The Awful Truth

The Awful Truth centres on Jerry and Lucy Warriner, a wealthy New York couple whose suspicions about each other's fidelity push them towards divorce. While the split is being settled, each becomes involved with someone new: Lucy with Dan Leeson, an Oklahoma oil man trailed by his mother, and Jerry with the well-born Barbara Vance. Neither can leave the other's plans alone, and Jerry has a convenient excuse to keep turning up, since the couple's dog has been placed with Lucy and he is allowed to visit the animal. Though they work to spoil each other's romances, their own ties are not so easily cut.

Leo McCarey directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Sidney Buchman and Viña Delmar. It follows Duck Soup in his filmography and precedes Love Affair, and it belongs to the run of comedies he made in the 1930s. Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play Lucy and Jerry, with Ralph Bellamy as Dan, Alexander D'Arcy as the singing teacher Armand Duvalle, Cecil Cunningham as Aunt Patsy and Molly Lamont as Barbara Vance. Thirty-seven performers are credited.

Released in October 1937 by Columbia Pictures, the film took about three million dollars worldwide. Critical approval is high, at 8.3 out of 10 from 33 reviews, and audiences agree closely: on IMDb it holds 7.6 from roughly 23,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.2 from a much smaller electorate of about 370. The gap between those two audience scores reflects the far larger and older sample behind the IMDb figure rather than any real disagreement about the film.