Oscar Profile #18: Mitchell Leisen

Born in 1898 in Menominee, Michigan, James Mitchell Leisen was trained as an architect, but worked in Hollywood form his early twenties as a set designer, art director and costume designer. Associated throughout the 1920s with Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille, he designed the costumes for Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1920) and The Thief of Baghdad (1922) and DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). He also provided the art direction for DeMille’s Dynamite (1929), for which he won his only Oscar nomination, as well as Madam Satan (1930) and The Sign of the Cross. After apprenticing as DeMille’s Assistant Director on the latter two, he was given an opportunity to direct his first film for Paramount, 1933’s Cradle Song with Dorothea Wieck, which led to his acclaimed 1934 version of Death Takes a Holiday with Fredric March.

Moving on to comedy, he directed some of the best remembered screwball comedies of the 1930s, including Hands Across the Table with Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray; Easy Living with Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold and Ray Milland and Midnight with Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore and Mary Astor.

Expanding his repertoire to include melodrama, his 1940s output included the classic comedies, Remember the Night with Barbara Stanwyck and MacMurray; Take a Letter, Darling with Rosalind Russell and MacMurray and No Time for Love with Colbert and MacMurray; as well as the classic melodramas, Arise, My Love with Colbert and Ameche; Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer and Oscar nominated Olivia de Havilland; and To Each His Own with Oscar winner de Havilland and John Lund.

His last success was 1951’s The Mating Season with Gene Tierney and Lund, along with Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter. His last theatrical film was 1958’s The Girl Most Likely, with Jane Powell a disappointing musical remake of Garson Kanin’s Tom, Dick and Harry which had been a hit for Ginger Rogers in 1941.

Moving into television in 1959, he directed episodes of various TV series through 1967, including The Twilight Zone and Wagon Train.

When work as a director was no longer available, he became the proprietor of a nightclub in his later years. He died of heart failure in 1972 at the age of 74.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1934)

Maxwell Anderson and Gladys Lehman wrote the screenplay for this, the first of several screen adaptations of Alberto Casella’s classic Italian play starring Fredric March as Death in human form. Wanting to know what it feels like for humans to face death, he disguises himself as a mysterious visitor to a duke’s estate. While there he falls in love with the daughter (Evelyn Venable) of the Duke (Sir Guy Standing), who is to be his next conquest.

The film was beautifully photographed by Charles Lang exquisitely decorated and costumed by Hans Dreier and Edith Head and others, but with Liesen’s background you can bet he oversaw them as meticulously as he did the rest of the production.

Subsequent versions pale in comparison, especially the insufferable 1998 version, directed by Martin Brest with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, which was re-titled Meet Joe Black.

MIDNIGHT (1939)

Working from a screenplay which was the first collaboration of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, Leisen fashioned a screwball comedy that was as smart and sophisticated as it was low-down funny. Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore and Mary Astor were all at their comedic best in this Parisian Cinderella story. Once again Hans Dreiier and company provide the art direction and Irene supplies Colbert’s gowns, but Leisen’s deft touch is apparent in both areas of his well known expertise.

REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940)

Once again Paramount supplied Lesien with a top-notch screenwriter. This time it was Preston Sturges who supplied the carefully crafted script of this Christmas comedy in which D.A. Fred MacMurray feels sorry for shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck and has her released in his care so that she doesn’t have to spend the holidays in jail. He takes her to his mother’s home and, of course, she and her sister mistake her for a girlfriend. The inevitable happens and before you say Happy New Year the two fall in love for real. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray, in the first of four films they made together, bring a sense of believability to the material that might have stymied less talented stars. It helps that they are assisted by Beulah Bondi as MacMurray’s mother, and Elizabeth Patterson, who played his mother two years before in Sing You Sinners, as his aunt. Sterling Holloway also excels as the old ladies’ farmhand.

TO EACH HIS OWN (1946)

When we first see thirty-year-old Olivia de Havilland, she is playing a gruff well-to-do middle-aged spinster arguing with a British lord of the realm in the midst of the London blitz. The old charmer (Roland Culver) soon melts her reserve and she begins to tell him her life story, which we see in flashback.

When we next see de Havilland, she is an eighteen year-old innocent Indiana pharmacist’s daughter who falls madly in love with a dashing, daredevil World War pilot, played by John Lund. He is killed in the war, leaving her pregnant. Because of the mores of the time, she leaves town on a pretext and returns after giving birth, planning to “adopt” her baby, but fate intervenes and her best friend becomes his adoptive mother instead.

Flash forward to the “present”, and de Havilland, now a cosmetic magnate in London, is fussing about, getting her apartment ready for a visit from her friend’s “son”, on leave from the RAF.

Leisen’s perfect direction, and the performances of de Havilland, Lund (in a dual role as both the lover and the son), and Culver, lift this one far above the realm of an ordinary tearjerker. Miss de Havilland’s first Oscar is richly earned, as is the film’s perfect happy tears ending.

THE MATING SEASON (1951)

Gene Tierney and John Lund received top billing as newlyweds in The Mating Season and Miriam Hopkins as Tierney’s snooty mother was top-billed among the supporting cast, but the film belongs to fourth-billed Thelma Ritter as Lund’s self-sacrificing mother who poses as a maid in her daughter-in-law’s home to alternately hilarious and heartrending results.

Ritter is literally in almost every scene of the film, creating a character of great warmth and insight that earned the beloved actress the second of her six Oscar nominations. The film itself won Leisen the Bronze Bear (third place) award for Best Comedy at the Berlin Film Festival.