Who, apart from a few hardcore film buffs, is still familiar with the name Mitchell Leisen nowadays? Historians of Hollywood will recognise him as a successful comedy director of the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Light comedy is a state of mind’, is how he described the character of his films. Leisen was originally a costume and set designer before turning to directing; he was famous for the elegance of his productions and played a decisive role in launching the careers of Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland and Fred MacMurray.
One of his best-known films bears the fitting title Easy Living (1937), based on a screenplay by Preston Sturges. Furious at his wife’s extravagance, the banker J.D. Ball (Edward Arnold) throws her mink coat from the balcony of his New York penthouse. It lands on Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), an underpaid editor at a youth magazine, and thus begins a classic ‘clothes make the man’ story. In a lunch counter café – ultra-modern for its time – Mary meets the family’s son (Ray Milland), who works there as a waiter, disgusted by his father’s wealth. She looks elegant but is completely broke; he is shabbily dressed but is in fact a billionaire. When the vending machine goes haywire, it provides the opportunity for a magnificent slapstick sequence in which everything goes to pieces.
The play on the contrast between rich and poor was a popular theme in classic Hollywood cinema. Naturally, the secretary and the millionaire heir fall in love. With innovative ideas, the son turns his stubborn father’s traditional business on its head, and the father eventually comes round to his son’s way of thinking. In this respect, Easy Living manages to resolve what the American film historian Thomas Schatz has described as the dilemma of screwball comedies: ‘reconciling class differences’.
In Hold Back the Dawn (The Golden Gate, 1941), based on a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, Charles Boyer plays the Romanian dancer and gigolo Georges Iscovescu, who is stranded in a Mexican border town and hopes to gain entry to the USA by marrying the sexually inexperienced American teacher Emily Brown (Olivia de Havilland). Everything goes according to plan; George has no trouble wrapping the naïve teacher around his little finger with romantic declarations of love. Until, suddenly, his former dance partner Anita (Paulette Goddard) turns up and demands what she is entitled to. Despite the comedic tone, the bitter reality of an immigration policy based on national quotas shines through. As a Romanian, Georges has no chance of entering the US legally. At the same time, one is also reminded of the violent methods of the Trump administration. The narrative structure is noteworthy. Whilst on a tour of the Paramount Studios lot, Georges gains access to a set where Mitchell Leisen is currently directing a film shoot, and tells him his story, which he proposes as an idea for a film. Everything else is then told as a flashback.
In Practically Yours (1944), Mitchell Leisen uses the tools of comedy to debunk the cult surrounding a supposed war hero. Fred MacMurray plays the fighter pilot Daniel, who is said to have sunk a Japanese aircraft carrier during a heroic kamikaze mission, losing his life in the process. His last words are addressed to ‘Piggy’, his dog. Due to an acoustic misunderstanding, they are heard as ‘Peggy’, the name of his colleague at a typewriter factory (Claudette Colbert). A major media campaign celebrates the deceased hero and his grieving sweetheart. When the dead man unexpectedly reappears, the company boss gets everything ready for a wedding in the near future.
The misunderstanding soon comes to light; Peggy is shocked and wants to have nothing more to do with the supposed hero. It turned out it wasn’t Daniel who sank the aircraft carrier after all, but the ‘loving couple’ have to put on a brave face and play along with the absurd charade. In the end, the two get closer on a personal level and a happy ending smooths things over. The theme of the wrongly celebrated war hero is reminiscent of Preston Sturges’ satire ‘Hail the Conquering Hero’ (1944), made in the same year. Here, an entire small town celebrates the homecoming hero, whose comrades have played a prank on him. One would not really have expected such subtle subversion of patriotic hero stories from Hollywood. It shows, that films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket – which take a critical look at the Vietnam War – had historical predecessors.