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The awful truth

Leo McCarey was better in the ’30s

By STEVE VINEBERG | June 2, 2008

THE AWFUL TRUTH: A screwball comedy reimagined as a comedy of remarriage.

“Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond” | Harvard Film Archive | June 8-16

Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten. Yet he was responsible for three of the greatest comedies of the Depression era: Duck Soup (the most sublime of the Marx Brothers movies), Ruggles of Red Gap, and The Awful Truth. He was an odd duck, though, as fond of melodrama as he was of romantic comedy and farce. The retrospective hosted by the Harvard Film Archive beginning this Sunday, “Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond,” is long overdue.

McCarey was brought up in the Hal Roach school of silent comedy, which means that by the time he made his first talkie, INDISCREET (which the HFA will screen a rare print of), he’d learned how to work quickly and economically, he’d perfected a kind of visual shorthand, and he’d developed a light, sure touch with actors. The series begins with a program of his comic shorts — three late silents starring Laurel and Hardy (including one of their most famous two-reelers, “Big Business”) and one with Charley Chase called “Dog Shy.” “Dog Shy,” the earliest of the quartet, was released in 1926, and it was the 40th short McCarey directed, so he was a veteran long before 1929, when he began to make features. His physical work with Chase and with Stan and Ollie bears fruit in sequences like the astonishingly poetic (and uproarious) human-mirror bit in DUCK SOUP, where Groucho encounters Chico and Harpo dressed up to look like him, or the classic scenes in THE AWFUL TRUTH involving Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and an expressive wire-haired terrier known as Mr. Smith — played by the same canny canine performer who kept showing up as Asta in the Thin Man pictures. (In “Dog Shy,” Chase is continually being bested by a frisky dog; their charming interchanges are a warm-up for the Mr. Smith episodes.)

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