Happy Birthday, Leo McCarey! Born today in 1898 as Thomas Leo McCarey, this American screenwriter, producer and film director was involved in nearly two hundred features.
Today, he is perhaps best known for his light comedies and notable classics but who also made several popular romances and sentimental films.
Born in Los Angeles, California, McCarey, years later, was pressured by his father to study law at the University of South Carolina. He later graduated alma mater.
However, McCarey was so bad at law that on one case he was chased out of a courtroom. Afterwards, he left town and ended up in Hollywood.
McCarey also tried his hand at mining, boxing, and songwriting. This was before his career as an assistant to American film director, film actor, screenwriter and vaudeville performer Tod Browning ('The Unknown', 'Dracula', 'Freaks') at Universal Studios.
Browning convinced McCarey, despite his photogenic looks, to work on the creative side as a writer rather than as an actor.
American film and television producer, director, actor and studio executive Hal Roach later hired McCarey as a gagman in 1923. This was after he had impressed Roach with his sense of humor, following a game of handball together at a sports club.
During this period, McCarey was under contact at Hal Roach Studios between 1923 and 1929.
While there, McCarey supervised the production of about three hundred comedy shorts including two-reelers of Laurel and Hardy and American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director Charley Chase.
Early in his Hollywood career, McCarey honed his skills by working with some of the great names of comedy, including Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, and The Marx Brothers.
McCarey was responsible for the original teaming of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Roach, however, claimed it later and is now sometimes erroneously given credit.
McCarey and his wife Stella lived at 1014 North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, California, just two blocks away from Roach.
McCarey accused Cary Grant of ripping off his persona while shooting 'The Awful Truth', saying that the star's style and personality was just like his.
Nonetheless, McCarey and Grant worked together several times after that but never fully extinguished their long-standing antagonism resulting from McCarey's comments.
McCarey once said: ""I was a problem child, and problem children do the seemingly insane because they are trying to find out how to fit into the scheme of things."
McCarey is among an elite group of eight directors who have won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Original/Adapted).
The other directors include Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, James L. Brooks, Peter Jackson, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author Jean Renoir famously said, "Leo McCarey understood people better than any other director in Hollywood."
McCarey understood people, as Renoir had said, and was able to convey this knowledge through his rapport with actors.
His training in the pantomime of the silent era and method of spontaneous scene-building pushed his performers to physically expressive heights unmatched in classical Hollywood.
It is widely believed that many aspects of McCarey's films were based on his personal history.
Because of this he could compress a lifetime of repressed emotion into one delicate close-up of Ingrid Bergman's incandescent face, or indicate a priest's mild subversiveness by having Bing Crosby take a hop over a hedgerow.
These little gestures over the course of his career constructed entire inner worlds, so each character is recognizably human, recognizably flawed.
This made McCarey's comedies sad and his tragedies funny; that is, they contained the world in all its frustrating contradictions.
McCarey was considered one of the most handsome directors in Hollywood, and some said as good looking as Cary Grant, whom McCarey had directed in four films.
Despite all of his commercial and artistic successes, McCarey has been sadly neglected by film historians and scholars.
For his contributions to film and cinema, McCarey received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is located at 1500 Vine Street.
In 1990, the United States Library of Congress deemed 'Duck Soup' "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
In 1996, 'The Awful Truth' was selected for preservation in Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The film has also appeared on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs – #68 in 2000 and on AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions – #77 in 2002.
In 2010, 'Make Way for Tomorrow' was selected for preservation by the United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry.
McCarey believed that 'Make Way for Tomorrow' was his finest film. Orson Welles once said of the feature, "It would make a stone cry", and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film.
This was in his book-length series of interviews with American director, writer, actor, producer, critic and film historian Peter Bogdanovich ('Targets', 'The Last Picture Show'), "This Is Orson Welles".
In Newsweek, famed American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris ('The Thin Blue Line', Fast, Cheap & Out of Control') named 'Make Way for Tomorrow' his number one most important film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly".
American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism Andrew Sarris has said that McCarey "represents a principle of improvisation in the history of the American film."
Through most of his career, McCarey's filming method, rooted in the silents, was to drastically alter the story ideas, bits of business, and dialogue in the scripts previously provided to the studios and the actors. He would usually sit at a piano and doodle as the sometimes exasperated crew waited for inspiration.
While many of his contemporaries have been elevated to auteur status, McCarey's contributions to film have not sparked the same level of interest or esteem.
In addition, the apparent diversity of his films actually represents an interrelated web of various comedy genres and a pattern of antiheroic characters and themes.
While focusing mainly on screwball comedies during the 1930s, McCarey turned towards producing more socially conscious and overtly religious movies during the 1940s, ultimately finding success and acclaim in both genres. In 1944, he had the highest reported income in the United States.
Throughout his career, McCarey had directed six different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Ralph Bellamy, Irene Dunne, Maria Ouspenskaya, Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Ingrid Bergman.
Both Crosby and Fitzgerald won Oscars for their performances in the 1944 American black and white musical/comedy drama film ‘Going My Way’. This occurred at the 17th Academy Awards in mid-March 1945.
The film was the highest-grossing picture of 1944, earning $7.8 million domestically. It was also nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning seven, including Best Picture.
McCarey was, along with Frank Capra, one of the most popular, established and successful comedy directors of the pre-World War II era.
Unlike Capra, however, McCarey's success endured well after World War II, and like Capra, his work was still influencing filmmakers in the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, American journalist, writer, and filmmaker Nora Ephron's 1993 American drama/romance comedy film 'Sleepless in Seattle' made such frequent references to 'An Affair to Remember' that it gave the older film a whole new lease on life in revivals, cable television, and video.
Starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, the result was that it is probably McCarey's most popular and accessible film today.
According to McCarey's personal life, he was a devout Roman Catholic and Republican who was deeply concerned with social issues.
McCarey was driven to entertain any audience, from a single person to movie millions, always trying to tell a better story. His own, long overdue story is finally revealed in this biography about one of the most fascinating figures to ever come out of the Hollywood dream factory.
McCarey had been active from 1921–1962.
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