Leo McCarey (1896–1969) was one of Hollywood’s most successful directors in the 30s and 40s, drawing on his great talent for comic and timing and a predilection for improvisation to make some of the most beautiful films of the classical Hollywood era, a unique blend of emotion, humor, vitality, and humanity. Yet despite this success and the admiration of such directorial colleagues as Frank Capra, Jean Eustache, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut, Leo McCarey is almost unknown today. We are showing a selection of his comprehensive oeuvre in collaboration with the Locarno Film Festival.
After graduating in law, Leo McCarey came to Hollywood in 1918, where he started out as a “script girl” (in his own words) for Tod Browning. In 1923, he moved to Hal Roach Studios, where he initially worked as a comedy writer for Our Gang and rapidly rose through the ranks to become a screenwriter and director. By 1929, he had made nearly 80 comedy shorts as a director or production supervisor in which situation comedy gradually become more important than slapstick gags. In 1927, McCarey formed the duo Laurel & Hardy, with whom he further developed the art of allowing a comedic exchange of blows to escalate with perfect timing, including the idea of the slow burn, whereby the effect of a joke is heightened by spinning it out ever longer. This great success paved the way for McCarey to direct features, which were equally defined by collaboration with famous comedians such as Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Ruggles, Mae West, W.C. Fields, and Harold Lloyd until the mid-1930s. Starting with RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935), McCarey went on to shoot increasingly personal works which connected romantic and dramatic elements with comedic ones. The idealism that found expression here, which is rooted in the belief in the power of setting a good example, places him firmly in the orbit of Frank Capra. The humanist McCarey, of whom Jean Renoir claimed that no one understood people better in Hollywood, created his characters with leniency, understanding, and empathy. “I like a touch of the fairy tale. Others should film the ugliness of the world. I don’t want to give people any worries”. Religious motifs became increasingly prominent in his work from the 40s onwards after he was involved in a serious car accident. Leo McCarey was no longer able to replicate his previous successes in the post-war era and only shot five more films until 1962, including two that were marked by the anti-Communist sentiment of the Cold War.
