Leo McCarey

His detractors would point him out as a director without his own style, with hardly any memorable moments in ‘artisanal’ films. Big mistake, product of a myopia unable to glimpse that Leo McCarey had the rare virtue of not giving himself importance. Since he didn’t pretend to be making masterpieces, he ended up, paradoxically, making them. He drank from his rich personal experience, and applied it to his stories. For example, his clumsiness in tying his bow tie led to several gags in his films with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy , a comic couple invented by him. If he found himself uninspired on a shoot, he would pause and play the piano, hoping for a happy idea. Non-conformist, rebellious and stubborn, McCarey admitted: “I like to go my own way.”

Leo started working in Hollywood in the 1920s as an assistant to Tod Browning . From him he learned to develop original plots for the screen. The following year, one day when Browning was ill, he directed Lon Chaney in a scene after discreetly asking him, “Lon, at least pretend you’re listening to me.” That same year he directed La estipe secreta . His meeting with the producer Hal Roach led him to comedic cinema, and between 1923 and 1929 his main task was to direct Fat and Skinny, in shorts made in 2 weeks.

In 1932, he stood out with Torero a la fuerza , a show-off vehicle for Eddie Cantor . Which brings him to the best Marx Brothers film: Goose Soup (1933), an amusing satire where he avoided his typical, and boring, musical numbers, with anthological gags like Groucho’s supposedly in front of the mirror. McCarey commented that the amazing thing about that film is “that it didn’t drive me crazy. They [the Marxes] were.” He also worked with WC Fields ( Journey , 1934) and Harold Lloyd ( The Milky Way , 1936). And with Charles Laughton he did the crazy Nobility obliges(1935), about an English butler in the west. Cary Grant ‘s first major comedy , The Puritan Rogue (1937), was made by McCarey. According to Garson Kanin , Grant adopted his comedic ways, in this and future films, from McCarey’s way of carrying himself; and in truth, both have a similar physique. Impressive was his drawing of the sorrows of the elderly in Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), which according to Orson Welles “would make the stones cry”, only comparable to Ozu ‘s Tokyo Tales . McCarey conceived the story after reading a story by Viña Delmar , in the midst of grief over the death of his father, whom he described as a true friend.

Peak of romanticism, he signed two versions of You and I , one from 1939 with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne , the other from 1957 with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr , of which he preferred the first. The idea was born from a discussion with his wife Stella, which was followed by a reconciliation trip by boat. The Empire State Building became a symbol of impossible encounters, since the romantic date of the protagonists in the emblematic building was fatally cut short by an accident. That despite his personal ups and downs, McCarey was a sincere Catholic, is proven by his two emotional titles ‘of priests and nuns’: Following my path (1944), Oscar for best film, with great works by Bing Crosby andBarry Fitzgerald as parish priests; and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), with the lovely ‘Sor’ Ingrid Bergman .

Jean Renoir said that “McCarey understands people, perhaps better than anyone else in Hollywood.” For John Ford he was “the first among us”, and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch agreed that he was “the best”. An idea of ​​his human stature is given by his interview with Peter Bogdanovich in the last year of his life, when he suffered from emphysema. He realized that the history of cinema needed his memories, and despite the difficulties to speak, he willingly agreed. Bogdanovich’s admiration for McCarey was reflected in Nickelodeon ‘s lead character Leo .