Background
Leo McCarey was born on 3 October 1898 in Los Angeles, California, United States.
Leo McCarey was born on 3 October 1898 in Los Angeles, California, United States.
He attended St. Joseph’s Catholic school and Los Angeles High School.
Society Secrets, an Eva Novak picture made for Universal, is now only an item in the reference books. McCarey claims to have begun as a “script girl,” so enthusiastic that he accepted work usually passed off on women. He dogged the steps of directors, learning whatever he could, and became assistant to Tod Browning: The Virgin of Stamboul (20) and Outside the Laic (21). In the mid-1920s, he made several comedy shorts with Charlie Chase and, in 1926, as production executive for Hal Roach, he was responsible for pairing the innocent Stan Laurel with the worldly Oliver Hardy. He made some of their finest shorts— including From Soup to Nuts and Putting Pants on Philip—developed one of the classic comedy teams (with all its undertones of scrawny mysticism and fat stupidity in mutually dependent disharmony), and discovered his own talent as a purveyor of visual gags.
One could easily list most early Laurel and Hardy films under McCareys name in that he effectively supervised everything they did from 1926 to 1929. Supervision, at that time and place, meant: "writing the story, cutting it, stringing the gags together, coordinating everything, screening the rushes, working on the editing, sending out the prints, working on the second editing when the preview reactions weren't good enough and even, from time to time, shooting sequences over again.
Laurel and Hardy refined McCareys intuition of comedy in disaster, and his use of the “slow burn," which runs all through his best work, even the much more sophisticated The Awful Truth. That film was made at Columbia as proof that the studio could manage without Frank Capra. It is an exuberant, tender comedy of feelings thrusting aside the proprieties of an imminent divorce. In Carv Grant and Irene Dunne, McCarey found the right balance of warmth and comedy technique. And as always with McCarey, it is our ability to see the joke coming and then watch the small improvement on expectation that constitutes the real impact. The “slow burn” is the deliciously delayed reaction to disaster on the part of a cl own. It works because the audience responds to this superb intellectual disdain of the quantity of custard hanging from the comic’s face. McCarey is best with the audience in the palm of his hand, encouraged to improvise by that confidence, but never betraying the characters in his story. His warmth consists of liking virtually everyone in his films, often against expectations. Even Rally Round the Flag, Boys!—an uneven movie—has moments of absolute glee, and it is typical of McCarey that he should make Paul Newman the straight man and Joan Collins so tipsilv funny.
Beneath that, however, there was too wide and coarse a vein of sentiment that produced movies such as the Grant character in The Awful Truth might have flinched at. That bizarre wartime interlude with Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as a Roman Catholic double act was carried off with skill, but they remain appalling projects. Good Sam and My Son John, equally, hardly seem the work of the man who established Laurel and Hardy. As with Capra, another gagman, there were ominous signs of solemnly pondered balderdash. My Son John, made at the time of McCarthy, is an obnoxious endorsement of patriotic and familial loyalty—the blunt doctrine of those playful priests.
The closer one looks at McCarey’s career, and his own memories of it, the more contradictions appear. For instance, McCarey reported that he was overwhelmed by the Marx Brothers on Duck Soup, and that he was a little sorry to have to fall back on Groucho’s verbal jokes. Whereas Duck Soup is the most audacious of Marx Brothers films, with a war sequence that shows how deeply their surrealism could penetrate the real world. And although Groucho was a dispenser of verbal jokes, it is lopsided to see him as nothing else. On the other hand, in Ruggles of Reel Gup McCarey drew out the comedian in Charles Laughton more subtly than anvone else. Even in the potentially crazy plot of Satan Never Sleeps, he manages to find the comedy—and find it in the tight anxiety of William Holden. Against that, he was clearly devoted to the adroit romantic comedy of Love Affair—remade as An Affair to Remember—and faintly regretted that Grant’s irony in the remake had offset the “beauty” of the original. Make Way for Tomorrow is his most serious and touching work, an uncommonly fond look at old age.