At 4:30 this afternoon, I turned in my film theory paper, marking the end of a very long era. I will no longer be considered a student (except as a student of life and love) but now I will be something else. What is that something else? I don't know. But to mark this momentous occasion, I am posting the paper. It might go without saying, but there are spoilers in the paper for The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story.


Everybody Wants to Be Cary Grant: The Use of Star Persona in Classical Hollywood Cinema


Based on a 1922 play by Arthur Richman, directed by Leo McCarey, and starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, The Awful Truth exists squarely in the popular pre-war subgenre of screwball comedy. In 1937, the basic fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot) would have been a familiar one to audiences. The Awful Truth had been a popular Broadway play, and adapted to a silent film starring Agnes Ayres and Warner Baxter (1925), as well as a “talkie” in 1929 starring Ina Claire and Henry Daniel. The fabula and syuzhet, as they apply to generic expectations, would have also been familiar. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, released three years earlier in 1934, was extremely popular and is the earliest example of the subgenre. The Awful Truth is most notable because, as the first screwball comedy to star Cary Grant, it is a critical antecedent for later classic comedies, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story.

The Awful Truth is about a married couple who divorce based on mutual suspicion of adultery. Before the divorce is finalized, Lucy (Dunne) becomes engaged to Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy). Dan’s mother, Mrs. Leeson, worries that her son is marrying a woman who divorced under a cloud of suspicion, and so Lucy calls on her ex-husband, Jerry, to clear her name. He does so, by confessing the divorce was entirely his fault, though he still suspects Lucy of cheating on him, and he does not like her fiancé. In “The Road to Reno: The Awful Truth and the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage,” Jane M. Greene provides an even more succinct summary: “All versions center on the divorce and eventual reunion of a once happily married couple” (338). As it happens, screwball comedies in general do not need to rely on this sort of plot, but nearly all of Grant’s screwball comedies can be summarized this way, including His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story. All four versions of The Awful Truth follow what Bordwell identifies as “the canonic story” of classical Hollywood cinema, which is simply “the pattern of establishing an initial state of affairs which gets violated and which must then be set to right” (19).

McCarey’s The Awful Truth deviates from its predecessors just enough to make it a classic screwball comedy and a more equal battle of the sexes. The biggest difference between the four versions is that the audience is encouraged to doubt Lucy’s innocence in the original play and subsequent movies, while McCarey intentionally asks the audience to doubt Lucy’s guilt, mainly by making Jerry explicitly guilty of lying and implicitly guilty of adultery. Another difference is that Lucy does not win her husband back by underhanded machinations and sexual manipulation, but rather by taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity to separate Jerry from his fiancée, Barbara, “establishing her solidarity with Jerry” with her screwy behavior and drunken antics (Greene 354). Dan was too naïve to be married to a woman like Lucy, and Barbara lacks the sense of humor necessary to be married to somebody like Jerry.

McCarey’s changes to the story were necessary for the subgenre. McCarey was not making a dramatic movie with comedic elements, and the first three versions of The Awful Truth treated marriage, fidelity, adultery, and divorce very seriously, with most of the comedy coming from Lucy’s machinations and the ambiguity surrounding her guilt or innocence. McCarey’s version treats the initial lies and suspicions as merely the plot device that creates the disruption that violates the initial state of affairs (the happy marriage between Jerry and Lucy). Jerry’s initial lies are never explained, and the film never asserts Lucy’s guilt or innocence. The questions are purely a function of the genre, one that shifts “the emphasis away from the normal question of comedy, whether a young pair will get married, onto the question whether the pair will get and stay divorced” (Cavell qtd in Shumway 8). The disequilibrium in screwball comedy is figured by divorce, and the equilibrium and disequilibrium relate to the presence or absence of romance and love. A screwball comedy can be viewed as the inverse of a romantic comedy, as at least one character wishes to dissolve the heterosexual union. This is the primary goal that is thwarted by the end of the narrative. The marriage, or remarriage, at the end of the film is a reversal of expectations, even as genre conventions stipulate the divorce must only be temporary. As a result, unlike romantic comedies, screwball comedies do not focus on themes of sexual conquest, but rather, sexual competition. The party (the husband, in Grant movies) who wishes to reconcile the marriage does not actively pursue the object of his or her affection, but schemes to outwit, out-shine, and out-maneuver the third party encroaching on the marriage. In the case of The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, the man to be outwitted is Ralph Bellamy, who is not a worthy foe and is easily shoved to the side. But the problem of out-shining and out-maneuvering a rival takes on a new dimension when Grant is faced with two potential romantic foes in The Philadelphia Story.

In “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” David Bordwell claims the spectator comes to a classical Hollywood film already well equipped to understand the Hollywood fabula. The viewer has the ability to “motivate” the film, in order to create hypothesis and form expectations. There are several ways to motivate a film, including transtextually: “The most important forms of transtextual motivation are recognizing the recurrence of a star’s persona from film to film and recognize generic conventions. Generic motivation…has a particular strong effect on narrational procedures” (29). Transtextual literally means across several texts. The previous screwball comedies inform the reader how to read The Awful Truth and what to expect from it, and The Awful Truth, in turn, informs the reading or understanding of future screwball comedies in general, and Grant’s films in particular.

The Awful Truth establishes or reaffirms the following generic conventions. First, the marriage must dissolve in some way, but must do so in a way that shows both parties are equally at fault. The effect of this is that nobody is at fault, and thus, it is not a requirement for either character to be fully rehabilitated. The dissolution does not have to be shown, but it must happen prior to the events in the film, or at the very beginning. The first shot of The Awful Truth is Jerry at a sports club, getting a tan beneath a heating lamp in order to hide the fact that he was not in Florida. The viewer does not know where he was, or what he was doing, but we are all fully aware that he has premeditated a lie and an alibi. Lucy, on the other hand, spent the night with Armand Duvalle, and has returned home after Jerry’s arrival. Jerry deflects his guilt by accusing Lucy, signaling this by saying “Don’t try to justify your behavior by insinuating things about me.” Lucy protests her innocence, “I haven’t got anything to justify!” but is flustered and nervous. Lucy finally exclaims, “Don’t you see there can’t be any doubt in marriage? The whole thing is built on faith. If you’ve lost that, well, you’ve lost everything.” Her words are ambiguous. He shouldn’t doubt her, or she can’t doubt him? Does she mean that if Jerry has lost faith, he’s lost everything? Or has she personally lost faith? They agree to divorce without either party firmly occupying the moral high ground. It is now possible for the couple to forgive each other, as well as for the audience to continue to identify with both characters. This also establishes that future films do not need to deal with the messy reasons, ugly reasons that lead to actual divorces. It’s simply enough that two characters are pushed to that point.

Second, there must be a triad. The triangle of Jerry, Lucy, and Dan is established very quickly in the film. But the love triangle in screwball comedies is different from love triangles in other types of films. Typically, a love triad has the woman positioned as object, and the men both positioned as equal subjects. The basic act of fighting for a woman serves to reinforce homosocial bonds, and in some cases, the woman is nothing more than a body of displacement for homosexual desire. In “Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage” David Shumway argues, “What distinguishes screwball comedies from dyadic narrative forms is that the woman is never merely an item of exchange between two men, but is also presented as a desiring subject” (12). But at the same time, the two men in the triangle cannot be equal. The new rival can be nice, even charming, and attractive, though not as attractive as the former husband. He can be affable, in love with the woman, and even successful in his professional field. He can even offer the heroine something her husband does not, or cannot. He is simultaneously a worthy adversary and somebody who never truly had a chance. Part of the pleasure of screwball comedies is that the woman appears to have a viable choice, which makes her decision to return to her husband even more meaningful. Dan is a nice guy, but it is obvious from the moment Jerry meets Dan for the first time that Dan cannot emerge victorious. Dan is nice to the point of naiveté, and he plans to take Lucy, a woman who enjoys living in New York, to Oklahoma. When Jerry learns they plan to live in Oklahoma City, he lightly mocks the whole idea with, “Not Oklahoma City itself? Lucy you lucky girl. No more running around the nightspots. No more prowling around in New York shops. I should think of you every time a new show opens up and say to myself, ‘She’s well out of it.’” He follows that up by reassuring her that if “it should get dull, you can always go over to Tulsa for the weekend.” Whatever the difference of values and expectations between New York City and Oklahoma, Lucy clearly belongs in the former. The Awful Truth has a mirroring effect, as Lucy must put on a similar performance to separate Jerry from his fiancée. In both cases, it is absolutely paramount that they prove themselves to be better mates than the competition. It is not a matter of “I was good to you” but rather “I will be better for you.”

Third, excitement and action is privileged, and dullness is despised. Aunt Patsy intones, in a very accusatory way, “Nothing the least unusual ever happens around here.” Dinah Lord echoes that line in The Philadelphia Story, as she melodramatically bemoans, “Nothing ever possibly in the least ever happens here.” Walter tries to warn Hildy that she will be bored in Albany, and repeatedly appeals to the part of her that enjoys action and intrigue. The characters are wealthy; they either have fast-paced careers, or come from family money. Shumway claims, “One reason that screwball comedies almost always involve the rich is that their world is a metaphor for the reward that romance promises of love” (10). I’m sure there is some truth in this, but I think it is more likely that careers and personal wealth are important elements of the syuzhet, especially when the careers involve journalists and writers.

Fourth, the deadline is critical. Bordwell identifies the deadline as a “device highly characteristic of classic narrative” (19). In the case of the screwball comedy, the deadline is immediate. Either the divorce will be finalized or the marriage must be thwarted within a very specific time frame, usually within a day, or a span of less than twenty-four hours. As a result, the films have a strong sense of suspense and unity. The climax of The Awful Truth happens at the end of the film, when both Jerry and Lucy are extremely aware of the passing seconds as midnight approaches. Once they reach that deadline, the marriage will be dissolved. Lucy has done all she could to prove she is a good partner for Jerry, and as the tension, and sexual excitement, increases, it is Jerry who breaks first and comes to her. There must be a moment of emotional vulnerability, when one of the characters is finally left completely alone and comes to the other party—who is already waiting and ready to accept the person back into his or her life. In this case, Jerry says, “Well you should be, because 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... but I'm not now. So long as I'm different don't you think that... well maybe things could be the same again... only a little different, huh?” Which leads to the final requirement of the genre; things must be the same and different. The viewer must be satisfied that when the marriage happens again, it will not eventually lead to another divorce. Marriage must be the culmination and reward of desire, both characters realizing they need the other person, and all past hurts are now forgiven and forgotten.

The second element of transtextual motivation is the stars’ persona. The Awful Truth was pivotal in encoding Cary Grant with the information the spectators needed to appreciate later screwball comedies. In 1937, Grant was working steadily in Hollywood. In 1933, he had two big hits for Paramount, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel with Mae West. But The Awful Truth was the pivotal movie in his career that launched a long string of classic comedies, including Holliday, Bringing up Baby, His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, and The Philadelphia Story. Due to The Awful Truth, Grant was encoded with a certain set of expectations and characteristics. His characters were flawed alpha males, charismatic and charming, and ultimately the only match for the intelligent, strong women who divorced him. The encoding is so strong that Walter Burns in His Girl Friday does not need further characterization. As soon as Rosalind Russell’s Hildy enters Walter’s office and the audience sees Cary Grant, everybody knows exactly what to expect, and the film follows the generic conventions established by The Awful Truth.

Hildy and Walter have divorced, but the film offers no explicit reason for this, and neither character is inherently at fault or unsympathetic. The love triangle is established at the beginning of the film when Hildy shows up in the newsroom with her fiancé, Ralph Bellamy reviving his role from The Awful Truth with the character Bruce. The importance of a fast-paced, exciting world is immediately presented in the form of the newsroom, and Hildy demonstrates her place there by calmly walking through the room, greeting people she knows, and participating in banter. Walter constantly reminds her of the exciting life she is giving up in favor of a dull, familial existence in Albany. The film is operating under two deadlines; Hildy’s train leaving for Albany and Earl Williams’ midnight execution. They are set in opposition to each other, as Hildy continually delays her departure while Williams’ stay of execution is diverted from the courthouse. His death becomes increasingly inevitable while Hildy’s marriage becomes increasingly unlikely. Finally, her revived relationship with Walter is just like their dissolved marriage, but different now, because Walter has demonstrated how much he still loves her—by not letting her leave New York—and Hildy has had a taste of life without him, and she would rather continue to be a journalist at his newspaper. Everything is just the same as it was before, but different.

The similarities between The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday operate on the very level of style. Bordwell claims that the syuzhet affects everything, and is responsible for creating the classic Hollywood style, and that is readily apparent in the dining scenes that are central to both movies.

The mirrored scenes in The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday call to mind Bordwell’s definition of the classic Hollywood style: “On the whole, classical narration treats film technique as a vehicle for the syuzhet’s transmission of fabula information” (26). These film techniques are recognizable to the audience, and they are “a historically constraint set of more or less likely options” (28). These options include framing, lighting, shot composition, and sound mixing. Hawks uses stylistic techniques already established and well-known as a function of the syuzhet.

In The Awful Truth, Grant’s Jerry spots his ex-wife and her new fiancé in a fancy restaurant. They have arrived for a night of dinner and dancing. Jerry invites himself to join them. The camera angle does not change until he has guided Dan out of his way and seats himself closest to Lucy, which is the moment the conflict is established. Once he is seated, the focus is tightened to the point of obscuring his own date from the shot. The dialogue, like the angles and compositions of the shots, is also similar to the later film. But in this instance, Grant’s character is mocking the notion of his ex-wife moving to Oklahoma, rather than to Albany. The visual cues reassure the viewer that nobody is moving anywhere with Ralph Bellamy.
The technique of positioning Grant in the center of the frame effectively conveys that the heroine and the new interloper, Bellamy, will always be separated by Grant’s presence. The techniques the filmmaker employs rehearse the structure of the content within the scene. There is the introduction phase to orient the characters within space and time. In His Girl Friday, the three of them enter a restaurant with Walter bringing up the rear, greet the waiter by name, and prepare to be seated in the center of the dining area. The conflict of the scene is established as soon as Walter takes the chair closest to Hildy, and Bruce nearly sits on him before realizing that his expected position has been usurped. Walter refuses to stand, forcing Bruce to move to the opposite chair. Once all three are seated, the angle changes. Now the focus is directly in front of the three characters, and they fill the frame, Walter comfortably in the middle of the two betrothed characters. The camera angle cuts to a new direction as Bruce explains his attraction to Hildy, following Walter’s line of sight. The composite of the scene is just the two men, the old and the new, the charmer and the sincere but incompatible bumpkin.

The camera lingers there, as if the audience is to absorb all the differences. The frame does not shift for over thirty seconds, though the conversation is sustained between the three of them. When the composition does change, it is when Walter’s eyes slide to Hildy, after Bruce asks if she is sure she wants to quit. Bruce talks about giving Hildy the chance to have a home, while the focus is purely on Walter and Hildy. It is a subtle cue that undermines Bruce’s plans, and announces to the audience that the expectations of the subgenre will not be subverted. Walter and Hildy remain framed in the shot while Bruce explains their plans to move to Albany. He is faceless and effectively rendered powerless. Over the next four cuts, Bruce is only seen facing the camera once. Walter, and Walter with Hildy, is the primary focus. These cues remind the viewer that regardless of what is being told in the dialogue, the camera is demonstrating a different truth.

There is something interesting going on with the editing in His Girl Friday. The timing of each cut to a new camera angle is very deliberate, and logical within the course of the dialogue. At one point, Walter calls Earl Williams a “poor dope,” and the camera briefly cuts to Bruce, smiling pleasantly, if a bit vacantly. But if you watch Grant closely, you’ll notice that he seems to move between each split second cut, and yet, both Bellamy and Russell remain stationary. Grant’s movements are not so obvious, and yet there is a cumulative effect, as though the editor wishes to demonstrate the energy inherent in Walter. He cannot sit still. He is constantly moving, constantly acting, constantly thinking.

The editing for The Awful Truth has a less frenetic quality, though Grant is treated much the same. The timing of the cuts and the framing of the shot gives the viewer the chance to share the joke with Jerry. It is funny that this Dan thinks he can take Jerry’s classy, high-society wife away from New York to live in Tulsa. The audience is allowed moments to see Lucy’s discomfort and Dan’s obliviousness as the joke continues, but Jerry and his subtle machinations are the star of the scene, just as Walter and his scheming is the star of the lunch scene in His Girl Friday.

The similarities between the two films should be problematic for the viewer. Bordwell claims, “A film’s principal innovations occur at the film’s fabula—i.e. “new stories” (28). That is, the film’s principal pleasure resides in the ability to present “new stories” organized around the same plot and generic conventions. But the popular screwball comedies did not offer a wide variety of new stories. The movies are all safely predictable with snappy, funny dialogue. The audience knows the conflict in the movie before the movie begins, and knows how the movie will end before the opening credits are finished. The popular screwball comedies do not provide pleasure to the viewing audience by providing new stories, but rather, offer pleasure through star recognition. In “The Role of the Star in Film History,” Robert C. Allen cites Edgar Morin who claims, “Once the film is over, the actor becomes an actor again, the character remains a character, but from their union is born a composite creature who participates in both, envelops them both: the star” (607). The private life of the star needs to be public, but it is impossible for the star’s private life to be known. What the public really desires to know is the “star as an image” (607). Movie studios, of course, developed projects that would best fit the image of their stars, and the image of the stars were based on previously popular films (as well as promotional items and critical response), and so a star’s image became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cary Grant became popular playing the flawed, yet charismatic and charming, alpha male in The Awful Truth, and not the clumsy, passive, confused, yet charming and charismatic, David in Bringing Up Baby (which was a financial flop only one year later), and so the former was encoded into his image, while the latter was not. As the screwball comedies evolved and became more sophisticated, we can trace how the star image contributed to the pleasure, and the surprise, of the film. There is pleasure in watching Cary Grant first assume the role of the divorced husband scheming to win back his wife in The Awful Truth; there is pleasure in watching Grant masterfully reprise the role and become even more intense in his schemes in His Girl Friday; and, finally, there is pleasure in The Philadelphia Story when a different type of star, Jimmy Stewart, becomes a momentary threat to Grant’s persona.

The Philadelphia Story has three top stars, but it does not present the typical and conventional love triangle. In The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, the third person in the triangle is the new fiancé, but that is not the case in The Philadelphia Story. There are three men pursuing Hepburn’s Tracy Lord—C.K. Dexter Haven, Macaulay Connor, and George Kittredge. The viewer knows that Dexter and Tracy belong together, because of the exposition at the top of the movie; she breaks his golf club, he pushes her to the ground, he leaves, she looks annoyed. Once again, the viewer is unaware of the conflict behind the obviously heated fight, and the audience is never told explicitly who started the fight or why. The next shot announces Tracy Lord’s upcoming nuptials, and following that, we learn Dexter Haven is plotting to return to her home under false pretenses. Once again, Grant is entering the picture with a little less than twenty-four hours to set things right and make everything “the same but different.” Despite Tracy’s loudly stated affections, she does not seem incredibly fond of Kittredge, and he should be no rival to Grant. At this point, the whole affair should be an exercise in tedium, but for the complication of Stewart’s Macaulay Connor. His presence creates four intersecting triads in the film: the first between Dexter, Kittredge, and Tracy, the second between Dexter, Macaulay, and Tracy, the third between Macaulay, Kittredge and Tracy, and the fourth between Liz (Macaulay’s girlfriend), Macaulay, and Tracy. The triangle between Kittredge, Tracy, and Macaulay exemplifies Shumway’s conception of triads in screwball comedies, in that Tracy is allowed to gaze on the second male with obvious desire. She is mentally stimulated by Macaulay, she is impressed with the fact that he is a regular man of the people, she is allowed to verbally spar with him as she spars with Dexter, encouraging sexual and emotional excitement, and finally she is aroused by him.

Stewart is the one that separates her from her fiancé, not Grant. Stewart fulfills the generic conventions by providing the means to stop the marriage, but Grant is still the ex-husband and past movies have made it explicitly clear that Cary Grant is the one who gets the marriage in the end. George Cukor creates tension in the film by placing generic conventions in opposition with a star persona that was, ironically, formed by the very same conventions. And it is no mistake or happy accident that Grant played Dexter Haven in this film. He was signed with Columbia Pictures and was loaned out to MGM in order to make the picture; he was cast in the film, the picture was not created to fit his star image. In fact, MGM green lit The Philadelphia Story as a vehicle for their newly signed star, Kate Hepburn, who, only two years previously, had been labeled as “box office poison.” The last film she did for her studio, RKO, was Bringing Up Baby. That same year, she also starred with him in Holliday, which wasn’t much more successful. Out of her contract, she went back to the stage for two years. Her return to
Hollywood conspicuously reunited her with Grant.

The tension is pushed to the very limits of the film when Stewart proposes to Hepburn, and she hesitates before she finally refuses him. This tension adds a new dimension to an already sparkling script, and for a moment, it threatens to subvert the entire subgenre. The audience temporarily accepts the possibility of subversion because spectators have never seen a fitting rival to Grant. The Philadelphia Story provides the possibility of a “crooked corridor,” or the jump to invalid conclusions, not through the use of narrative, but through the use of a star’s persona. Bordwell claims that it is rare for a classic Hollywood film to make use of the “crooked corridor” by using narration to make the audience jump to an invalid conclusion (30), but it might be far more common to see the possibility of an invalid conclusion through the conscious use of star persona in generic films.

Works Cited
Allen, Robert C. “The Role of the Star in Film History [Joan Crawford].” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Bordwell, David. “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” Narrative Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Greene, Jane M. “The Road to Reno: ‘The Awful Truth’ and the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.” Film History, Vol. 13, No. 4, Before Screwball (2001), pp. 337-358

His Girl Friday. Dir. Howard Hawks. Perf. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy. DVD. Columbia, 1940.

Neale, Stephen. Genre. Chapter Two. BFI: 1981

Shumway, David. R. “Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 7-23

The Awful Truth. Dir. Leo McCarey. Perf. Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy. DVD. Columbia, 1937.

The Philadelphia Story. Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart. DVD. MGM, 1940
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