reverse things, to do the simple opposite of what the audience expected of actors, of a comic situation. Hepburn, for example, had previously done a certain amount of noble suffering and a certain amount of romantic dithering, too. He thought the business of making her not merely headstrong, but entirely thoughtless would be funny. “I think it’s fun to have a woman dominant …” Hawks would drawl in that off-hand way of his. Same way with Grant. “Such a receiver,” the director was heard to murmur years later.
Why not take that air of not being all present and accounted for that he had shown here and there in his work and develop it into the core of a comic character.
[Remember: Howard Hawks was the director who discovered Lauren Bacall and put her in “To Have and Have Not” with Bogart. He wanted to put Bogart with a female co-star who gave as good as she got, who was equally as insolent as Bogart was. So far – in the movies Bogart had done – he hadn’t really met his match. Hawks wanted to see what would happen to give the Bogart character his equal to spar with. Bogart was never effective with floozy women. Or, let’s say, not AS effective. His sex appeal came out with Bacall, with Bergman – women who could give it right back to him, who talked back, who weren’t submissive or easy. Strong, smart, etc. That was Hawks’ fantasy woman.]
