The Awful Truth

Screening as part of The Divorced Women’s Film Festival curated by writer Haley Mlotek for the release of her new memoir “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce”.

The screening will be introduced by Haley Mlotek and a special guest. 

“‘You’re wrong about things being different because they’re not the same,’ Cary Grant tells Irene Dunne in 1937’s The Awful Truth, as she laments their marriage and approaching divorce; everything between them is about to change, and perhaps all out of pride rather than the end of love. ‘Things are different, except in a different way.’ It’s one of the great lines of dialogue in this great remarriage comedy, an exceptional entry into a subgenre of films in the 1930s and 40s that only gain more resonance as time goes on.” —Haley Mlotek

In this Oscar-winning farce, Cary Grant (in the role that first defined the Cary Grant persona) and Irene Dunne exude charm, cunning, and artless affection as an urbane couple who, fed up with each other’s infidelities, resolve to file for divorce. But try as they might to move on, the mischievous Jerry can’t help meddling in Lucy’s ill-matched engagement to a corn-fed Oklahoma businessman (Ralph Bellamy), and a mortified Lucy begins to realize that she may be saying goodbye to the only dance partner capable of following her lead. Directed by the versatile Leo McCarey, a master of improvisation and slapstick as well as a keen and sympathetic observer of human folly, The Awful Truth is a warm but unsparing comedy about two people whose flaws only make them more irresistible.

Read more about NO FAULT here. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Hazlitt, and n+1, among others. She is a founding member of the Freelance Solidarity Project in the National Writers Union, teaches in the English and Journalism departments at Concordia University, and is the editorial lead at Feeld. Previously, Mlotek was the deputy editor of SSENSE, the style editor of MTV News, the editor of The Hairpin, and the publisher of WORN Fashion Journal.

*Winner of the Best Director Academy Award – 1938