1,001 Films: "The Awful Truth" (1937)

Legend has it that The Awful Truth was one of those studio productions that, more than most, was made up as it went along, which explains its freewheeling energy, the improvisational asides, and those elements (a musical number here, a dance routine there) thrown in for no real reason other than "we thought it played good at the time". A peppily subversive film that gets funnier as it goes along, it now sparks nostalgia for the routinely classy Hollywood comedies of days gone by, when leading men were encouraged to show up for even mundane domestic scenes in dinner jackets rather than latex fat suits; it's hard to imagine anybody feeling the same way in 70 years' time about Little Man or Norbit.

Meet the Warriners (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne): a married couple whose mutual suspicions have finally got the better of them. Granted a 90-day trial separation in court - she keeps the pooch, he gets visiting rights - they hit the social scene all over again as singletons, only to find their love lives keep getting in the way of each other: he sees off Ralph Bellamy as a momma's boy from Oklahoma, but she faces a much tougher proposition in sabotaging Grant's affair with an heiress, until the brainwave of posing as her ex-husband's lush of a sister. Along the way, the much underrated Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow) gathers together varying strains of comedy, from some delicious verbal ironies (Dunne's lawyer on the phone, insisting his client persist with her marriage even as his own wife nags that his dinner's getting cold; Grant declaring "nothing's going to hurt me" as a piano lid falls on his fingers) to the inspired heart-to-heart pastiche that seals the lovers' fate.

Dunne is wonderfully sassy, but this is likely to be best remembered as the film that first established Grant, previously a stooge to Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, as the pre-eminent star of screwball comedy, as essential a part of the cycle's furniture as Cagney and Bogart were to the gangster movie or John Wayne was to become to the Western. Grant tosses out the zingy one-liners with measured insouciance, but also performs a series of perfectly pitched pratfalls in a sequence that opens with him suffering jijitsu at the hands of a Chinese doorman and ends with his falling off a chair and destroying a chest of drawers. That such a patchwork, ad hoc film comes to feel as slick as it does is almost entirely down to the actor's ability to establish a rapport with anything set in front of him: Dunne, yes, but also an undersized bowler hat, an oversized nightshirt, a glass of eggnog, and the dog that - if the Thin Man series is anything to go by - was obligatory in all comedies of the early sound era.

The Awful Truth is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.