This Day in Film History (Birth of Leo McCarey, The Man Behind Stan, Ollie, and Cary)

October 3, 1898—Leo McCarey, a three-time Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and producer whose films reflected his own considerable charm and humor, was born in Los Angeles, Calif.
 

McCarey created the rom-com-as-weepie with Love Affair and its high-gloss color remake, An Affair to Remember (and thus, indirectly inspired Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle); helmed one of the archetypal “screwball comedies,” The Awful Truth; and brought together Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as perhaps film’s most successful comedy pair.

The son of an Irish-American boxing promoter, McCarey, in his waggish recollections, stumbled into Hollywood. Having failed as a copper miner, vaudeville songwriter, and middleweight slugger, he became a lawyer at the urging of his father, only to find this, too, an uncongenial pursuit.

Then one day, in a divorce action, the young lawyer, finding out his client was a wife-beater, quit the case, whereupon he was chased out of the courtroom and down the street. “After about three blocks, I lost him and I kept running out to Hollywood.” (The young admirer to whom he related this anecdote, Peter Bogdanovich, used it to kick off his own valentine to the early movie industry, Nickelodeon, even getting his hero a name—Leo Hartigan—that echoed McCarey’s.)

To his vast amusement, McCarey discovered that the skills he had developed to sway juries also impressed studio executives. “Because of my legal education I had developed quite a vocabulary,” he recalled to Bogdanovich, in an interview collected in the latter's Who the Devil Made It, “and the heads of the studios in those days didn’t have the advantage of advanced education. And they thought I was brilliant because I used big words. So they made a director out of me at the end of the picture! I was script girl and at the end of the picture, they were measuring me for jodhpurs!”

Working with comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers honed McCarey's ability to enhance scripts through improvisation, and to coax expert performances from actors who could bedevil other directors.

Many colleagues regarded McCarey as handsome, humorous and suave as Cary Grant, but the two worked uneasily if productively on four films: The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Once Upon a Honeymoon, and An Affair to Remember. “Of the sixteen hours a day when he's awake I don't think there are twenty minutes when he is not complaining,” the director griped. “I've never seen a man more constantly in turmoil.” 

Though readily acknowledging that the actor’s sense of humor was “extraordinary,” McCarey could not really get over that Grant had tried to buy his way out of The Awful Truth and that, during the making of that movie (which, incidentally, ended up winning winning McCarey a Best Director Oscar), Grant had tried to imitate his style and personality. 

As that complaint suggests, McCarey could nurse a grudge for years—so much so that, he told fellow director Edward Dmytryk, he had charged Paramount “a half-million more than it should” because the studio threw him off the lot the moment a picture he was making for them was completed.

At the same time, McCarey was friendly, without the neuroses endemic to the industry, and a devout Roman Catholic who made what became, in effect, great recruitment films for the priesthood and sisterhood, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, both starring Bing Crosby.

The sunny Going My Way came out the same year (1944) as one of the darkest of all film noirs, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. When the Oscars came, Going My Way almost totally eclipsed its rival, and McCarey himself picked up awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Wilder didn't take his losses well at all: as McCarey walked up to collect his Best Director statuette, his rival stuck his foot out to trip him!

In his last two decades, McCarey’s productivity slackened because his health became more uncertain. A problem he had had with alcohol for years was now compounded by an addiction to painkillers he had developed after an auto accident in 1940. His reputation also took a hit after the release of My Son John (1952), an almost hilariously hysterical red-baiting film released at the zenith of the McCarthy era, and his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But at his best, he could make listeners guffaw, cry, and do both in quite succession, including his two with Bing Crosby, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, and his own personal favorite, Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple forced to live on the tender mercies of their not-so-helpful adult children. In the gallery of great directors that Bogdanovich interviewed for Who the Devil Made It--including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and Otto Preminger--McCarey comes across as the funniest and most humane.