Sorry, I should have ''cleaned'' it up before posting. It's done now for anyone who wishes to read.flipp525 wrote:There's some wacky formatting going on in this article, Reza. Lots of pound signs, semi-colons, and ampersands making it very hard to read.
Mitchell Leisen Retrospective
(Scotland) Sunday Herald - 06 August 2006
Mitchell's library
He made some of the finest films of Hollywood's Golden Age but Mitchell Leisen's legacy has been overlooked. EIFF director Shane Danielsen profiles a perfectionist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THERE was a time, in Hollywood's so-called Golden Age, when the epithet journeyman director was not the thinly veiled criticism it signifies today. On the contrary, most directors were precisely that: contracted to a particular studio, and turning their talents to whatever projects, in whatever genre, they were assigned.
Then along came auteurism, the notion of the film director as the ''author'' of the work, and suddenly a new generation of critics (mostly French) began examining the filmographies of these indentured artisans; attempting to discover, within their body of work, the common themes, preoccupations and stylistic flourishes that would constitute an auteurist vision. A whole generation of film-makers; talents as diverse as Howard Hawks and Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Richard Fleischer; profited immensely from the attentions of the serious young men at Cahiers and Positif. Not to mention the chief beneficiaries of French theory, those reliable workmen John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.
Yet somehow, amid all this eager rediscovery, Mitchell Leisen was overlooked. It seems little short of inexplicable. He worked with some of the leading stars of his day, and some of the finest screenwriters; though two of these, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, themselves went on to direct (supposedly out of frustration with Leisen's handling of their scripts), and subsequently enjoyed a critical acclaim that far outstripped his own.
Part of the problem might have been the transparency of his technique. He was a craftsman, not a radical cineaste, and tended to eschew overt stylistic flourishes. If you've noticed, he told his unofficial biographer, David Chierichetti, ''the camera never moves arbitrarily in any of my films. It follows somebody across the room, or some kind of action; therefore you are not particularly conscious of the camera moving. Unnecessary camera movement destroys the concentration of the audience''. He preached quieter virtues: the integrity of performance, the rhythms of dialogue. Yet this immaculate sense of timing was ignored, and his versatility held against him; as time passed, he came to be regarded as a mere aesthete, a glorified set-designer, willing to subordinate dramaturgy to décor. (Wilder, in one of the many slurs he directed against Leisen, dismissed him as ''a window-dresser''.)
In fact, while he lent his films a definite élan, a visual sophistication lacking in the work of those other film-makers, he also imbued them with real heart, and a refreshing sense of the complexity, the ultimate unaccountability of human nature. Nobody's all good, or all bad ''not in my movies, at least'', he once said. ''There's a little bad in the best of us and a little good in the worst of us''.
Leisen was a company man, contracted to Paramount for virtually the length of his career; only at the end, as his fortunes dwindled and work grew scarce, did he swallow his pride, and move to MGM, an experience he professed to abhor. Perhaps it jangled his delicate sensibilities.
Originally a costume designer for Cecil B DeMille, and then an art director, he was a creature of exquisite taste (a criticism that his detractors would frequently level against him) and apparently settled habits: he preferred to work in genres he enjoyed; romantic comedy, mostly, with an occasional detour into period costume; and with the same actors: Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard. Indeed, had the latter not died so prematurely, it's likely she would have become the director's muse: hers was a rare talent, more than capable of reconciling his instincts for comedy and pathos.
This disjunction is worth noting. If he was, in his professional life, a creature of habit, his films were quite different: restless, mercurial, capable of shifting genre even in the transition between two scenes. His classic late-1930s comedies are given to shifting gear, detouring into sudden, startling realism or melodrama; those of the 1940s are much more straightforward, at least in terms of genre, and accordingly, much less interesting.
A psychologically inclined critic might attribute the tonal complexity of Leisen's films to his own divided nature. He was bisexual by inclination, and his reputation in the early 1920s as a ladies' man, later translated to an equally ardent pursuit of young men (his conquests were rumoured to have included actor Ramon Navarro and songwriter Ivor Novello). In 1927 he married mezzo-soprano Stella Yeager, aka Sondra Gahle, but theirs seems to have been a union in name only, and she spent a number of years in Paris, pursuing her singing career.
The true love of his life, many claimed, was one Natalie Visart, a costume designer with whom he conducted a long, clandestine affair (her Roman Catholicism would not allow her to marry him), and who reportedly fell pregnant with his child in 1943, a labour that ended with her miscarriage. However, he also lived for some years with Billy Daniels, a dancer and choreographer, in a ménage astonishingly out by the standards of the day. This complicated sexuality ensured a strong rapport with a number of bisexual actresses (Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich); he was, essentially, regarded as a woman's director. But it also served to alienate him from the Hollywood mainstream, still conservative to the point of homophobia.
Towards the end of his life, Leisen's star waned, in the manner of so many Golden Age directors. His health, fragile after a number of heart attacks, declined still further. And his reputation for perfec- tionism, his unwillingness to compromise, saw him fall out of favour with the big studios.
Desperate for work, he overcame his initial distaste for the medium and sought work in television, overseeing episodes of The GE Theatre, Shirley Temple's Storybook and The Twilight Zone; but after three fairly busy years, he was hospitalised with emphysema and bleeding ulcers. Later, he approached old colleague Fred MacMurray to work on his series My Three Sons, but despite the long and successful working partnership they had enjoyed, the actor never even bothered to respond to his telegram. ''He was, well, you know, a homosexual'', MacMurray later told David Chierichetti, ''with the three young boys we had working on the show, I just didn't think it was right''.)
Soon he was too infirm to work, and after having his left leg amputated for gangrene, he spent the final years of his life at the Motion Picture Country Home in California, where he was occasionally visited by friends from the old days: Ray Milland, Myrna Loy, Dorothy Lamour and Olivia de Havilland. He died there, of coronary disease, in October 1972, and while a retrospective of his work was held at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1998, his name is barely remembered today.
Many of his finest films have yet to appear on DVD; Chierichetti's oral history, first published in 1973, remains the sole reference work. Easy Living is perhaps his best-known title, a fixture in repertory houses around the world, but even then, the film owes its reputation more to the canonisation of its screenwriter (Preston Sturges), than to the estimation of its director. Few falls from grace have been so complete, or so unfair.
David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary Of Cinema, encapsulated Leisen's dilemma: his films were, he said, ''too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour to be satires''. Destined to be misunderstood, they endure as illustrations of a creative vision as refined as it was unclassifiable. In his art, as in his life, Mitchell Leisen was never content to be one thing only.
The Mitchell Leisen retrospective, featuring 13 of his films, runs August 14-26
Mitchell's library
He made some of the finest films of Hollywood's Golden Age but Mitchell Leisen's legacy has been overlooked. EIFF director Shane Danielsen profiles a perfectionist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THERE was a time, in Hollywood's so-called Golden Age, when the epithet journeyman director was not the thinly veiled criticism it signifies today. On the contrary, most directors were precisely that: contracted to a particular studio, and turning their talents to whatever projects, in whatever genre, they were assigned.
Then along came auteurism, the notion of the film director as the ''author'' of the work, and suddenly a new generation of critics (mostly French) began examining the filmographies of these indentured artisans; attempting to discover, within their body of work, the common themes, preoccupations and stylistic flourishes that would constitute an auteurist vision. A whole generation of film-makers; talents as diverse as Howard Hawks and Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Richard Fleischer; profited immensely from the attentions of the serious young men at Cahiers and Positif. Not to mention the chief beneficiaries of French theory, those reliable workmen John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.
Yet somehow, amid all this eager rediscovery, Mitchell Leisen was overlooked. It seems little short of inexplicable. He worked with some of the leading stars of his day, and some of the finest screenwriters; though two of these, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, themselves went on to direct (supposedly out of frustration with Leisen's handling of their scripts), and subsequently enjoyed a critical acclaim that far outstripped his own.
Part of the problem might have been the transparency of his technique. He was a craftsman, not a radical cineaste, and tended to eschew overt stylistic flourishes. If you've noticed, he told his unofficial biographer, David Chierichetti, ''the camera never moves arbitrarily in any of my films. It follows somebody across the room, or some kind of action; therefore you are not particularly conscious of the camera moving. Unnecessary camera movement destroys the concentration of the audience''. He preached quieter virtues: the integrity of performance, the rhythms of dialogue. Yet this immaculate sense of timing was ignored, and his versatility held against him; as time passed, he came to be regarded as a mere aesthete, a glorified set-designer, willing to subordinate dramaturgy to décor. (Wilder, in one of the many slurs he directed against Leisen, dismissed him as ''a window-dresser''.)
In fact, while he lent his films a definite élan, a visual sophistication lacking in the work of those other film-makers, he also imbued them with real heart, and a refreshing sense of the complexity, the ultimate unaccountability of human nature. Nobody's all good, or all bad ''not in my movies, at least'', he once said. ''There's a little bad in the best of us and a little good in the worst of us''.
Leisen was a company man, contracted to Paramount for virtually the length of his career; only at the end, as his fortunes dwindled and work grew scarce, did he swallow his pride, and move to MGM, an experience he professed to abhor. Perhaps it jangled his delicate sensibilities.
Originally a costume designer for Cecil B DeMille, and then an art director, he was a creature of exquisite taste (a criticism that his detractors would frequently level against him) and apparently settled habits: he preferred to work in genres he enjoyed; romantic comedy, mostly, with an occasional detour into period costume; and with the same actors: Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard. Indeed, had the latter not died so prematurely, it's likely she would have become the director's muse: hers was a rare talent, more than capable of reconciling his instincts for comedy and pathos.
This disjunction is worth noting. If he was, in his professional life, a creature of habit, his films were quite different: restless, mercurial, capable of shifting genre even in the transition between two scenes. His classic late-1930s comedies are given to shifting gear, detouring into sudden, startling realism or melodrama; those of the 1940s are much more straightforward, at least in terms of genre, and accordingly, much less interesting.
A psychologically inclined critic might attribute the tonal complexity of Leisen's films to his own divided nature. He was bisexual by inclination, and his reputation in the early 1920s as a ladies' man, later translated to an equally ardent pursuit of young men (his conquests were rumoured to have included actor Ramon Navarro and songwriter Ivor Novello). In 1927 he married mezzo-soprano Stella Yeager, aka Sondra Gahle, but theirs seems to have been a union in name only, and she spent a number of years in Paris, pursuing her singing career.
The true love of his life, many claimed, was one Natalie Visart, a costume designer with whom he conducted a long, clandestine affair (her Roman Catholicism would not allow her to marry him), and who reportedly fell pregnant with his child in 1943, a labour that ended with her miscarriage. However, he also lived for some years with Billy Daniels, a dancer and choreographer, in a ménage astonishingly out by the standards of the day. This complicated sexuality ensured a strong rapport with a number of bisexual actresses (Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich); he was, essentially, regarded as a woman's director. But it also served to alienate him from the Hollywood mainstream, still conservative to the point of homophobia.
Towards the end of his life, Leisen's star waned, in the manner of so many Golden Age directors. His health, fragile after a number of heart attacks, declined still further. And his reputation for perfec- tionism, his unwillingness to compromise, saw him fall out of favour with the big studios.
Desperate for work, he overcame his initial distaste for the medium and sought work in television, overseeing episodes of The GE Theatre, Shirley Temple's Storybook and The Twilight Zone; but after three fairly busy years, he was hospitalised with emphysema and bleeding ulcers. Later, he approached old colleague Fred MacMurray to work on his series My Three Sons, but despite the long and successful working partnership they had enjoyed, the actor never even bothered to respond to his telegram. ''He was, well, you know, a homosexual'', MacMurray later told David Chierichetti, ''with the three young boys we had working on the show, I just didn't think it was right''.)
Soon he was too infirm to work, and after having his left leg amputated for gangrene, he spent the final years of his life at the Motion Picture Country Home in California, where he was occasionally visited by friends from the old days: Ray Milland, Myrna Loy, Dorothy Lamour and Olivia de Havilland. He died there, of coronary disease, in October 1972, and while a retrospective of his work was held at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1998, his name is barely remembered today.
Many of his finest films have yet to appear on DVD; Chierichetti's oral history, first published in 1973, remains the sole reference work. Easy Living is perhaps his best-known title, a fixture in repertory houses around the world, but even then, the film owes its reputation more to the canonisation of its screenwriter (Preston Sturges), than to the estimation of its director. Few falls from grace have been so complete, or so unfair.
David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary Of Cinema, encapsulated Leisen's dilemma: his films were, he said, ''too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour to be satires''. Destined to be misunderstood, they endure as illustrations of a creative vision as refined as it was unclassifiable. In his art, as in his life, Mitchell Leisen was never content to be one thing only.
The Mitchell Leisen retrospective, featuring 13 of his films, runs August 14-26