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Leo McCarey (October 3, 1898 - July 5, 1969) was a movie director, screenwriter and producer. Witty and ironic, Leo McCarey is one of the greatest directors of the history of Movie. During his lifetime he was involved in almost 200 movies, expecially comedies, where he demonstrated his great elegance and his fine sense of humour.
He come into movie business as an assistant director to Tod Browning in 1920, but honed his skills at the Hal Roach Studio for the rest of that decade. Hired by Roach in 1923, McCarey initially wrote gags for Our Gang series and other studio stars, then produced and directed shorts-including a string of inventive and hilarious two-reelers with Charley Chase. It was while at Roach that McCarey teamed Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy together for the first time, thus creating one of the most enduring comedy teams of all time. He only officially appeared as director of the duo shorts We Faw Down (1928), Liberty (1929) and Wrong Again (1929), but he wrote also several pictures of the team. By that time he was vice-president of production for the entire studio.
In the sound era McCarey ventured into feature-film directing and, after some fairly good tentatives, he begun to realized some masterpiece of comedy. He subsequently worked with many of the greatest comedic talents in movies, including Eddie Cantor (1932's The Kid From Spain), the Marx Brothers (1933's Duck Soup, an extraordinary satirical picture about the stupidity of the war), W.C. Fields (1934's Six of a Kind), Mae West (1934's Belle of the Nineties) and Harold Lloyd (1936's The Milky Way). He won his first Best Director Oscar for his inspired handling of The Awful Truth (1937, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), one of the best hironical screwball comedies ever made.
His work also had a serious side; McCarey was a devout Catholic and deeply concerned with social issues. During the 1940s, his work became more serious - McCarey was concerned with the battles that had yet to be fought for human dignity, after World War II was won - but this only seemed to make his work more popular. In 1944 he realized Going My Way, a story about an enterprising priest, the youthful Father Chuck O'Malley, played by Bing Crosby. It shows eventually that it is necessary in life to learn to accept everyone around you, regardless of faults and flaws of character, and to help your fellow people find their strengths and develop them in order to serve humanity. McCarey's share in the profits of this film gave McCarey the highest reported income in the U.S. for the year 1944, and its follow-up, The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), which was made by McCarey's own production company, was equally successful.
After the war McCarey's vision darkened, and the public reacted negatively. My Son, John (1952), an overblown anti-Communist diatribe, failed at the box office, but five years later he was back on track, as co-author, producer, and director of An Affair to Remember, a delightful romantic comedy with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Then he directed a very great comedy, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, which tells the story about the furor caused by an attempt to open an army missile base in a small community. McCarey shows astonishing energy, verve, and radicalism with the greater part of the film constituting a wholehearted assault upon American values and lifestyles the horror of commuting, the modern nuclear family, sexual frustration, the womans search for meaning in pointless community work, bureaucracy, the military, the desire to escape into outer space. Some years later he directed his last picture, the unsatisfactory Satan Never Sleeps (1962).
The great Leo McCarey died seven years later for emphysema.
French director Jean Renoir once said that no other Hollywood director understood people better than Leo McCarey. How can we contradict him...
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