Plot
Jerry Warriner (Cary Grant) returns home from a trip to find his wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne), is not home. When she returns in the company of her handsome music teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D'Arcy), he learns that she spent the night in the country with him, after his car supposedly broke down. Then, she discovers that Jerry hadn't gone to Florida as he had claimed. Mutual suspicions result in divorce.
Lucy moves into an apartment with Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham) and becomes engaged to her neighbor, Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy) from Oklahoma. However, Leeson's mother (Esther Dale) does not approve of her. Eventually, Lucy realizes that she still loves Jerry and decides to break the engagement. However, before she can inform Dan, Armand shows up at her apartment to discuss Jerry's earlier disastrous interruption of Lucy's singing recital. When Jerry knocks on the door, Armand decides it would be prudent to hide in the bedroom. Jerry wants to reconcile, much to Lucy's delight, but then Dan and his mother make an appearance. Wanting to avoid complications, Jerry slips into Lucy's bedroom, too. A fight erupts when he finds Armand already there. When Jerry chases him out of the apartment, right in front of the Leesons, Dan and his mother stalk out.
Afterward, Jerry becomes seen around town with heiress Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont). To break up this relationship, Lucy crashes a party at the Vance mansion, pretending to be Jerry's sister. She acts like a showgirl (recreating a risqué musical number she had seen performed by one of Jerry's girlfriends) and lets on that their "father" had been a gardener at Princeton University, not a student athlete. Realizing that his chances with Barbara have been effectively sabotaged, Jerry drives Lucy away in her car.
Motorcycle policemen stop them, and Lucy, plotting to spend more time with Jerry, sabotages the car. The couple get a lift to her aunt's cabin from the policemen. Once there, Jerry admits having made a fool of himself and they reconcile.
Read more about this topic: The Awful Truth
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)