Mitchell Leisen: The Best Director Nobody Knows

Mitchel Leisen's trademark signature

Sometimes history isn’t always fair. For example, there are movie directors and actors, who in their day, were enormously famous and successful, but for whatever reasons are almost forgotten today.

Paramount Director
Such is the case with Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972), a top director during Hollywood’s golden age. As a contract director at Paramount, he worked with all the top stars during that period: Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Jack Benny, Fredric March, Ray Milland, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck.

Fred MacMurray

Early Commercial Success
Best known for his elegant romantic comedies, Leisen also excelled at action and melodramatic films. Leisen got his start as an art director and costume designer. Working under famed director Cecil B. DeMille, Leisen received his one and only Academy Award nomination for his art direction of Dynamite in 1930.  He eventually worked his way up the ladder, directing his first film, Cradle Song, in 1933. The next year, Leisen directed two popular films Death Takes a Holiday and Murder at the Vanities. In 1935, he knocked one out of the park with Hands Across the Table. This landmark romantic comedy made Carole Lombard a superstar and established Fred MacMurray as a top leading man. During the rest of the 1930s, Leisen made some of the most commercial films at Paramount, including Swing High, Swing Low which was the studio’s biggest moneymaker in 1937. That same year, he directed the classic Easy Living starring Jean Arthur. Leisen topped off the decade with the delightful Midnight starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. This romantic comedy, one of the many great films released in 1939, unfortunately does not have the status of some of its less-worthy, but better-known contemporaries.

The Fabulous Forties

Claudette Colbert

During the next decade, Leisen produced more winners for Paramount. In 1940, he directed the classic Remember the Night starring Stanwyck and MacMurray. The sensitive Hold Back the Dawn (1941) provided Olivia de Haviland with one of her best film roles up to that time. Leisen’s masterful direction helped de Haviland receive her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination. Later in the decade, he would direct de Haviland in her Oscar-winning performance for To Each His Own (1946). In 1944, Leisen was trusted with directing two big-budget Technicolor productions: Lady in the Dark starring Ginger Rodgers and Frenchman’s Creek starring Joan Fontaine. Both films were huge commercial successes and both focused on the talent and beauty of the female leads. As Dona St. Columb, Joan Fontaine never looked more beautiful. In 1945 Leisen directed Paulette Goddard to one of her biggest commercial and critical successes in Kitty. After seeing Goddard in that film, French film director, Jean Renoir decided to cast her as the lead in Diary of a Chambermaid the following year.

Paramount's George Cukor
Leisen, like George Cukor, at MGM, had a reputation for his direction of women. A generation of leading ladies at Paramount owe Leisen a great debt. Many did their best work under his direction. For others, he crafted popular vehicles ideally tailored to their personalities.

TV Director
His success as a director continued into the early 1950s. Leisen’s last popular success was The Mating Season (1952) starring Gene Tierney, John Lund, and the Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter. After The Girl Most Likely in 1958, with movie projects nonexistent, Leisen turned his attention to television, directing episodes of popular shows like the Twilight Zone, Wagon Train, and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Of all the directors to come out of the studio system, Mitchell Leisen was one of the best. And one day, I hope, he’ll receive the recognition and honor he deserves.

The legacy of screenwriter John Michael Hayes

Best work with Hitchcock

Screenwriter John Michael Hayes did some of his best work while under the employ of director Alfred Hitchcock. Their four-film collaboration was short, but it produced three classic movies, including Rear Window  (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

Hayes’s screenplays for Hitchcock, bright and sophisticated when first produced, have remained fresh and contemporary, even in the been-there-done-that era in which we live today.

Rear window ethics

Sample this piece of dialogue between Jeff (James Stewart) and Stella (Thelma Ritter) from Rear Window.

Stella :You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.
Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?
Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about?" Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.

Few people before or since, have been able to match Hayes’s ear for authentic-sounding dialogue. Granted, having Stewart and Ritter mouth what you’ve written helps, but they had great material to work with to build their characterizations.

Three out of four isn't bad

The one picture that didn’t catch on with the public was The Trouble With Harry. It was too British in its black humor, according to Hitchcock (although apparently the British didn't like it much either). To Hitchcock fans, it's a fun film for a number of reasons. It features the film debut of Shirley MacLaine for one and a pre-Leave it to Beaver Jerry Mathers for another. It also has some beautiful cinematography and a pounding score by composer Bernard Herrmann. This was the beginning of a long professional relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann, that lasted until Marnie (1964).

After Hayes moved on and worked more independently, his services were in great demand. He wrote the screenplays for some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1950s and 1960s, including Peyton Place (1957), The Carpetbaggers (1964), and Nevada Smith (1966). Still, his most enduring work remains the films he wrote for the master of suspense.

Hayes’s last screenplay was for the film Iron Will (1994) starring Kevin Spacey. Hayes died in November 2008 at the age of 89. 

Classic film of the week: "A Letter to Three Wives" (1949)

A Letter to Three Wives (1949) is based on a novel by John Klempner. His novel was entitled A Letter to Five Wives. Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz thought the novel was too long and would be difficult to transfer to the screen. So, he shortened it to four wives and then shortened it again to three. Mankiewicz adapted the screenplay with author and screenwriter Vera Caspary (Laura).

The plot revolves around three wives who, just before going on a boat ride and picnic with some disadvantaged children, receive a letter from a society friend named Addie Ross. In the letter, Addie says she’s run off with one of their husbands. While the women spend the afternoon volunteering, each looks back on her marriage and wonders if hers is the husband who ran off with Addie.

Is it Deborah (Jeanne Crain) Bishop’s husband Brad (Jeffrey Lynn)? Deborah, a poor farm girl, met her husband in the Navy during World War II. Somewhat insecure and naïve, she thinks Brad is attracted to Addie because she is beautiful and sophisticated. Is it Rita (Ann Sothern) Phipps’s husband George (Kirk Douglas)? Rita has a career writing radio soap operas, the quality of which, her schoolteacher-husband disapproves. She wonders if her job, which brings in some much-needed cash, is somehow intimidating to George and ruining their marriage. Is it Lora Mae (Linda Darnell) Hollingsway’s husband Porter (Paul Douglas)? Lora Mae is a girl literally from the wrong side of the tracks who tries her best to marry up by marrying her boss, in part, to help provide for her widowed mother (the wonderful Connie Gilchrist) and younger sister Babe (Barbara Lawrence).

Like Mankiewicz’s All About Eve a year later, A Letter to Three Wives has witty dialogue delivered by a cast of pros. Crain, Sothern, and Darnell are all wonderful as the three wives, with Darnell a standout. As Lora Mae, Darnell has a tough exterior, but in many ways is more vulnerable than either Crain or Sothern. Her battles with Paul Douglas are wonderfully scripted; they make a very believable married couple struggling to keep their relationship together. Also believable are character actresses Gilchrist and Thelma Ritter as Sadie Dugan, Rita and George’s maid.

For Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949 was an extraordinary year. Not only did he win the Academy Award for Best Director, but he also won for Best Writing as well. Writing and directing was something Mankiewicz had always wanted to do and A Letter to Three Wives showcases Mankiewicz at the height of his creativity.


Classic Movie Man Trivia: Who was set to play the fourth wife before her part was cut?
Answer: Ann Baxter