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Leo McCarey Paul Harrill's most recent films are Gina, An Actress, Age 29, winner of the 2001 Sundance Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking, and Brief Encounter with Tibetan Monks. |
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| Of the greatest directors of the Classic Hollywood era,
Leo McCarey's work and reputation are today among the most popularly and
critically neglected. McCarey was a giant in his time. His films were often
hugely successful with audiences, and his colleagues admired his work (three
Oscars and 36 nominations for his films, fan letters reportedly from Chaplin
and Capra, etc). Jean Renoir expressed a once widely held sentiment when
he remarked, “McCarey understands people better perhaps than anyone
else in Hollywood.” (1) Yet today, thirty-three years after his death, while Frank Capra, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock's legends have only grown and, thanks to auteurism, reputations have been securely established for Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, and Nicholas Ray (among others), McCarey is ignored by virtually all but diehard cinephiles. When a McCarey film is popularly discussed (or revived) these days, more often than not, the film is Duck Soup (1933) or An Affair to Remember (1957), two works that have their merits but which are a far cry from McCarey's strongest or most personal work. Part of the neglect results from a problem of access to the movies themselves. Of the twenty-three sound features McCarey directed, eleven (including possibly his greatest masterpiece, Make Way for Tomorrow [1937]) are either out of print or have never been released on video in his home country. At least two more, Good Sam (1948) and Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), exist in compromised video versions. Likewise, his films are only sporadically shown on television. Is it any wonder that there is no book-length McCarey biography, and the last extended studies of his work were published in 1980? (2) It seems less excusable that important surveys of film history – including David Cook's voluminous A History of Narrative Film – virtually ignore him. (3) For a director who made a film (The Bells of St. Mary's [1945]) seen, at one time, by more moviegoers in the USA than any other to that point in history, (4) McCarey has, oddly enough, become something of a cult figure. Among his most perceptive and vocal supporters are David Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum and, especially, Robin Wood. Though Wood's essays and Kehr and Rosenbaum's reviews have championed him on multiple occasions, virtually every extended biographical or critical essay about Leo McCarey written since the advent of auteurism either questions whether he was more than a serviceable metteur-en-scène or, alternatively, discusses his neglect and defends his career as an auteur. (5) This essay very much follows the latter approach. Leo McCarey was the first son of Irish-Catholic Thomas McCarey, a well-known boxing promoter, and French-born Leona [Mistrol] McCarey, for whom he is named. He attended St. Joseph's Catholic school and Los Angeles High School growing up. Though he tried prize-fighting as an amateur middleweight, he eventually obeyed his father's wishes and studied law at USC. With $5000 in damages from an accident where he fell down an elevator shaft, McCarey invested the money in a copper mine, which soon went bust. He continued in mining for a short while, and then practiced law. As a lawyer he was a failure: he lost cases quickly and he didn't have the heart to defend people he knew to be guilty. A talented pianist, McCarey decided to try to make it as a songwriter. Despite writing song after song – some accounts put the number he authored over the course of his life at nearly 1000 – he never made enough money at it to make a living. (6) After he had become a successful filmmaker, his failure as a songwriter remained “his major frustration.” (7) In 1919, deciding to pursue a career in motion pictures, he got a break as an assistant to Tod Browning at Universal. After his apprenticeship at Universal, McCarey worked for Hal Roach studios from 1923 through 1929. This period, which I won't deal with here, deserves its own extended study. (8) He worked his way from being a gag-man to vice-president of the studio and during that time supervised hundreds of comedy shorts. (9) His single greatest contribution at Roach was pairing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, though McCarey was only given credit for this much later in his life.
The fact that McCarey alluded to his life in his films does not necessarily, of course, make him a great director. It does show, however, how deeply he thought of cinema as an avenue for personal expression. McCarey may have liked, as was often quoted, “a little bit of the fairy tale” in his films, but this inclusion of his real world shows there's something more complicated and nuanced going on than that seemingly innocent phrase initially suggests. He clearly thought that, in the cinema, even fantasies needed to be anchored in the actual and the specific in order for them to be convincing. In near coincidence with the advent of sound, McCarey became a director of features. (12) Over the next eight years he directed a series of features (most while under contract at Paramount) that mainly paired him with star comedians. Among these works: 1932's The Kid from Spain (Eddie Cantor), 1934's Belle of the Nineties (Mae West), Six of a Kind (starring W.C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen) from that same year, and The Milky Way (Harold Lloyd). The most widely known film of this bunch is the Marx Brothers' classic Duck Soup, a film almost universally agreed upon as being their best. McCarey didn't much care for it. The film has its moments – its justifiably famous final sequence is a bitter satire on the absurdities of war – but the film at large suffers from the same drawbacks of the other Marx Brothers comedies. The humor largely revolves around one-liners, and often the surrounding cast does little but stand and listen as Groucho delivers punchline after punchline. This is uncharacteristic for McCarey's humanistic work, where it seems all his characters have something to do. Its favorable comparison with other Marx Brothers vehicles (no harp solos, for example) leads one to suppose that McCarey was responsible for keeping things moving, something that gives the film such staying power. Beyond that, within the rubric of a McCarey study, it is at best a transitional work and, at worst, nearly faceless. Other films from this “transitional period,” however, do show greater flashes of McCarey's later concerns. For instance, it's hard to not see Charles Ruggles and Mary Boland's reminiscences of the earlier, less strained days of their marriage in Six of a Kind as a precursor to the lovers of both Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth. And music, which we'll later see is essential to McCarey's universe, figures significantly in Belle of the Nineties, Duck Soup, and even The Milky Way, where Harold Lloyd learns to box to music.
McCarey's detractors (and sometimes even his supporters) argue that he is a director of great moments rather than great films. Up until Ruggles of Red Gap, this is a fair assessment: McCarey trained as a gag-man and grew, some would say slowly, into a director of features. But while Ruggles contains some of his finest set pieces – including the justifiably famous scene where Ruggles the Brit is the only person in a bar of clueless, speechless Americans that can recite the Gettysburg Address – the film also coheres as a narrative. One reason it coheres, and one thing that marks Ruggles as McCarey's first mature feature, is that here he begins to deal spiritual themes, something that runs through virtually all of the remainder of his work for the next twenty-two years. Ruggles is a very funny movie, but McCarey is dead serious about what lies at its core: it is a film about a man's spiritual transformation. After Ruggles recites the Gettysburg Address in the bar, all the patrons share a beer together. It is a moment of informal, but real, communion – a ceremony celebrating Ruggles' “baptism,” not just as an American, (13) but more importantly, as a human being with fully developed hopes and desires of his own.
Despite all of these, possibly the best is Make Way for Tomorrow, a heartbreaking film concerned with the fate of an elderly couple whose money problems force them to split up and stay with their children, who are too busy to care for them. It has to be one of the most bittersweet movies ever produced by an American studio, and the fact that it is not mawkish despite its subject is a testament of McCarey's substantial talent. Scandalously, the film is unavailable on video and rarely shown on TV, presumably, because it is a “difficult” subject; it has probably been seen by fewer people than any other Hollywood masterpiece. The film was ignored upon its release as well. Paramount was so disappointed with its box office that McCarey was fired. McCarey, for his part, was devastated by the film's popular rejection. When he accepted his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth (his other film from 1937) he did so somewhat bitterly, telling anyone who would listen that he had won for the wrong film. Late in his life, he said, “If I really have talent, this is where it appears.” (16) From this period, only The Milky Way and Once Upon a Honeymoon are comparatively minor successes. The former was completed by an assistant when McCarey fell ill to milk poisoning; the latter was compromised, at least a little, by studio tampering. (Robin Wood, nevertheless, has argued convincingly that this curious film's strengths are many.) (17) Slowed only by a near-death car wreck (1940) and a failed contract with Howard Hughes (1940-1942) that put him out of commission for roughly three years, McCarey defines, refines, and redefines his style and themes over these ten years, and he forges a vision that is truly unique in the Hollywood cinema of the Classic era. One factor that has made it difficult to champion McCarey as an auteur is that he lacks a “visual style” that is as identifiable as, say, a Hitchcock, Welles, or Sirk. Some critics, like George Morris, have argued that McCarey does have one, but to my mind the case can only be made in a limited fashion. For the most part McCarey's visual style is one that is barely distinguishable from numerous other Hollywood filmmakers of the same era, especially those directors that started at the bottom of the Hollywood ladder (in McCarey's case, as a script supervisor) and apprenticed in silent shorts and early sound features. To his credit, his mise-en-scène shows sensitivity to the meaning of objects (the graduation dresses in The Bells of St. Mary's, for instance). His cinematography is restrained, and he clearly has a fondness for using off-screen space. (Sometimes McCarey places the most important moments of his films just beyond the frame – the killing of the Nazi husband in Once Upon a Honeymoon, for example, or perhaps best of all, the lovers' first kiss in An Affair to Remember.) Beyond that, I believe the questions of McCarey's visual style – whether he has one, and if so, what it is – are not easily answerable, and this is one reason why McCarey's status as an auteur is insecure. But, more to the point, why must a director have a visual style to be an auteur? Cinema is more than a visual medium, it's a medium that exists in time, and few Hollywood filmmakers had more command over rhythm and structure than Leo McCarey. From at least 1925, there are accounts that McCarey, while working on Charley Chase shorts for Hal Roach, would play the piano on set while dreaming up new scenes to shoot. McCarey certainly continued to improvise his films late into his career: according to Bing Crosby, “probably 75 per cent of each day's shooting [on Going My Way] was made up on the set by Leo … He would go immediately to the piano [when he came on set in the morning] and play some ragtime for an hour or two, while he thought up a few scenes.” (18) Similar accounts exist for many other McCarey films, especially The Awful Truth. To see just one place where improvisation is found, a survey of McCarey's work shows a fondness for scenes where one person teaches another. In The Milky Way, Harold Lloyd is taught to box and, later, he gives a society woman lessons on how to avoid a punch. Roland Young's drumming lesson in Ruggles of Red Gap leads him to true love. In Going My Way, Bing Crosby teaches Carol the street girl and, later, a group of tough kids how to sing. In The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman teaches a kid to box. Nazis coach Cary Grant, in Once Upon a Honeymoon, on how to deliver a radio address with “shpontanuity.” Almost all of his mature films (and some of the earlier ones) have teaching scenes. Though it's impossible to confirm, most of these scenes are likely improvised, and it's not hard to see why McCarey, as a fan of improvisation, returns to this device. Lesson-giving has a fantastic structure for improvisation: one person leads, the other follows, each has flexibility in what they do and say, and there's a reactive nature to the enterprise. In McCarey's universe these scenes produce gently comic results – we see someone make mistakes, which we can laugh at, but it is within the safe environment of a lesson instead of “real life.” The moments are funny without being cruel. Indeed, that mistakes and failure are allowed and forgiven is a concept that, no doubt, McCarey had personal sympathy for. He was, after all, someone that attempted careers in boxing, law, mining, and songwriting before becoming a filmmaker. That he's able to create scenes where we can laugh at someone without resorting to ridicule points at McCarey's characteristic generosity. More than just a unique working method, the improvisational method created films with relaxed scenes and relaxed structures. As Jonathan Rosenbaum so succinctly puts it, “the major lesson of Leo McCarey [is] that people and their tragicomic behavior matter much more than plot.” (19) That does not mean that McCarey is a director of great moments instead of great films, nor does it mean his films are digressive. His improvised scenes, like these moments of teaching, are great not just because they feel real, but also because they advance the story by revealing character and human relationships. What could be less digressive? Music offers an even more important way to see how McCarey's films, more than just stringing together great digressive moments, are instead unified, relaxed, and subtle. We shouldn't be surprised that music is one of the keys defining and understanding McCarey's work. After all, this failed songwriter who would come to set and play piano, was a man who readily confessed that he was “at heart, a musician.” (20) McCarey's diegetic music is more important than his non-diegetic music. Music-in-the-world abounds in almost all of McCarey's sound films. Jazz orchestras, children's choirs, opera stars, music instructors, failed songwriters, and nightclub entertainers populate his films. There's a place for amateurs, too: country boys that can't stay on key while singing “Home on the Range”, bartenders that serenade their drunk customers, dogs that are encouraged to bark along to the piano, weaklings that learn to box while dancing, British noblemen that learn to play the drums while falling in love (or is it the reverse?). Despite (or because of) this obsession, McCarey only directed one film that could rightfully be labeled a musical, 1929's Red Hot Rhythm. McCarey even (correctly) considered Going My Way, which features at least nine instances of diegetic music, as a “dramatic comedy.” (21) Indeed, because music emerges in realistic ways and serves dramatic functions (unlike musicals, whose plots often stop while someone performs a number), the effect, ultimately, is that the music simultaneously relaxes and advances the plot. That the films are not musicals, but simply musical, gets at the crux of McCarey's worldview. His comments about his films being “fairy tales” notwithstanding, music exists for him in a real world. Because McCarey's characters do not spring into song and dance, but surround their lives with “real” music – not just with songs, but nostalgic music boxes, chiming clocks that bring lovers together, etc – the cinematic world is more convincing. The cumulative effect is that music is a cosmic principle not just of most of his films, but of his universe.
Likewise, in Going My Way, most filmmakers would end the film at its moment of climactic melodrama (literally, melodrama – a children's choir sings an Irish tune in the background) when Barry Fitzgerald's priest is reunited with his mother. Not McCarey. Instead, the camera follows Crosby outside, as he leaves the reunion, and his parish for good, in the snow. As he walks alone, his back to the camera, the music can be heard only faintly. Its now diminished volume becomes a way of underscoring, with characteristic restraint, the silence that is symbolic of Crosby's Christian selflessness and the resulting isolation that brings. The impact of these quiet moments (and others) found in McCarey's mature sound work stems at least in part from the fact that music is so omnipresent in his films. It makes the silence more noticeable. It reminds one of another Catholic filmmaker, Robert Bresson, who once wrote “The sound film invented silence.” (22) The comparison is not unjust. Indeed, in The Awful Truth and Going My Way, which have so many moments of music-based (but not “musical”) comedy, McCarey's uses of near-silent endings approach the kind stasis that Paul Schrader defines as the Transcendental Style. I would not want to have to argue that McCarey is a “Transcendental Stylist,” but he is undeniably a religious filmmaker. (23) The phrase “religious cinema” often conjures up one of two things: we may think of the facile Biblical epics that were so prominent in American films of the 1950s or, alternatively, of the spiritual searching of directors like Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, or Andrei Tarkovsky (among others). McCarey's films fall into neither category: He never made a Biblical epic (though it was his long-stated desire to make a film about Adam and Eve), nor are his films formally rigorous like those of Bresson, Rossellini, et al. Nevertheless McCarey's mature work is deeply informed by his Catholicism. On a simply superficial level, this is seen in the churches and priests that figure prominently in his films. Beginning with Love Affair, seven of McCarey's nine remaining films have, at the very least, a scene in a church or chapel. Four of them (plus his teleplay “Tom and Jerry” [1955]) feature Catholic priests as central characters. (24) More importantly, there are recurring thematic motifs, not all of them church-bound. While non-violence and a deep skepticism about money (both part of Christian teachings) are recurring thematic concerns, the most important theme is the intersection of romance with the spiritual life. Love Affair, for example, is more than a romance between any man and a woman – as its advertising campaign proclaimed, it concerns “a man of the world and a lady of leisure.” From the moment that Dunne and Boyer share an intimate, and unplanned, meditation in a chapel during their ship's stopover, we understand why this is no longer just any “love affair” for McCarey; the religious element of the encounter spiritually transforms his “loose” characters, and by extension, their behavior in the world. They become selfless, devoted to one another, instead of to their own selfish desires. Love Affair, then, is first and foremost a tale of spiritual (and moral) redemption. McCarey's investigation of spiritual themes began with the tale of a British butler discovering he had human desires of his own, but McCarey would reverse the trajectory of such transformation: by the time of Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's and Good Sam, liberated individuals serve others before themselves. As Jean-Pierre Coursodon has forcefully argued, denial is one of the keystones in McCarey's work. (25) That's certainly the case of the romances: the denial often comes about through selfish pride (The Awful Truth, Love Affair and An Affair to Remember), or through religious devotion (Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's, and Satan Never Sleeps [1962]). Tellingly, in McCarey's Catholic universe, when pride is the issue, the lovers ultimately realize their selfishness and unite; when a previously made devotion to God holds the lovers back, their desire remains unconsummated. This tension between helping oneself and serving others is, in fact, the central tension of Good Sam, the film that marks the beginning of McCarey's decline. In his last twenty years, McCarey's health declined, and his work followed. From 1948 until his death in 1969, McCarey made only five features, a short film, and two teleplays. (26) According to Peter Bogdanovich, McCarey's productivity was stalled and eventually stopped by drink, drugs, and illness. (27) Details on what Bogdanovich is referring to are elusive, and one hesitates to speculate on such claims without more details, but whatever the reasons, besides An Affair to Remember, a fine (though inferior) remake of his Love Affair, the films are generally less successful as films. This is not to say that they are uninteresting. In fact, they are often more fascinating than the earlier work, and part of the reason why is that beginning with 1952's Anti-Communist family melodrama My Son John, McCarey's vision grows much darker. (28) Critically destroyed upon release (McCarey went so far as to travel to New York to defend it against its critics), My Son John has started to grow in stature as deconstructive readings of the film have shown how the film's seemingly rabid pro-HUAC (29) stance also critiques the very thing that was supposed to “save” America from Communism: the family. (30) Indeed, My Son John's resonance deepens when compared alongside his previous family drama, Make Way for Tomorrow; the intermittent pessimism of the earlier work overtakes the latter's drama to a point of hysteria. Formally, My Son John is also noteworthy for how it provides insights into McCarey's style. When star Robert Walker died suddenly in the middle of production, McCarey had to thoroughly reconfigure the film. His solution to the film's final scene is revealing: an empty dais is shown as a PA system plays Walker's commencement address. The speech is Walker's confession, not just in a legal sense, but also in a spiritual one. (Indeed, not unlike the Catholic confession of sin, he is unseen to us. Even more, he's dead, and if he isn't speaking from “the afterlife” at the very least he does so after life.) McCarey's decision to solve his dramatic dilemma by moving the film toward a moment of formal stasis invites comparison with the endings of radically lighter films like The Awful Truth and Going My Way, suggesting that even as his vision grew darker, he was still pursuing a singular stylistic vision that could accommodate his obsession with spiritual matters. Satan Never Sleeps, McCarey's final picture, deals with Catholic priests in Communist China. McCarey grew frustrated with the studio's tampering and he quit the set with five days of filming left. One wonders what the film would have been without the interference, particularly if he had supervised its editing, for if Satan Never Sleeps is not a very good film (its humor is forced, and the acting is uneven) for those familiar with McCarey's career it can be an often-compelling compendium of seemingly irreconcilable elements from his other movies: absurd screwball romance, generational conflicts between Catholic priests, parent-child conflicts, and anti-Communist commentary. The film is also noteworthy in the McCarey oeuvre for a rape scene that is the single darkest moment he committed to film. McCarey had never attempted to make a film with such a radical spectrum of elements, and the fact that parts of it actually come off makes it worthwhile, if sometimes difficult, viewing.
Satan Never Sleeps has been routinely (and rightly) criticized for its absurd (and somewhat studio-imposed) recuperative ending, wherein a woman and her rapist are encouraged by Holden's priest to form a family. The recuperation, twisted though it may seem, is indicative of the radical generosity of McCarey's directorial personality. He tried to extend the chance of forgiveness and redemption, however unconvincing, to even his most repulsive characters. Indeed, forgiveness, possibly the single most important theme of Christianity, is one of McCarey's major themes. It is what makes love – from the romantic love of The Awful Truth to the mother's love of My Son John – in his universe possible. (32) He's right. Even McCarey's most ardent supporters would have a hard time making the case that his films can be encapsulated in the way that makes defining Ford's or Hitchcock's status as an auteur a comparatively more straightforward enterprise. McCarey's career has eras defined by substantially different concerns. His career, which began in silent slapstick and ended with works that bend genres and blend spiritual and political commentary, cannot be reduced to any one genre or theme. Furthermore, his style is one that is more sonic and rhythmic than picturesque, which makes the work more difficult to identify immediately and discuss in print. (Try selecting a still image that communicates rhythm!) And, like many great directors, he made some films that are, at first (or second) glance, bad or even embarrassing. These are mere complications, however, and a sensitive approach to McCarey's career reveals a career of tremendous growth. The recurring themes and formal motifs of his mature period are largely unique in the American cinema, and the fact that he developed them over the course of his career in interesting ways makes him undeniably an auteur. The fact that many of these works are truly great ranks him, ultimately, as a great film artist. As I am completing this essay, McCarey's penultimate film An Affair to Remember has just been listed as the American Film Institute's fourth-greatest Hollywood love story (“100 Films, 100 Passions”) and Duck Soup is fifth on the AFI's list of 100 funniest films. The Awful Truth, surprisingly, is ranked on both (#77 and #68, respectively). These AFI lists are a pretty ridiculous enterprise, more marketing ploy than serious study, but that may make the inclusion of McCarey's films, especially The Awful Truth, all the more noteworthy. Perhaps someday soon his films will get their due? Then again, maybe not – perhaps Leo McCarey will always remain a filmmaker appreciated by the few, not the many. If so, it will be a curious fate for a talent so respected in his day. (34) Thanks to Charles Maland, Tom Kleinschmidt, Tony Rossi and especially Michael Campi, who provided me with videos of McCarey films unavailable in the United States. © Paul Harrill, September 2002 Endnotes:
Filmography Leo McCarey produced, wrote, directed, and/or supervised countless comedy shorts at Hal Roach Studios. There are too many to list here, not to mention that, because credit was not always properly given, the authorship of many of these films is subject to debate. As such, only McCarey's features are listed.All films as director, unless otherwise indicated. Society Secrets (1921) The Sophomore (1929) Red Hot Rhythm (1929) Wild Company (1930) Let's Go Native (1930) Part Time Wife (1930) also known as The Shepper-Newfounder Indiscreet (1931) also Co-Story The Kid from Spain (1932) Duck Soup (1933) US Library of Congress National Film Registry Six of a Kind (1934) Belle of the Nineties (1934) Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) The Milky Way (1936) Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) also Producer and bit part (uncredited) The Awful Truth (1937) also Producer US Library of Congress National Film Registry Academy Award for Best Director The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) Directed by H.C. Potter (Story only) Love Affair (1939) also Producer and Co-Story My Favorite Wife (1940) Directed by Garson Kanin (Producer and Co-Story only) Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) also Co-Story Going My Way (1944) also Producer and Story Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Bing Crosby), Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald), Best Screenplay, Best Story, and Best Song
Good Sam (1948) also Producer and Co-story You Can Change the World (1951) short film made for The Christophers organization. My Son John (1952) also Producer, Story, Co-screenplay “Meet the Governor” (first airdate: October 5, 1955) debut episode of television's Screen Directors Playhouse “Tom and Jerry” (first airdate: November 30, 1955) episode of television's Screen Directors Playhouse An Affair to Remember (1957) also Producer, Co-story, Co-Screenwriter, Lyricist Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (1958) also Producer and Co-Screenwriter Satan Never Sleeps (1962) also Producer, Co-Screenwriter; also known as The Devil Never Sleeps (UK) Worth noting: Love Happy (1950) also known as Kleptomaniacs Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) lists this film, the Marx Brothers final feature, as having an uncredited directorial contribution by McCarey. All research points to the contrary. Though he was initially interested in directing it, McCarey never worked on the film. 
Select Bibliography Peter Bogdanovich,
“Leo McCarey”, Who The Devil Made It, Ballantine, New
York, 1997, pp. 379-436
Articles in Senses of Cinema Duck
Soup by
Michael Koller
Web Resources Compiled by the author and Albert Fung Leo
McCarey Retrospective. Dec 27, 2002 – January 9, 2003
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