Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Awful Truth
1937 · Leo McCarey · The Awful Truth on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for doors letting in the wrong person at the wrong time. (staging)
McCarey builds scene after scene around thresholds and connecting doors, staging entrances so that who walks through a doorway carries the plot forward.
Payoff: A door opening at the wrong moment does more storytelling here than a line of dialogue.
Notice the cuckoo clock and its two little figures. (setting)
The clock appears at the start and keeps recurring, its two Swiss figures sliding out from separate doors each time the hour strikes.
Payoff: A toy on the wall is quietly keeping score of a marriage the characters won't talk about directly.
Notice how often two or three actors share the frame. (camera)
Walker and McCarey favor compositions that keep several actors in view together, letting reactions play out continuously instead of cutting to isolated close-ups.
Payoff: You get to watch everyone's face react in real time, not just whoever is talking.
Notice how the film holds a shot after the joke. (cutting)
Al Clark's editing waits a beat past the line, so a double-take or an embarrassed pause has room to land before the next cut.
Payoff: The pause is doing the comic work, not a quicker cut to the next line.
Watch Cary Grant stay dignified while nearly falling over. (performance)
Grant plays a man perpetually a half-step from collapse, capable of pratfall and poise inside the same shot.
Payoff: His whole persona gets built in this film out of that one balancing act.
Once you have seen it
Watch the cuckoo-clock figures finally enter the same door. (structure)
At the mountain cabin, the two Swiss figures that spent the whole film exiting separate doors finally retire through one door together.
Payoff: The marriage gets resolved as a spatial fact, without either character saying the words out loud. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls this a symbol: one object condensing the film's whole relationship into a single form.
Notice how every suspicious gesture could mean two things. (structure)
A hat left somewhere it shouldn't be, a person entering at the wrong moment: the film keeps giving you behavior that reads as innocent or guilty and never says which.
Payoff: You are left to decide what jealousy and desire actually mean here, because the film won't. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity: the same act pointing at two opposite meanings at once.
Watch Dunne impersonate Jerry's crude, invented sister. (performance)
Dunne barges into Jerry's high-society engagement performing a broad comic invention purely to humiliate him in front of the people he's trying to impress.
Payoff: It's pure performance about class and pride, not really about romantic jealousy at all.
Carry this in: Watch the doors. Every wrong entrance is the film's real dialogue about this marriage.