A Director to Remember
KARNICK, S.T.
A Director to Remember In Leo McCarey's films, small mistakes have big consequences. It's like that in life, too. BY S.T. KARNICK "Leo McCarey," said the French director Jean Renoir, "understands...
...McCarey's commercial success enabled him to graduate to more challenging subjects...
...and a close-up of a man shouting, "My soul to God...
...They stroll through Manhattan, and sit on a park bench to reminisce...
...Little sins—or, in the case of Good Sam (1948), little good deeds—have enormous consequences...
...The Awful Truth remains McCarey's most celebrated comedy and one of the best of the screwball genre that flourished in the 1930s...
...Egbert's wife apologizes for Egbert's drunkenness, "Je suis mortifee...
...Thirty years after his death from emphysema in 1969, however, McCarey seems almost forgotten by the new generations that have canonized other directors of his era: Hitchcock, Ford, Capra, Chaplin...
...The train leaves the station, and Lucy is left behind...
...As his stories matured, however, his narrative technique remained the same...
...She misses the meeting, and the couple gets together only after learning about what they really want out of life, in the film's more dramatic second half...
...Jerry, meanwhile, romances a ridiculous showgirl and then an heiress...
...events are linked together...
...Orson Welles said of McCarey's Make Wa^ f^^r Tomono'w (1937), "It would make a stone cry...
...The same pattern is followed in his more serious stories: Make Way for Tomorrow, Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), My Son John (1952), and Satan Never Sleeps (1962...
...After World War II, his popularity slipped, but An Affair to Remember (1957, a remake of his 1939 film Love Affair) proved that he could still please both audiences and critics...
...But of course it cannot last, for Bark must board the train for California...
...In Duck Soup (1933), Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx), president of Freedo-nia, loses his temper—which results in war with a neighboring country...
...Cora decides at last to send her father to her sister in California, ostensibly for his health...
...Even in the magical final sequences, they thank their benefactors but exhibit a detachment from them...
...If I should never see you again," he tells his wife of five decades, "you're the nicest person I ever met, Miss Brecken-ridge...
...Moreover, Michel, an artist and playboy, has never worked a day in his life, and Terry has been too fond of fine things such as pink champagne...
...The Awful Truth exemplifies the style McCarey carried through all his work...
...I'm traze amazed...
...and won Academy Awards as best director for The Awful Truth (1937), and for direction, picture, and original story for Going My Way (1944...
...McCarey lets the story unfold slowly, as the audience gradually realizes the children's selfishness while the parents try to fit into their new places...
...Karnick is editor of American Outlook, published by the Hudson Institute...
...Both Bogardus's planning and O'Mal-ley's improvisations are in service of a will greater than their own...
...A simple card game leads to a moving comic meditation on marriage, social class, snobbism, hypocrisy, democracy, and the meaning of equality...
...McCarey's 1929 Liberty provides a classic example of this structure...
...Mary's (1945) was the highest-grossing release in its studio's history—and critics loved them...
...In Indiscreet (1931), for example, a woman's chance meeting with her sister's former lover triggers a series of events that threatens to turn a romantic comedy into a tragedy...
...Meanwhile, George, at his wife's urging, resolves to send Lucy to a nursing home...
...Irene Dunne, who played the female lead, greatly enjoyed working with McCarey, but Cary Grant, the male lead, was less enthusiastic about the prospect, never having done this sort of sophisticated comedy before, and even offered to pay the studio (Columbia) to release him from the picture...
...The scene ends with shouts of "Hallelujah...
...It hardly seems possible that Bark and Lucy were perfectly wonderful, loving parents yet all their children turned out smarmy, distant, and selfish...
...He even included a prayer meeting in his Mae West film, Belle of the Nineties...
...McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow flopped at the box office, much to the director's disappointment...
...In Belle of the Nineties (1934), Tiger Kid (Roger Pryor) breaks up with Ruby Carter (Mae West) after hearing a false rumor of her infidelity—which leads to a fixed boxing match, a hotel fire, and a murder charge...
...The two films seem designed to show the interplay of law and grace, and McCarey's technique of improvising within a strong structure fits the theme perfectly...
...Upon this thin story, McCarey hangs a series of scenes that demonstrate the joys of spontaneity and improvisation...
...After finding their separate callings, Michel and Terry find each other once again...
...In Six of a Kind (1934), J. Pinkham Whinney (Charles Ruggles) reluctantly lets his wife (Mary Boland) save money on their second honeymoon by advertising for traveling companions (George Burns and Gracie Allen)—who cause a series of mishaps that culminates in the Whinneys' falling off a cliff...
...Terry, while looking up at the Empire State Building—"the nearest thing to Heaven" because her lover awaits her there— is hit by a car and crippled, perhaps permanently...
...They tell their grown children they have nowhere to go, and the dreary, middle-aged children decide to split the parents among them, with Bark going to hypochondriac daughter Cora's shabby New England home and Lucy staying in New York City with peevish, social-climbing George (Thomas Mitchell) and his family in a cramped Park Avenue apartment...
...And the bandleader plays a tune for them and smiles at them as they leave the floor...
...Upon finding out about their previous visit, the hotel manager invites them to be their guests for an evening of dinner and dancing...
...Rather than being character-driven or plot-driven, McCarey's stories are morally driven, each decision ineluctably leading to new circumstances...
...That's true in the world outside, as well, and it's why audiences remember McCarey's films, whether they remember his name or not...
...In The Kid from Spain (1932), Eddie Williams (Eddie Cantor) is placed, unconscious, in a girls' dormitory as a practical joke—which causes his expulsion from college and his posing as a bullfighter to escape an armed robbery charge...
...Fitzgibbon is too old to change but eventually sees the wisdom in O'Malley's ideas...
...The manager listens to their stories and laughs sympathetically...
...McCarey created the screen personae of Cary Grant and of Laurel and Hardy, pioneered the job of the writer-director, S.T...
...The parents' insularity and selfishness, through a long accumulation of minor transgressions, results in the insularity and selfishness of their children...
...While waiting for the decree to become final, Lucy moves in with her Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham), enjoys custody of their pet fox terrier, Mr...
...Anguished over the loss of her sweetheart, West asks her maid to pray for her, and as the revivalists sing "Pray chillun, and you'll be saved," West joins the chorus from a balcony above...
...McCarey's masterpiece is Make Way for Tomorrow, his own favorite...
...And McCarey's invariable technique of drawing large consequences from little causes suggests this has been the pattern of their lives together...
...Unlike most of his colleagues, Mc-Carey was able to continue this approach after graduating to feature films...
...Bark and Lucy are clearly good people whose lives were filled with good intentions, but they always seem interested only in each other...
...In Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), gruff Westerner Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles, in an excellent performance against type) gets drunk in Paris and plays poker, winning a butler, Mar-maduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton...
...Terry loses her physical freedom and her singing job...
...The screenplay for The Awful Truth, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the finished film...
...Studio head Harry Cohn refused, and Grant's career took off—though he never gave McCarey much credit for creating the film persona that became Grant's trademark...
...It begins, in true McCarey fashion, with a character making a small mistake...
...Bark and Lucy drink and dance together, sharing memories and a chaste kiss...
...Sister Benedict learns to unbend, teaching a boy to box and smiling as her young students rehearse the Christmas play they have written and never perform the same way twice...
...McCarey started out at the Hal Roach comedy factory in 1921, directing shorts featuring Charley Chase and Laurel and Hardy...
...O'Malley manipulates wealthy factory owner Horace I? Bogardus into donating his brand-new building to the school, but, as Sister Benedict says, it was built "in answer to our prayers...
...This results in a concerted and unwelcome effort to turn Egbert into a dignified gentleman...
...The fundamental narrative element of such films is the gag, and since character and motivation were of secondary importance, the progression of gags had to be extremely precise...
...McCarey's self-effacing style gave his films power and allows them to retain their force even today...
...The strangers they encounter are equally kind: The checkroom girl is delighted to meet them and introduces the couple to the manager...
...This is where McCarey's ineluctability of incidents rises to the level of art...
...Michel's losses, however, make him a better painter, and his art begins to sell...
...They test-drive a limousine, at the salesman's insistence, and when he realizes that they are in no position to buy, he merely laughs at his mistake and cheerfully drops them off at the hotel where they spent their honeymoon decades before...
...So they promise to meet in six months if they both manage to change enough to give marriage a chance...
...Finally, Lucy manipulates Jerry and two policemen into a situation that forces Jerry to admit his love for her and commit to fidelity...
...Jerry breaks up Lucy's romance, Lucy breaks up Jerry's, and they reconcile...
...And Terry's sufferings help her learn patience...
...In the world inside McCarey's movies, events have an inexorable logic by which our actions have gigantic consequences...
...Throughout this sequence Bark and Lucy treat each other with a kindness and courtesy that was probably old-fashioned then and is all but inconceivable now...
...But then, exactly midway through the film, it suddenly turns serious...
...The amount of prayer in McCarey's films is unique for a Hollywood director...
...But it's easy to see why audiences found the film discomfiting...
...Smith, meets Dan Lee-son and, after a few wisecracks, begins banging loudly on the piano while the dog "sings," making it impossible for Lucy to talk with her beau...
...In his two most popular films, Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St...
...His films made huge amounts of money—The Bells of St...
...The contrast between this kindness from strangers and the coldness of their family could not be more distinct—and yet is expressed quite subtly...
...Michel gives up his pride and takes a job painting signs...
...KARNICK "Leo McCarey," said the French director Jean Renoir, "understands ^ people better than anyone in Hollywood...
...In return, Lucy later pretends to be Jerry's vulgar sister, imitating a sexy nightclub act to stop Jerry's engagement: "There's a wind effect right here," she says, "but you'll just have to use your imagination...
...They accidentally put on each other's trousers but are forced to flee before they can exchange...
...Jerry, arriving at Lucy's house for his court-appointed visiting time with Mr...
...After a series of perfectly inevitable gags, they end up on top of a skyscraper under construction—^with a large, angry crab in Ollie's trousers...
...My soul to God...
...Smith, and takes up with neighbor Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), a cloddish but wealthy oilman from Oklahoma...
...Jerry Warriner brings his wife Lucy some California oranges—rather than ones from Florida, where he was supposed to have been, thereby exposing himself as a liar and adulterer and bringing on the couple's divorce...
...If the Cooper children are selfish and dreary, how did they get that way...
...it's a way of thinking...
...Mary's, McCarey further developed his notion of the ineluctability of incidents...
...Stan and Ollie, having escaped from prison, are in a car hastily changing their clothes...
...As the film progresses, McCarey steadily strips them of the worldly things that stand in the way of true happiness...
...They fall in love again...
...In the first, comic half of Love Affair, Terry McKay (Irene Dunne) meets Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer) aboard an ocean liner, and they fall in love, although each is already engaged to someone else...
...The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitably flows from it—like night follows day...
...Charles Laughton called him "the greatest comedy mind now living...
...Based loosely on a book by Vina Delmar, the film tells the story of Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bon-di), an elderly couple who lose their home of fifty years as the story begins...
...Before their final separation, however, Bark and Lucy meet in New York one last time...
...This isn't just the application of slapstick structure to feature films...
...In a 1969 interview, McCarey said, "I have a theory . . . which I call the ineluctability of incidents...
...None of this was mere habit or coincidence...
...Such scenes of gratuitous piety are common in McCarey's world...
...By 1945 he was the highest-paid man in the entire country...
...McCarey made up many of his films' best comic lines, bits of comic business, and even whole scenes, in the course of filming...
...The movies follow Father Chuck O'Malley (Bing Crosby) as he saves a rundown church and a failing school— his easygoing approach puts him in conflict with the more rigid Father Fitzgib-bon (Barry Fitzgerald) in the first film and Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) in the second...
...Ernst Lubitsch, the creator of brilliant, delightful screen comedies, said, "That boy McCarey is one of the best...
...And yet, that anonymity may be the strongest indicator of his greatness...
...Throughout his movies, trivial matters and small mistakes lead to enormous consequences...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 8
