A salute to the genius of director Leo McCarey - Reel World - Biography

MY BOOK on Capraesque baseball films finally has been posted to the publisher, so it's on to the next project--a biography of movie director Leo McCarcy (1898-1969). While he is not a household name, this is one filmmaker who decidedly deserves the distinction.

McCarey excelled at comedy--all aspects of comedy. Actor Charles Laughton said of the director--after starring in the McCarey classic, "Ruggles of Red Gap" (1935--be is "not only a great director, but in my opinion, the greatest comic mind now living." Like many great talents daring their heyday, McCarey's creativity knew no bounds. Orson Welles, commenting on McCarey's poignant melodrama about old age, "Make Way for Tomorrow" (1937), noted: "It would make a stone cry," (The same film produced a McCarey fan letter from renowned Irish author George Bernard Shaw.)

Still, comedy tended to be his focus. After making a series of brilliant short subjects, first with Charley Chase and later Max Davidson, McCarey graduated to pantheon status by teaming with, and then molding, arguably cinema's greatest comedy duo: Laurel & Hardy. Moreover, the deliberate McCarey pacing gave this pair a fresh approach to visual farce late in the silent era, enabling Laurel & Hardy to, as critic/historian Walter Kerr observed, "alter silent film comedy in a way that made it possible for them, alone among their [speedier] contemporaries, to pass over into sound films [where sound technology required a slower pace] with scarcely a hitch of their philosophical shoulders."

McCarey went on to direct many of the era's major comedians, including the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mac West, Harold Lloyd, Burns & Allen, and Eddie Cantor. McCarey's most acclaimed "clown" picture--one he masterminded--was the Marxes' "Duck Soup" (1933), making him the only director to actually contribute to their sizable canon. Indeed, the American Film Institute later designated it as one of the five greatest American comedies ever made.

As a fun footnote to the film, one of "Duck Soup" 's memorable ongoing scenes has direct ties to a comedy strategy McCarey created for Laurel & Hardy--the phenomenon since labeled "tit-for-tat." The use of this technique for "'Duck Soup" involved a conflict between peanut vendors Chico and Harpo Marx and lemonade stand owner Edgar Kennedy. The resulting tit-for-tat, utilizing MeCarey's slower pacing, reveals comic combatants who patiently and politely take turns wreaking havoc on each other's possessions, while the competing owner courteously looks on.

After McCarey's days as a director of personality comedians, he branched out into screwball comedy, winning his first Oscar for "The Awful Truth" (1937). This movie, and its quasi-sequel, "My Favorite Wife" (1940, produced and co-written by McCarey), have come to be regarded as definitive examples of this genre. The two films, both starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, showcase the genre's standard antiheroic male, rescued from a rigid lifestyle by a dominatingly free-spirited leading lady.

Sandwiched between these two pictures, McCarey directed and co-authored the groundbreaking romantic comedy "Love Affair" (1939, with Dunne and Charles Buyer). Unlike screwball comedy, the romantic genre assumes a more traditional dating ritual, with the male being the catalyst for love, though he frequently needs to do some growing up first. "Love Affair" also was one of the best received movies of 1939--the year commonly acknowledged to be the peak of the American studio system.

Never one to rest upon his laurels, McCarey would later lake this property In even greater heights when he remade it as "An Affair to Remember" (1957). Starring Grant and Deborah Kerr; the new version would achieve iconic status hi the world of romantic comedy. For example, the more recent classic of the genre, "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993), borrows a pivotal "Affair" plot point--lovers rendezvousing at the top of the Empire State Building.

Despite the late career success of his "Love Affair" remake, McCarey's greatest professional achievement, both critically and commercially, occurred during World War II with his watershed populist pictures, "Going My Way" (1944) and "The Bells of St. Mary's" (1945). The former captured seven Oscars, including best picture, with McCarey winning for both direction and original screenplay. The "Bells" sequel soon became, after "Gone with the Wind" (1939), one of the largest box office hits in history. Mc Carey's close friend Frank Capra even salutes the movie in "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) by having "The Bells of St. Mary's" on the marquee of the film theater George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) tans past just after he has been given back his life.

Over a half-century before the current scandals in the Catholic Church, the central character in "Going" and "Bells," Bing Crosby's down-to earth Father O'Malley, represented one of the tree heroes of American pop culture, McCarey's take on the cracker-barrel philosopher. Not surprisingly, "Going My Way" also received what was called a "G.I. Oscar," for "maintaining in the minds of the American home front the principles for which American soldiers [were] fighting."