Leo McCarey indulges Cary Grant's odd passion in comedies for remarrying his first wife and leaving a new boyfriend (the likes of Ralph Bellamy) bemused and bereft. Irene Dunne is the ex- and future-wife. As James Harvey writes in Romantic Comedy, "Of the great women stars who dominated the movie comedies of the '30s (and '40s)-movies which finally come to be about these women as much as or more than about any of their ostensible subjects or plots-Irene Dunne is probably the greatest...She is one of those transcendent comic players who remind us that there is a comic equivalent-even a laughing-out-loud one-to the tragic experience of being deeply moved: at her best, as in...The Awful Truth, she is deeply funny. More than anyone else, she is the paradigm of the screwball heroine: a powerfully sensible woman with a passionate, even dangerous susceptibility for being amused, for 'going wild'. No one conveys a certain mystery at the heart of this heroine as strongly as she does. No one else gets the odd sober lunacy, the combination of common sense and uncommon passion, so exactly, so exhilaratingly right. Dunne is to playfulness on the screen what Garbo is to weariness: the keeper of mysteries."