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Leo McCarey: A man to remember
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Leo McCarey: The auteur at work
That Leo McCarey does not enjoy a more substantial reputation today is one of the cinema’s greater puzzles.
Let’s take a look at his résumé. He got his start in the silent era, helming numerous comedy two-reelers, before having the marvelous idea of pairing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their first movie together. Making the shift to sound, he worked successfully with Mae West and W.C. Fields, as well as directing Charles Laughton’s best comedic performance (Ruggles of Red Gap), the best Marx Brothers movie (Duck Soup) and Harold Lloyd’s best talkie (The Milky Way).
McCarey won the Best Director Oscar for 1937's The Awful Truth, the quintessential screwball comedy. With typical McCarey wit, he politely thanked the Academy, then later commented that he’d won for the wrong movie (referring to the heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow, his personal favorite of his films). Although not his best work, he picked up another directing Oscar for Going My Way and was nominated for its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, the films that proved that Bing Crosby, in addition to being the era’s premiere crooner, was also one heck of an actor.
McCarey was no stranger to romance, and 1939’s Love Affair is a textbook weepie, equal parts comedy and pathos, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as lovers brought together by fate aboard a luxury ocean liner and then separated by a tragic accident. It proved to be so successful that McCarey remade it equally as well in 1957 as An Affair to Remember (a movie that would later serve as the template for Sleepless in Seattle), with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant stepping into the leads.
So, if McCarey was not only popular and successful but also critically acclaimed during his time in Hollywood, why has no one heard of him today? Part of it might be politics. The last decade of his career was marked by right wing extremism, including testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and making anti-Communist propaganda films disguised as fiction, but I would argue that his obscurity has its roots in the purely aesthetic.
The McCarey style is never obtrusive and favors the two-shot, the camera functioning as an extension of story and character, moving only when necessary and cutting based on the characters’ interrelationships within the frame. His films don’t have the visual beauty of Ford or the technical flair of Hitchcock, but his presence is always felt in the economic efficiency of his scenes and the crisp pacing of his dialogue.
When most people think back on The Awful Truth or An Affair to Remember, they think that those were good Cary Grant movies, not realizing that they were the product of the same director or that McCarey did more than anyone to shape the Cary Grant screen persona. Even critic William Bayer, an auteurist to the core, completely dismisses the screwball comedy era in his book The Great Movies and makes not one reference to McCarey in his review of Duck Soup.
Leo McCarey is often compared to Frank Capra, his close friend and the man whom he called “my hero,” but Capra had a folksy, often caricatured approach to American life, whereas McCarey, despite the light tone to his body of work, had a frankly realistic view of human interaction.
Director Jean Renoir once said, “McCarey understands people – better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood,” and nowhere is that understanding more apparent than in Make Way for Tomorrow, the American cinema’s best and saddest commentary on the plight of the elderly. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play an aging couple who learn that the bank is foreclosing on their home. Rejected by their children, who claim they don’t have enough room to take them both in, they are forced to separate, she relegated to the indignity of an older women’s home.
McCarey treats all this with grace and humor, keeping his film sentimental but never mawkish. The extended final sequence, a delicate tightrope walk of emotions, plays like a courtship in reverse as Ma and Pa Cooper relive their youth with a last date, a mostly wordless evocation of love and joy delivered with the undertones of a funeral hymn.
Made during the Great Depression, Make Way for Tomorrow is unfortunately as relevant today – in this era of a failed mortgage industry, a battered stock market, and a Social Security system on life support – as it was when it was made.
The last date: Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi in a clip from Make Way for Tomorrow
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