Mitchell Leisen : Reappraisal of a Queer Filmmaker in Hollywood

 

Sometimes, a writing project can take a life of its own, overwhelming you. That's what happened to me when trying to write about Old Hollywood director Mitchell Leisen. Initially, I pitched this piece to Nathaniel as a way of spotlighting an oft-forgotten talent whose best films feature in one of the Criterion Channel's latest collections. Later, as our 1946 journey began, the piece gained new value as a profile of the man who directed that year's Best Actress champion, Olivia de Havilland in To Each His Own. However, what most surprised me was how Leisen's story correlates with queer history and everything we celebrate and mourn during Pride month.
 
As I went down a rabbit hole of research, the marvelous writings of Mark Rappaport, David Melville, Farran Nehme, and others revealed the complex case. That of an acclaimed queer artist whose legacy was systematically tarnished, if not downright erased, in a gesture of barely concealed homophobia…
 
James Mitchell Leisen was born into an affluent middle-class American family in 1898, right at the twilight of the 19th century. Suburban peace and familial security weren't lasting factors of his childhood, however. By the time Leisen was five, his parents were divorced. Burdened with a club foot, the young man wasn't prone to sporting hobbies, preferring to spend his days looking after flowers or staging great theatrical productions starring his favorite toys on sets of painted paper. During World War I, he served as a drill officer and later found work related to architectural studies. Still, an office job quickly bored young Mitchell, inspiring him to leave his Chicago home to go live in the developing film industry town of Hollywood.
 
During a dinner party, he caught the attention of Jeannie MacPherson, a movie screenwriter who worked with Cecil B. DeMille. Through this acquaintance, Leisen was hired to devise some outrageous Ancient World outfits for Gloria Swanson to model in DeMille's latest period epic Male and Female. It's important to note that while Leisen's career in Tinseltown started in the costume department, the man was not a trained dressmaker. Learning as he worked, Leisen accumulated screen credits with vertiginous speed. By the mid-1920s, he was a well-established designer, having dressed Swanson, Mary Pickford, Natacha Rambova, Douglas Fairbanks, and many other greats.
 
He was better equipped to designing sets, and that's what he started doing once his ambitions outgrew the work of a costume designer. From then on, he became Cecil B. DeMille's go-to art director, devising the look of such opulent productions as the deliriously vulgar Madam Satan and the orgiastic hedonism of The Sign of the Cross. You got to love the excess of the Pre-Code period and its cinema's drunken need to shock, seduce, inflame the humors with jumping hormones. It's a pity that the majority of Leisen's career as a director happened after the implementation of the new Hays Code of 1934. One wonders what lewd camp spectacles he would have created otherwise. He directed some extravagant pictures, nonetheless.

 
The man's taste for grand imagery was, in part, a product of De Mille's tutelage. Leisen learned how to run a movie shoot and use the camera with as much ease as he already employed the pencil. Since he started in the silents, Leisen learned filmmaking as an essentially visual artform. DeMille reportedly told him: "The camera has no ears. If you want to say it, get it on the screen." Leisen would take the words to heart while philtering his mentor's ethos through an aesthetic more attuned to gentle grace and elegance than bombast. Still, the beginning of his career as a director happened in fits and starts, through experiments and a bit of corporate pressure.
 
During the transition to the talkies, many studios started importing talent from the stage - not only actors but writers and directors, too. Stuart Walker was a Broadway professional who Paramount hired to direct a couple of new movies starring up-and-coming stars Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Cary Grant, and Carole Lombard. To help the movie novice, the studios designated Leisen as a co-director. Quickly, it became apparent that DeMille's former art director was calling all the shots and the studio decided to give him a chance to helm a picture solo. That production was Cradle Song, a 1933 flick about a nun's half-romantic, half-maternal fixation on a pretty young orphan. The lead was played by Leontine Sagan, star of one of the most notable queer films of the 1930s, German lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform. From the start, the cinema of Mitchell Leisen was brimming with queerness.

 
The next year, Leisen traded the nun's habit for the Grim Reaper's shroud, adapting Death Takes a Holiday from stage to screen. Modern audiences will be more familiar with its 1998 remake Meet Joe Black, but it should be noted that the original is much better. In any case, the central romance is a morbid jewel of bizarre attractions. Fredric March's Death behaves as an aloof entity whose perspective is decidedly inhuman, while his love interest, Evelyn Venable's Grazia, is a lady with a fixation on the beyond that verges on Byronic. The end could be seen as a metaphor for suicide or the sublimation of desire over life. It represents the human rendition to a love so strange, yet so strong, that it transcends the natural order. Again, it's not difficult to find queer readings in Leisen's movies.
 
Following those early efforts came a period in his filmography defined by the then very popular screwball comedy genre. What made Leisen's examples of the genre so different from the majority was how he sacrificed frenetic energy in favor of glossy sorrow. There's an undercurrent of sadness shaping every laugh into something world-wearier and more complicated. Furthermore, his close-ups and gliding camera motions confer a smooth elegance to the proceedings, often filming faces within frames of draped couture or hazy reflections. In Hands Across the Table, a drunken cab ride feels like a predecessor of In the Mood for Love as Carole Lombard's romantic disappointment, her unfulfilled yearning, shines in close-up before a background of fuzzy streetlights.

 
In Easy Living, Leisen's ultimate masterpiece, a romantic conversation between Jean Arthur and Ray Milland is staged in a bed, the camera looking down at the two actors. Upturned tulle skirtings, silken sheets, fuzzy covers, and a sequined bodice make the shot appear gauzily unreal. It's almost as if, in their amorous interaction, the leads have opened a portal to another cinematic dimension. It's a portrayal of blossoming intimacy that's as beautiful as it is viscerally affecting. While scripted by Preston Sturges, Easy Living's less hurried and more sincere than any of that man's brilliant directorial efforts. Unfortunately, the future maker of The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels didn't enjoy the edits Leisen did to his work, the streamlining of plot points, the pruning of excisable minor characters.
 
Preston Sturges, who wrote other films by Leisen including Remember the Night, would call him 'an interior decorator who couldn't direct', more interested in frocks than good screenwriting. He went so far as to name the director as one of the people whose incompetence made him want to direct his own scripts. Unfortunately for Leisen, Sturges wasn't the only one who felt this way. As the war years approached, Paramount assigned some scripts by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett to Leisen, starting a tumultuous partnership that left no one happy. When David Chierichetti wrote Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director, he interviewed several people who had worked with the man, including Wilder. He had this to say:
 
        “All he did was he fucked up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you. Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don't knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen's problem was that he was a stupid fairy".

 
One need not be a genius to read homophobia in Wilder's words or Sturges' pithy comments. For many, their horrible words became the most-known judgments of Leisen’s entire career and worth as a filmmaker. Wilder’s dislike was especially destructive. Also, if you assume Mitchell Leisen made extensive efforts to hide his homosexuality from colleagues (as many more did in the days long before gay liberation), let me assure you that wasn’t the case.
 
Leisen was married in 1927 to Sondra Gahle, an aspiring opera singer, but the director made no secret of his non-heteronormative proclivities. He and his wife often lived in separate cities, sometimes separate continents, and some dear confidants such as Carole Lombard often called Leisen their girlfriend. Furthermore, Leisen had multiple affairs with men. The most known liaison was with ballet dancer Billy Daniels, whom he met during the filming of The Big Broadcast of 1938, when Daniels was playing a sailor. The relationship lasted decades, and Leisen went as far as starting a company with his paramour to promote the younger man's artistic pursuits. If Leisen's movies weren't as successful, this might have posed a problem, but Paramount made sure to protect their cash cow, who, by the beginning of the 40s, was one of their more lucrative – and better paid – directors.

 
It's also exceedingly hard to look at Leisen's filmography and ignore the elements of gay camp or the blatant transgressions of gender norms littered throughout Murder at the Vanities is so salacious in its confections of glittery eroticism it dives headfirst into camp, crashing magnificently on its face. There's a passage where women pose inside giant cosmetic products, a romantic hymn to marijuana, a male lead showing off his body in a shredded romper to a gaggle of thirsty chorus girls. Frenchman's Creek is another blatant example, telling the story of a noblewoman turned pirate mistress who saves her beloved by cross-dressing as a man. Later on, there's also a pirate ballet brimming with drag extravagance. One can see why straight-laced critics would sneer at such excess, but I, for one, revel in it. The man didn't hide that he was queer, whether he was attending a party or directing a movie.
 
Despite the whiffs of machismo and prejudiced hate, the most significant source of Wilder's venomous ire is said to have been Leisen's handling of 1941's Hold Back the Dawn. Considering the flick's final form, it's easy to see where Leisen twisted his screenwriter's acidic misanthropy into a more melancholic sense of forlorn, deep yearning, and bruised compassion. While Wilder might have made a border town's criminals, tricksters, and lowlifes into subjects of vicious cynicism, Leisen extends generosity towards them. In the film's most infamous departure from the script, a confessional monologue Charles Boyer's character performs to the audience of an unsuspected cockroach was entirely excised. The actor felt foolish talking to the bug, and Leisen agreed. Wilder was furious. Still, Hold Back the Dawn was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, so some people liked it.

 
It's also interesting to compare Wilder's later Parisian comedies as a director – Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon, and Irma La Douce – with a similar project he wrote that was directed by Leisen. By my account, 1939's Midnight is miles better than any picture in that lackluster Wilder tercet, which I credit to the costume designer turned director's privileging of character over wordplay. He views romance as an organic relationship rather than a battle of the sexes. His portrayal of the City of Lights is that of a frothy kingdom of effervescent dreams, blessed with glitzy sights and infinite possibility. Leisen was uninterested in forced conflict and even less invested in realism. That's why his hallucinatory Paris feels somehow more concrete and lived-in than the gritty studio facsimile found in something like Irma La Douce.
 
I'm not trying to say that Leisen was a better filmmaker than Wilder and Sturges, just that the vitriol the later men felt for the other doesn't wholly correlate to a bastardization of their scripts. Sometimes, as in Midnight, I think Leisen did a better job than Wilder himself could have done. Still, nobody's perfect, and there's a lot of flotsam across Leisen's long career. Historians like Steven Bach snidely referred to him as competent but devoid of any sense of material and, even as I defend Leisen's craft and fight against such condescending summations of his work, I can admit there's some truth to that. The man had little to no sense of rhythm, and his pictures often moved at erratic paces. Even the best ones suffer from this, though sometimes, narrative arrhythmia can be a blessing in disguise.
 
As it happens, a lot of Leisen's flicks don't belong to any definite genre, floating through tonal registers on gossamer wings. The lack of structural sharpness, the love for elliptical edits, hid the radical nature of these movie transfigurations, creating the illusion of cohesion. Watching something like the feminist noir No Man of Her Own, we may think we're watching a thriller of deception before it falls into melancholic romance and then becomes a murder mystery. There's no whiplash because, for the most part, the movements that transport us from one wildly divergent idea to another have been smudged. Furthermore, Leisen's cinema is bursting at the seams with complicated women who are never made to apologize for their eccentricities and who are rarely punished for going against the status quo. His many romance films are tales of equals learning to live with each other, often foregrounding female leads who ignore easier socially acceptable paths in favor of passionate affairs.

 
Does Carole Lombard's manicurist ever get punished for her shameless gold-digging in Hands Across the Table? Nope. Does Marlene Dietrich's quirky Broadway actress in The Lady is Willing ever need to make up for her vanity or the impulsiveness that made her adopt an abandoned babe as a single woman? Of course not. Is Barbara Stanwyck's pregnant fallen woman in No Man of Her Own ever made to pay for her unwed adventures or the scheme that finds her impersonating another woman for financial security?  No, she's not. Even Joan Fontaine's doctor's wife in Darling, How Could You! isn't forced to apologize for her modern ways. When she capitulates to traditional motherhood, it's because she feels she wants to move on and try another kind of life, not because society demands it.
 
On another note, Leisen's fixation on costumes and sets was often beneficial. Exploring his directorial filmography, I grew accustomed to finding much to love in his visuals while cringing at the screenplays. 1945' Kitty almost falls into the same trap, transporting the Pygmalion narrative model to the 18th-century and still insisting on grafting a love story's happy ending to its conclusion. However, something special happens when you put Leisen in charge of such material. He feels particularly interested in exploring the historical milieu of Georgian England, filling the frame with the lines of Neoclassical architecture and the idiosyncratic fashions of the late-Rococo period. Because of that, Kitty becomes more about its time and place rather than the toxic romance and the melodrama. It thus emerges as an unlikely social satire about a world where nobility is a vacuous concept, easily transferable and devoid of any meaning. His visuals elevate the screenplay and help obfuscate its flaws.

 
Despite the dismissals of Sturges and Wilder, some collaborators had nice things to say about Mitchell Leisen. For the most part, actors loved him, with Ray Milland showing great admiration for his director's interdisciplinary mastery. Even while writing this piece, I became awed at the man's deep pool of varied talents. He was a film director, a set and costume designer, club owner and promoter, writer, a part-time interior decorator, and accomplished couturier, pilot, painter, draughtsman, sculptor, and even stage director of variety revues. How did he do it all? Where did he find the time? Even after his movie career came to an end, he never stopped working, finding a place for himself as a TV director who did episodes for shows like The Twilight Zone. That's not surprising, considering he was always enormously versatile regarding the projects he helmed, from musicals to swashbucklers, war pictures, noir, melodrama, comedy, you name it.
 
Leisen died in 1972, at the Motion Picture Country Home, when he was 74. By that time, his films had been mostly forgotten, a Hollywood legacy either lost to time or smeared by those whose hatred for him probably stemmed from more than just artistic differences. What happened to this queer artist is a tragedy that should be rectified. If I can do nothing else during this Pride Month, I hope I have at least shed some light on the greatness of Mitchell Leisen and mayhap convinced one of you, dear readers, to give his movies a chance. It's criminal that this fascinating filmmaker has been so thoroughly left behind, even by cinephiles and classic movie lovers. Let's honor the man by remembering he existed, applauding the good work he did, and celebrating his queerness.
 
You can find ten of Leisen's films on The Criterion Channel, in a collection cheekily titled Style and Substance. Other works are less easy to find, though some of the lesser-known pictures are available on such sites as Youtube and Ok.ru.

 
Mitchell Leisen: The forgotten legacy of a queer filmmaker .  By Cláudio Alves. The Film Experience. June 8, 2021,

I'd been meaning to see more Guy Madden films before they leave the Criterion Channel on July 31, but somehow got sidetracked by Death Takes a Holiday. I mean--Fredric March as The Grim Reaper? I know Madden is an important experimental filmmaker with a high reputation and what films I've seen (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary; The Saddest Music in the World; Archangel) reveal a cineliterate talent with a taste for silent film exuberance and, in the case of Dracula, the influence of Gerardo de Leon's The Blood Drinkers--but morbid romances are impossible to resist. Besides there's a cadaverous quality to March--his performance here suggesting an antediluvian theatrical style irretrievably lost--that makes him the perfect Death.

 
And yes the film is creaky at times melodramatic at times but there's an intriguing...something...as if Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe collaborated on a script Roger Corman decided to direct in black and white. The special effects may not be all that special but when director Mitchell Leisen sticks to simply lighting and framing an image--when his camera tilts up at such an angle a grandfather clock looms like a great horned owl over an empty hall--he can be eerily effective. 
Leisen's probably best known for Death; otherwise he's a largely forgotten filmmaker, remembered if at all as the costume-designer-turned-filmmaker who butchered the early scripts of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, cutting away their dialogue in favor of the striking image. "He was a window dresser," Wilder once sneered; makes me like the poor man right there. 
 
Midnight is Leisen directing a script by Wilder and Charles Brackett, showcasing dialogue and plot twist over visual style. You're reminded of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, wealthy folks 'dancing on a volcano' (Renoir's words), though Leisen's frothy satire doesn't even begin to touch Renoir's masterpiece, or attempt anything like Renoir's apocalyptic subtext (to be fair I don't think anything Wilder has done begins to touch Renoir either). Have not done a page-by-page comparison of what Wilder wrote or what Leisen changed but I'm guessing if Leisen's alternations were so damaging then his subsequent films without Wilder shouldn't be as good--which I'd say isn't the case at all.
 
Kitty is considered one of Leisen's best, a Pygmalion with sex actually involved not just suggested (What was that again about Shaw and sexuality?). Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) discovers young pickpocket Kitty (Paulette Godard) and grooms her to be the wife of rich and powerful men; problem is she'd rather be his wife not theirs.
 
David Melville puts the film on the same shelf as Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, an ambitious comparison. The two films share similar time period and location (England in the 1700s), and while Leisen doesn't have Kubrick's teutonic monumentality--the latter's ability to make every shot, structure, and narrative plot point feel (for better or worse) like a momentous occasion--Kubrick doesn't have Leisen's light comic touch ("Goodbye old chap; I'm going to miss you like sin." "Exactly like sin."), or his ability to couch barbs in what looks like a comforting romantic comedy, till you press too hard and the sharpened points sink home.
 
I'll argue that Leisen has also been honing his visual chops--witness the long largely wordless sequence of the 10th Duke of Malmunster receiving news of a male heir's birth. Servant comes out of the nursery announcing the good news to a second; second with candelabra in hand walks swiftly forth, camera retreating before him. The sequence becomes a relay of torchbearing footmen, one passing the message to the next through one long hallway after another, down a staircase so vast you imagine there was a different microclimate for each floor. Finally the Duke receives word and, following yet another of his candlelit employees, makes his interminable way towards the nursery, the camera recording what turns out to be the rest of his life. It's sly satire on the ridiculous amount of flooring and steps required by the privilege to signify their high status; it also happens to be the Duke's undoing, as at one point he starts panting desperately from his exertions. 
 
Then there's the finale where Kitty, Hugh, and Brett (Patric Knowles) all stand in a row, one looking at the other then turning to a third to clarify their feelings. Leisen could have played it any number of ways, including grouping them in a single shot and letting everyone hash out their differences MMA style, but this way when one does an about-face so does the plot, one lover's fate determined by the caprices of another. Nothing spectacular mind, but the choreography is there if you care to see it, effectively serving narrative and dialogue. 
 
To Each His Own won Olivia de Havilland the first of two Oscars, despite which I insist it's a marvelous performance: woman bears child out of wedlock (a scandalous premise in '40s Hollywood), through a chain of freak circumstances loses custody of the child, scrambles as she watches her child grow up from a distance. De Havilland was likely handed her award for the spectacle of a suffering mother but even more harrowing is the elaborate web of self-delusion she weaves around herself--the belief, for one, that a limitless fortune and strong-arm tactics will win her son back from the woman currently raising him. Much of Leisen's direction can be considered by-the-numbers Hollywood melodrama, only a few sequences--a conversation on a crumbling rooftop, a seduction by biplane--betray his real game plan: to visualize specific moments in the woman's life with such dreamlike intensity that the rest of her life feels bland and unconvincing in comparison. No wonder she obsesses over her absent aviator, and the son conceived with him.
 
(De Havilland incidentally gained twenty pounds over the course of the shoot to look convincingly older--and pregnant--for the film, some thirty-four years before Robert De Niro ever thought of putting on a pair of boxing gloves)
 
No Man of Her Own starts with a Cornell Woolrich sitch: pregnant woman with no husband and no hope mets pregnant rich woman on a train; train derails with nearly everyone killed, no-hope finds herself mistaken for rich girl, lives happy life with rich family until someone starts sending threatening letters. The miracle of the film isn't that Woolrich and Leisen make such a good combination, the miracle is that no one saw this coming. Leisen's films like Woolrich's novel are full of impersonations (Death posing as a Hungarian prince; Kitty posing as a highborn aristocrat; Jody Norris pretends to be her own son's aunt), doublings (Hugh and Brett as aristocratic rivals for Kitty's affection; John Lund playing both de Havilland's son and lover), and unlikely coincidences (Kitty's husbands fall dead exactly when it's convenient for her that they do so; Jody puts her son up for adoption at the same moment a richer family is seeking a child to adopt).
 
Think The Magnificent Ambersons meets Shadow of a Doubt, only where in Shadow Uncle Charlie is the source of all corruption here the threat is more vague. O a pushy male might refuse to answer a door, or drag his reluctant ex-lover to the marriage bureau, but the film's true villain (as in any Woolrich novel) is the world itself--hostile, malevolent, prone to outrageous elaborate machinations designed to pull a man down with as much irony as possible.

 
Leisen gilds the toxic atmosphere with an elegant visual style, steeped in the nostalgia of small towns, tainted with a sense of dread. "...summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. But not for us; not for us"--as our heroine (Barbara Stanwyck, unforgettable as Helen Furgeson / Patrice Harkness) speaks we approach the lovely three-story Harkness residence with its trimmed lawn, white porch, softly luminous windows, seen through the lens of a camera gliding stealthily up the front door.
 
The ending is often described as 'ridiculous' and a 'dilution of the original' but thinking about it Leisen may have captured the Woolrich spirit better than any filmmaker before or since (skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the film). Where in the book the married couple is left with an ostensibly happy life full of uncertainty, in the film the couple's guilt is squared away by the action of a third party, in as ingenious and unlikely a manner as possible. Yes the Harknesses are safe--proven innocent, even--but the manner of their acquittal is as capricious as the manner of their entrapment; if they can fall into this much trouble and just as easily fall out of it who's to say the cycle won't repeat itself the very next day? A man (or woman) bent over an executioner's block waits resignedly for the axe to fall; should she feel any better if the blade remained suspended above her head? Life (we are told by Leisen and Stanwyck) can be as crazy-complicated as a Woolrich noir, with pleasures on display both seductive and ecstatic...but not for us; not for us. 
 
 
Mitchell Leisen (Death Takes a Holiday (1939), Midnight (1939), Kitty (1945), To Each His Own (1946), No Man of Her Own (1950)) By  Noel Vera.  Critic After Dark, August 5, 2021

This is really just for those of you who might want to know what the famously queer Mitchell Leisen, great director of Easy Living, Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn and so many other classics, looked like. At the time of his appearance here in Variety Girl in 1947  he was Paramount’s top director second only to C.B. DE Mille, who also makes an appearance. Their status is the reason for their presence in the film. Mitchell’s would sadly change, too soon and for the worse.

 
First Impressions : Notes on Film and Culture, March 29, 2020

Though the elegant, urbane and sophisticated director would recoil in horror at the comparison, Mitchell Leisen is the Rodney Dangerfield of golden age Hollywood directors. He simply can’t get no respect.

 
That’s not for lack of people trying. Every few years, almost on cue, a melancholy critic will write an essay bemoaning the fact that a filmmaker this gifted has been forgotten, or an adventurous institution will put on a comprehensive and enjoyable retrospective, such as the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s 16-film “The Signature Style: The Films of Mitchell Leisen” that begins on Friday at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.
 
But though library shelves and film school syllabuses groan under the weight of books and courses about such acknowledged auteurs as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, there is but one slim volume (written by David Chierichetti) with this man’s name on it. And though boxed sets of Leisen’s films are available in French, Italian and even Spanish editions, nothing of the kind exists over here.
 
This is all the more remarkable because, both as a group and individually, his films “Midnight,” “Easy Living,” “Death Takes a Holiday” and “Remember the Night” are as reliably — and stylishly — entertaining as anything made by the director’s contemporaries.
 
Leisen’s written signature at the start of a film — a mark of the great esteem in which he was held by his bosses at Paramount back in the day — is as good a guarantee of a pleasurable experience as one could hope to find. So why the lack of respect?
 
One explanation is that Leisen’s gifts and tendencies turn out to be harder to quantify than easily identifiable markers like Hitchcock’s feeling for suspense, Ford’s passion for westerns, or even tropes like the respective Lubitsch and Capra touches.
 
For what made Leisen’s films distinctive was the wit, style and intelligence he consistently brought to them, gifts that invariably made his characters more realistic and his stories more emotionally complex and involving than the norm.
 
Because he was so good at amplifying the strengths of scripts, the director often had his pick of the best ones at Paramount, which was certainly the case with the two Leisen films that open the series on Friday at the Billy Wilder Theater: “Midnight” and “Easy Living.”
 
“Midnight” (1939), which is sometimes considered Leisen’s signature film, was written by Wilder and partner Charles Brackett. The film stars Claudette Colbert as a genial adventuress who arrives in Paris on a third-class train ticket with nothing to declare but the gold lamé evening gown she’s wearing.
 
Helped by Don Ameche’s easygoing cab driver, she bluffs her way into a fancy party (the dress helps), where she catches the eye of wealthy John Barrymore, but not for the reason you might suspect: He wants her to distract the gigolo who is after his wife. Misunderstandings and hilarity ensue, as does a largeness of spirit that typifies Leisen’s approach.
 
The same goes for “Easy Living” (1937), from a script by Preston Sturges, which starts with a classic screwball premise: Tyrannical banker J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold), the Bull of Broad Street, drops a $58,000 sable coat on the head of penniless Mary Smith, who toils for the Boy’s Constant Companion, and nothing is the same for anyone ever again.

 
Actress Jean Arthur brings to spirited life the spunky young woman whom everyone starts to mistake for Ball’s mistress. Sturges’ rat-a-tat dialogue is a treat (“Where there’s smoke, someone’s smoking,” says a hotelier played by Luis Alberni), as is an enormous hotel suite that Leisen, who came to directing from art direction and costume design, took particular pleasure in creating.
 
Though having fine writers to work with helped Leisen’s career, it hurt him in the auteur sweepstakes, as his reputation became one of being no more than an adroit adapter (as if this was an easy task) of other people’s material. It also didn’t help that both Sturges and Wilder segued to directing and, in Wilder’s case, heaped vituperation on Leisen for what he’d allegedly done to their earlier scripts.
 
As it turns out, the UCLA series has another film apiece for both the Brackett-Wilder team and Sturges, and the comparison between how Leisen handled their material and what they did when they were on their own is instructive.
 
“Hold Back the Dawn” (1941, playing Nov. 30 with “Swing High, Swing Low,” 1937) is an unusual film for Leisen in that it’s a brooding romantic melodrama about a heartless Romanian gigolo (who else but Charles Boyer) who marries a naive schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) to get American citizenship. Leisen’s talent takes some of the chill out of the air (the film got six Oscar nominations, including one for De Havilland), and the director himself is visible behind the camera in the story’s Hollywood soundstage framing device.
 
Similarly, “Remember the Night” (1940, on a Dec. 14 double bill with Carole Lombard at her best in “Hands Across the Table,” 1935) has a much different feeling than it would have had it been directed by screenwriter Sturges.
 
The situation is classic screwball — foursquare district attorney Fred MacMurray ends up sharing a Christmas trip home to Indiana with Barbara Stanwyck’s intoxicating shoplifter — but Leisen’s direction adds both drama and humanity to a top-notch script with lines like Stanwyck’s wised-up, “One of these days one of you guys is going to start one of these scenes in a new way and one of us girls is going to drop dead from surprise.”
 
Another way Leisen is regrettably pigeonholed is as a strictly visual director. The look of his films is certainly important, even in tip-top romantic comedies like “Take a Letter, Darling” (1942, on a Dec. 9 double bill with “Lady in the Dark,” 1944), but the crisp byplay between Rosalind Russell’s female executive and MacMurray as her beleaguered male secretary is the main attraction.
 
One of Leisen’s most visual films, “Death Takes a Holiday” (playing with “Murder at the Vanities,” both films from 1934, on Nov. 18), is also one of his most touching and sophisticated. Fredric March is exemplary as death itself, determined to take human form for three days to try to determine why humanity fears him, who ends up making an unexpected connection with Evelyn Venable’s spiritual seeker.
 
The best way to fall under Mitchell Leisen’s spell is to see as many of his films as you can. You may enter the theater as a skeptic, but you will leave with an unlooked-for appreciation of an overlooked man. And you will have had a very good time in the process.
 
 
‘The Signature Style: The Films of Mitchell Leisen’ Screenings at 7:30 p.m. (except where noted) at the Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.

 

UCLA fest: A stylish way to get to know Mitchell Leisen. By Kenneth Turan. Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2012. 

History is unforgiving, implacable and, once written, nearly impossible to re-write. The victors, the wildly successful, are often too generously rewarded. The vanquished and the modestly successful disappear from the annals altogether. Unfortunately, the same is true of film history and, sadly for Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972), he is almost completely forgotten today. Even though in the 1930s and ‘40s he was one of the most important and certainly among the most highly paid directors of his time, with many hits to his name, if he is remembered at all today, it is in relation to more famous directors he has been associated with. He did art direction for De Mille’s King of Kings (1927) and Madame Satan (1930). He designed the still very racy costumes Claudette Colbert wears in De Mille’s Sign of the Cross (1932), as well as serving as assistant director and art director. But even more importantly, he directed the delightful Easy Living (1937), with a script by Preston Sturges, who went on to become a more famous director himself when he started directing his own scripts. Leisen directed the wonderful Midnight (1939), certainly one of his masterpieces, and the equally wonderful (although for different reasons) Hold Back the Dawn (1941), both scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. 

To give an idea of how powerful and respected he was at the time, he was able to ‘sign’ his credit with his own signature, equivalent to the French un film de long before anyone in America, aside from Hitchcock, Frank Capra and Cecil B. DeMille, were describing their films as ‘a film by...’. Leisen also became an ugly footnote in Wilder’s biography. Wilder is said to have hated so much what Leisen had done to his scripts – although it’s hard to imagine how anyone could fault Midnight or Hold Back the Dawn – that he decided to become a director himself so that his scripts wouldn’t, in the future, be ‘butchered’ by the likes of Leisen.  ‘All he did was he fucked up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you. Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don’t knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen’s problem was that he was a stupid fairy’. Leisen also has the dubious honor of having had the same effect on Preston Sturges, who snidely and indecorously referred to Leisen as an interior decorator.

Leisen initially wanted to be an architect. Through a casual connection, he met Cecil B. DeMille shortly after graduating; DeMille asked him if he would like to design costumes for his movies. His first film for DeMille was Male and Female (1918). He was so good at it, DeMille gave him more and more responsibilities: set dresser, art directing, designing the productions, even second-unit directing. Because of his extensive knowledge of how to put a movie together and especially his input into the way it looked, Paramount asked him to co-direct a film with a stage director whom Paramount had imported from Broadway, Stuart Walker. Everyone soon realised that the reasons the films worked were because of Leisen, not the B roadway director. A film directing career was born.

 Of course, no director is better than the script he has to work with. And Leisen’s films, lucky though he was with some scripts, suffered the most when the scripts did not much interest him. He diverted himself, sometimes to the detriment of the movies themselves, by making the costumes or concentrating on the art direction. But he had the good fortune to work with some wonderful actors, many of them several times over. He helped make Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland and Dorothy Lamour into stars. He gave Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck some of their finest roles. And offered the talents of Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland and Paulette Goddard opportunities that they never had before.

It is important to talk about Leisen in relation to Wilder’s and Sturges’ films. Even Sturges’ best films, let’s say The Palm Beach Story (1942) and The Lady Eve (1941), do not have the assured elegance of Leisen’s adaptations of Sturges’ scripts. Sturges’ scripts are crammed with business, distractingly eccentric, cartoon-like minor characters, sometimes overwritten to the point of exhausting the audience with his manic, rat-tat-tat gunfire rounds of bon mots. It is well-documented that Leisen, in the charming and rich in sentiment (two adjectives that were never used in describing any of Sturges’ films) Remember the Night (1940), ripped out many pages of Sturges’ script, cut the excess verbiage, and concentrated on the two main characters, as he did in Easy Living. Both of these comedies are much more leisurely paced than Sturges’ films, which are made with such frantic, almost caffeine-induced speed – as if Sturges sensed he was going to burn himself out in a handful of years, which he did – and are much more character-driven.

As for comparing Leisen’s Wilder-Brackett films with those that Wilder himself directed: even if you’re a huge admirer of Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), it is impossible to ignore the cynically sour aftertaste of his movies from his very first film, The Major and The Minor (1941), all the way through Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and beyond, and especially the acidic unpleasantness of A Foreign Affair (1948) and Ace in the Hole (1951). One can almost be assured that Midnight, had it been directed by Wilder, would have been as charmlessly coy and hard-boiled as Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1939), scripted by Wilder and Brackett, instead of the light-as-air soufflé that it is. And Hold Back the Dawn, an unlikely tale of redemption, of gigolos and gold diggers conniving their way across the American border from Mexico, would have been unpalatably depressing under Wilder’s direction. Charles Boyer’s and Leisen’s decision to cut a scene in which Boyer, a down-and-out playboy in his seedy hotel room, toys with and confesses to a cockroach, one can only surmise, was a good choice. It was the elimination of this particular scene that stoked most of Wilder’s hatred for Leisen.

And there’s something else. The romantic comedies, at least the way Leisen directed them, are never strictly comedies. They all have a slight melancholic tinge to them; the characters experience a Mozartean longing and sadness and a wish that life could be something other than what it is, an unspoken ache that one would never accuse Sturges or Wilder (whatever their many virtues) of ever feeling.

Another thing about Leisen as opposed to Sturges and Wilder, or anyone else in Hollywood, for that matter, in film after film, then and now: the interactions between his stars – MacMurray and Lombard in Swing High, Swing Low (1937) and even more so in Hands Across the Table (1935), Milland and Arthur in Easy Living, MacMurray and Stanwyck in Remember the Night, (3) MacMurray and Rosalind Russell in Take a Letter, Darling (1941), Colbert and Don Ameche in Midnight, Colbert and Milland in Arise, My Love, Boyer and Goddard in Hold Back the Dawn, and even Milland and Marlene Dietrich in Golden Earrings (1947) – have an easy and very palpable sexual chemistry which radiates from the screen, suggesting that the physical attraction the characters have for each other is more than merely a given in the script. Credit the director and his relationship with his actors, rather than the script. Similarly, Gene Tierney in Leisen’s The Mating Season (1951) conveys a physical and emotional warmth that one does not sense in any of her 20^th Century Fox films. All of this from a director whom everyone in Hollywood knew was gay, or bi-sexual at best, and was frowned upon for his openly gay liaisons. Perhaps the depiction of sexuality, as Nicholas Ray suggested, is not a question of being gay or straight but of just being sexual.

Most Hollywood films see the relationship between men and women as a Battle of the Sexes, something to be won or lost, with men and women fundamentally different and basically incompatible. Even so-called proto-feminist films like George Stevens’ Woman of the Year (1942) and George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) clearly enjoy presenting the spectacle of an intelligent, sophisticated woman (in both cases played by Katharine Hepburn) taken down a few pegs before she is worthy of the less sophisticated, more down-to-earth man (played in both films by Spencer Tracy). What is unusual about Leisen’s movies, which are almost all about the see-sawing relationships between men and women, is how equal both partners are even when they are from different social strata – and they always are – and how fluid the role-playing is in the relationship. In film after film, we are presented with seemingly incompatible opposites – a poor working girl looking for a rich man, a career woman falling for a man with no skills, a money-hungry woman pitted against a modest, moralistic lawyer, a taxi driver infatuated with a broke entertainer who wants a millionaire. Everyone is at cross-purposes, socially as well as romantically. But they all learn how to negotiate their territories, as well as the other person’s. Falling in love is not a compromise or surrender. It’s more a question of accommodation – who wants whom badly enough to abandon the abstract idea of the lover they think they deserve for a flawed but equally accommodating person who is also willing to change. In movie after movie, the leads discover they like each other so much that learning to overcome the differences that separate them is the least they can do. If Leisen doesn’t exactly present feminist role models, his movies are rich with strong, spunky, independent women who know what they want, alongside indecisive men who don’t know what they want but will know it when they see it.  Everybody is weak and strong at the same time. In Leisen’s very generous universe there is no room for steel-jawed, testosterone-driven egotists like John Wayne and Clark Gable or self-sufficient, take-no-prisoners gorgons like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Everyone gradually learns how to change and make themselves over in order to find love.

If Leisen was sometimes very fortunate in his choice of scripts, or not-so-fortunate in the inferior scripts that he was assigned to direct, his lot was no different from many other directors who benefited from the studio system and who, with few exceptions, floundered when that system cut them adrift. They had access to superb art directors, set designers and builders, costume designers and a team of top-notch cameramen and lighting technicians, all thorough and experienced professionals, who helped them immeasurably in achieving, seemingly without any great effort, a unified ‘look’ from film to film, that identified the film as theirs. Think, for example of Vincente Minnelli’s unprecedented 20 years at MGM, Michael Curtiz’ films at Warner Brothers from the mid-‘40s to the early ‘50s, Douglas Sirk at Universal-International in the ‘50s, and Otto Preminger’s films from Laura (1944) to the early '50s at 20^th Century Fox. And Leisen at Paramount. Of all of these directors, all of whom were visual stylists of the highest order and who relied very heavily on the art direction to be the handmaiden in helping to reveal the narrative, only Preminger was really able to make a successful transition to directing outside the stifling but nevertheless very often supportive confines of the home studio.

Without making too extravagant claims for Leisen’s work, I should like to suggest that in Hold Back the Dawn he has redemptive love scenes that pre-figure the endings of both Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) as well as Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) and, even though it may smack of heresy to suggest it, are every bit as moving. And speaking of Bresson: in Leisen’s 1950 No Man of Her Own (a hideously soap-operatic title that doesn’t do justice to the gravity of the film, re-made, from a Cornell Woolrich novel, into  a vehicle for Nathalie Baye titled J’ai épousée une ombre [1983]), he employs editing ellipses and quick fade-outs of scenes that will soon become part of Bresson’s arsenal of formal strategies even before Bresson himself invented them.

 Every director, no matter how great or beloved, has his or her share of misfires, movies which for whatever reason are uneven, not fully-realised or even downright poor, despite how strenuously the most ardent apologists may champion them. Leisen’s batting average may not be as high as some (like Hitchcock’s or Buñuel’s, to mention the very greatest), but any career that includes Hands Across the Table, Swing High, Swing Low, Easy Living, Midnight, Remember the Night, Frenchman’s Creek (1944), Kitty (1945), Song of Surrender (1949), and No Man of Her Own is hardly a negligible one. In fact, it’s a major one. Other enthusiasts are likely to include To Each His Own (1946), The Mating Season and maybe even Lady in the Dark (1944) in the roll call. In addition, there are many pleasures in small moments and events to be found in his other films. If he is dismissed as only an actor’s director, what of it? So was Cukor, until very recently. If, in the past, he was dismissed as a director who was overly interested in décor, so what? Hadn’t Minnelli been ignored and belittled for decades for similar reasons?

 For those of you who know some of Leisen’s films, this is a splendid opportunity to get to know more of them. For those who have never seen any, or have barely heard of him except as a footnote to Wilder’s or Sturges’ or De Mille’s careers, this is an unprecedented opportunity to discover the works of a forgotten master and some of his masterworks. I envy you the pleasure of seeing some of these movies for the first time. Is there is anything more rewarding for film lovers and cinephiles than discovering still another rich chapter of film history that was previously shrouded in darkness, in a vast history still full of dark pockets and as-yet unilluminated treasures?

 

This text is the introduction to a Mitchell Leisen retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, 27 August to 2 November 2008.

Mitchell Leisen. By Mark Rappaport. Rouge,  September 2008. 

I was the enemy of the ordinary.

 
– Fred MacMurray, Hands Across the Table
 
When Mitchell Leisen died at the Motion Picture Country Home in 1972, both he and his films were largely forgotten. One of a host of old-style Hollywood directors who had not been rediscovered, re-interpreted or (in some cases) recreated as an auteur by Cahiers du cinéma, Leisen was remembered – grudgingly – as a minor artisan. A dress-designer who turned director, fashioning a string of campy gossamer romances for the lesser Great Ladies of Tinsel Town.
 
“Leisen was competent and stylish at his best.” Film historian Steven Bach gives the majority view. “He could always make a picture look better than it was, but never play better, for he had no sense of material.”  Condescending but benign next to Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, writers whose early Hollywood careers were built on their scripts for Leisen films: “On TV,” Wilder said, “I would watch only a picture by a director I hated. There is no director I hate that much. Not even Mitchell Leisen.”
 
Wilder and Sturges, in later years, bewailed the havoc Leisen wreaked on their scripts. Painted him as a flamboyant gay aesthete, who preferred décor to drama, party dresses to pithy dialogue. Who deleted pages of script at the whim of his leading lady – focusing instead on a vase of white lilies on a table, a muscular Grecian statue in a corner of the Grand Salon. Flickering and insubstantial as a celluloid ghost, his oeuvre embodied Susan Sontag’s definition of camp. It was “decorative art, emphasising texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content.”  For Wilder, the problem with Leisen was simple. “He was a window dresser.”
 
Ironically, though, Midnight (1939) – a frothy romantic farce directed by Leisen from a Wilder script – is a sharper and more stylish satire than Wilder’s own Sabrina (1954) or Love in the Afternoon (1957). A socially-conscious soap opera, Hold Back the Dawn (1941) – again, written by Wilder but directed by Leisen – packs a far greater punch than Wilder’s own Ace in the Hole (1951). Lacking Wilder’s pervasive sourness and contempt, Hold Back the Dawn views its hicks and whores and schemers through a veil of sympathy, suggesting they might have reasons to act as they do
 
Similarly, Easy Living (1937) – a “screwball” comedy shot by Leisen but scripted by Sturges – is as frenetically funny as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). Yet it has a quality that Sturges’ film wholly lacks, a visual and emotional grace. Their second teaming, Remember the Night (1940) parades Sturges’ love of small-town Americana. But Leisen, with his drastic cuts to the screenplay, makes it heartfelt rather than hokey. Mercifully, he eschews those Sturges forays into cornball excess.
 
Leisen, glimpsed in this new light, is no longer a swishy hack. He’s a subtle and stylish auteur who could add heart and humanity to the brittle sophistication of Billy Wilder, lend grace and elegance to the boisterous Americana of Preston Sturges. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson hails Leisen as “an expert at witty romantic comedies, too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour to be satires – and thus less likely to attract critical attention.”
 
Such re-evaluation is long overdue, yet it still falls short of the whole story. It overlooks, for a start, Leisen’s bold and flamboyant exploration of the world of dreams. A homosexual artist in a homophobic era and industry, Leisen sought solace (and perhaps a cure) in the arms of Freudian psychoanalysis. As his profile rose – and his relationship with dancer-choreographer Billy Daniels became an open secret – Leisen put his psychoanalytical quest onto film. His wild dream sequences in No Time for Love (1943), Lady in the Dark (1944) and Dream Girl (1948) are as close to the avant-garde as 1940s Hollywood could allow.
 
Less surprising, perhaps, that Leisen is uniquely forthright in his portrayal of gays. True, many of his films display the “moral frivolity about homosexuality” condemned by the pioneer gay critic Parker Tyler. Franklin Pangborn as a gossipy milliner in Easy Living; Rex O’Malley as a poisonous lounge lizard in Midnight; Mischa Auer as a fiendishly camp fashion photographer in Lady in the Dark. In each case, gayness is “used as a Halloween masquerade to play slyly on the subject of the homosexual, as if he were not real but a sort of charade person.”
 
But the truth, as ever with Leisen, is more complex. Richard Haydn, the Gay Best Friend in No Time for Love, is more than a comic sideshow. He’s a literal “good fairy” who resolves the crisis in the plot. Frenchman’s Creek (1944) has a cross-dressing heroine and a transvestite pirate ballet. Golden Earrings (1947) has a hero who swathes himself in androgynous gypsy drag. In these films, Leisen subverts the Hollywood notion of “masculinity” – in ways that run far deeper than Johnny Depp’s campy turn in Pirates of the Caribbean (2003).
 
Not even Leisen’s greatest fans will deny that Frenchman’s Creek, Golden Earrings and the 1934 musical Murder at the Vanities are monuments of camp. Their fervid artificiality, their feverish riot of costume and decor, tend inexorably towards that “theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility.” Popular yet critically savaged, Leisen’s more flamboyant films need reassessing. Directors as diverse as Kenneth Anger and Baz Luhrmann, Pedro Almodovar and Paul Bartel have redefined our notions of camp. No longer just a failure of taste, camp is fast becoming a genre all its own.
 
It may, in fact, be possible to make a case for Mitchell Leisen as the first Post-Modern filmmaker. Unlike directors that critics tend to adore (Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford) almost none of his films can be evaluated in terms of a single genre. Murder at the Vanities is a frothy musical extravaganza, a raunchy sexual farce and a tough-talking crime thriller. Remember the Night flows from high comedy to road movie to heart-warming rural drama – and becomes, in its final reels, a doomed romance akin to Marcel Carné’s Quai des Brumes (1938). Frenchman’s Creek turns a Gothic into a feminist pirate swashbuckler. No Man of Her Own (1950) is that strangest, most contradictory of beasts, a feminist film noir.
 
Add in Leisen’s moral and sexual ambiguities, his persistent reversal of gender roles, his delight in masquerade, impersonation and role-playing…a vision of Leisen as Post-Modernist is not far off. From the start, there was a dazzle to his talent that challenged the dour strictures of mainstream “good taste”. His frequent art director Ernst Fegté said: “Mitch’s career was like a star that got brighter and brighter until it exploded and the remnants fell to earth.” What can we do but turn our face towards Heaven and catch the sparks?
 

HE: Why do young people think they can cure anything by getting on a train?
 
SHE: You never know who you’ll meet while travelling.
 
– Larry Keating and Miriam Hopkins, The Mating Season
 
James Mitchell Leisen was born to middle-class affluence in 1898, in a tranquil Midwest town – Menominee, Michigan. Cut to the first shots of No Man of Her Own, a vista of shimmering suburban lawns and gingerbread homes. “The breeze that stirs the curtains is soft and pleasant.” Barbara Stanwyck speaks a huskily hypnotic voice-over. “There’s the hush, the stillness of perfect peace and security.” It is a mythic landscape, a lost Eden, to which Leisen’s characters repair time and again. A shelter from complex or corrupted lives. Such security, for Leisen, did not last his childhood. His parents divorced before he was five.
 
A sickly child, operated on for a Byronic club foot, little James spent time arranging flowers and designing sets for his toy theatre. Oddly, his parents sent him to military school. He served as a drill officer in World War I, then worked for a firm of architects in Chicago. Bored, he drifted out to Hollywood to try his luck in the movies. One night at dinner, he sat next to Jeannie MacPherson, the screenwriter (and mistress) of Cecil B. DeMille. Deciding this young man had “interesting hands”, she introduced Leisen to her boss – who promptly hired him to design some Art Deco Babylonian gowns for Gloria Swanson in his new epic, Male and Female (1919).
 
Although Leisen had never made a dress before, the gowns were a hit. He was next teamed with Natacha Rambova to design a fantasy Cinderella Ball in DeMille’s Forbidden Fruit (1921). He dressed Mary Pickford in a Spanish lace mantilla for Rosita (1923), the Hollywood debut of Ernst Lubitsch. He then designed two epics for Douglas Fairbanks – Pre-Raphaelite Medieval for Robin Hood (Allan Dwan, 1922) and fantasy Oriental for The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924). “If he had wanted to,” Dwan said, “he could have become another Dior.”
 
But Leisen soon grew bored with couture. Rejoining DeMille as an art director, he designed such triumphantly vulgar spectacles as Mary Magdalene’s banquet in King of Kings (1927). The race in Dynamite (1929), with bathing-suited debutantes strapped inside giant hoops. The masked orgy on board a zeppelin in Madam Satan (1930) – with its Electrical Ballet and chorus of tap-dancing cats. “DeMille had no nuances,” Leisen said. “Everything was in neon lights six feet tall. LUST, REVENGE, SEX. You had to think the way he thought, in capital letters.”
 
Yet it was DeMille who taught Leisen his central credo. “The camera has no ears. If you want to say it, get it on the screen.” Leisen, to the despair of Wilder and Sturges, was a visual stylist. An aesthete who favoured the image over the word. In 1932, Leisen did both sets and costumes for DeMille’s Ancient Rome epic The Sign of the Cross. With its evil Empress Poppaea afloat to her nipples in asses’ milk, its graphic lesbian dance in honour of the Moon Goddess, its naked Christian maiden trussed up in flowers and mauled by a randy gorilla, this a flamboyantly depraved work to rival Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969).
 
Around this time, Leisen got married. His wife, Sondra Gahle, was an ambitious if not overly gifted opera diva. “I heard her sing once,“ said Ray Milland, “and she was lousy.” She and Leisen lived apart amicably for years (he in Hollywood, she in Paris) and he nurtured a project to direct her in a film of Bizet’s Carmen. Only in the late ’30s, when Leisen started a serious affair with Billy Daniels, did Sondra lose her starring role in her husband’s life. The plush Parisian soirée in Midnight, with its screeching opera diva and public in agonies of boredom, can be read as an “in-joke” at a chapter that had drawn to a close.
 
On top of his film work, Leisen ran an haute couture studio, did interior decorating for luxury homes, and staged and designed lavish nightclub revues at the Coconut Grove. “He had so much talent in all artistic directions,” Ray Milland said. “He could direct; he could write; he did marvellous interior decoration; he could dress people beautifully, both male and female; he staged nightclub acts; he painted, sketched and sculpted. He never stopped.” He continued to design costumes and sets for most (if not all) the films he directed, although he took credit on only one, Bride of Vengeance (1949).

 
 
HE: You expect love to be all sky-blue pink and trumpets blowing. Well, it isn’t like that.
 
SHE: If it isn’t, I don’t want it!
 
– Philip Terry and Olivia de Havilland, To Each His Own
 
 
Leisen’s move into directing was gradual. His first two credits at Paramount were as co-director with a graduate of the New York stage, Stuart Walker. Tonight Is Ours (1932) is a comic romance about a Ruritanian queen (Claudette Colbert) who falls for a commoner (Fredric March). The Eagle and the Hawk (1933) is an anti-war drama, with March and Cary Grant as World War I flying aces, and Carole Lombard as a token love interest. Leisen later tried to claim full credit for both films. “Stuart Walker had no idea what a camera was for, or about, or anything else.”
 
With or without Walker, a style was emerging. Most early Leisen films are swooningly romantic. A character, however cynical or jaded, can always find redemption in True Love. Naïve, perhaps, but true to Leisen’s own emotional journey. A bisexual enduring psychoanalysis and a sham marriage – plus a string of furtive affairs with young men – Mitchell Leisen in the ’30s was, outwardly, a high-toned sophisticate with a glamorous career but, inwardly, a damaged soul on a quest for impossible love.
 
Such a love was hinted at in his first solo credit. Cradle Song (1933) is a bizarre drama about a lovelorn nun and her “maternal” adoration of a pretty orphan girl. German actress Dorothea Wieck (known for Leontine Sagan’s 1931 lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform) plays love-struck Sister Joanna. Soft-focus camerawork and kitsch iconography give Cradle Song the aura of a mock-Catholic photo by Pierre et Gilles. Worlds away from such inspirational slop as Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), it anticipates such “naughty nun” epics as Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and Pedro Almodovar’s Dark Habits (1983).
 
Another cod-religious fantasia, Death Takes a Holiday (1934) stars Evelyn Venable (the doe-eyed protégée from Cradle Song) as a young girl who falls in love with Death – in the earthly form of a suave aristocrat, Prince Sirki (Fredric March). A film whose “artificial situations made it the L’Année derniere à Marienbad of its day”, it is the Orpheus myth told in reverse. A tormented hero lures his willing victim out of the everyday world, into a shadow realm haunted by a spectre of ideal love. Its lush visual delirium outdoes even Cradle Song. A riot of icons and crucifixes; marble palaces, moonlit pools and cypress groves; a Neapolitan carnival in full swing. Its mood is only slightly less rarefied than that of Alain Resnais’ film.
 
From ethereal to earthy…Leisen’s next film, Murder at the Vanities marked him out as a master of raunchy innuendo and elegant smut. Its centrepiece is a Broadway musical revue of jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-blowing vulgarity. Giant powder boxes snap open. Each one reveals, in its mirrored lid, a nude chorus girl lounging Venus-like inside. Lovers croon on a tropical island bristling with phallic palm trees. Around them writhes a “sea” of dancers with ostrich-plume fans. The diva sings a paean to “Sweet Marijuana” – as chorines bloom like peyote flowers on a giant cactus! (Not surprisingly, Murder at the Vanities re-emerged as a cult movie in the ’60s.)
 
Some lesser films followed. Behold My Wife (1935) is a glum drama of interracial marriage, with Sylvia Sidney as a Native American bride called Tonita Stormcloud. Four Hours to Kill (1935), with Ray Milland, and Thirteen Hours by Air (1936), with Joan Bennett and Fred MacMurray, are both thrillers. But Leisen’s next film was the prototype for all his romantic comedies of the next ten years.
 
A sparkling but dark-hued love story, Hands Across the Table (1935) stars Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray as two vulnerable souls, both willing to sell themselves in marriage for money. She is a gold-digging manicurist, courted by a wheelchair-bound millionaire. He is a playboy-turned-gigolo, engaged to a spoiled heiress. Both, in theory, are contemptible. Yet Leisen maintains that “nobody’s all good, or all bad, not in my movies at least. There’s a little bad in the best of us, and a little good in the worst of us.”
 
Both characters are products of a system that condemns people, arbitrarily, to extremes of poverty and wealth. This film marks the start of Leisen’s fascination with class and its corrosive effect. “While an artisan seldom crosses a Lubitsch drawing room,” David Shipman writes, “in the films of Leisen the penniless are in constant conflict with the well-to-do.”  This being Hollywood, the two cash in their dreams of fortune. They settle instead for True Love and each other. But only once the director has made his point.
 
Leisen also plays fast-and-loose with gender roles. Lombard is the “masculine” character. Thrusting, abrasive, relying on her brains. (She even boasts a man’s name, Regi Allen.) MacMurray’s is the “feminine” role. Frivolous, playful, reliant on his charm. For Susan Sontag, “the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s own sex.”  Hands Across the Table evokes Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Are these two heterosexual lovers? Or a tomboy and her gay best pal? Doubt is resolved as they lie awake by moonlight in separate beds, and each puffs longingly at a cigarette. It is one of the most achingly romantic scenes in all cinema.
 
Leisen continued in this vein with Swing High, Swing Low (1937), the tragi-comic love story of a street-smart hairdresser (Lombard) and an alcoholic musician (MacMurray). She takes charge of his career in hand, builds him into a star and he leaves her for a slinky femme fatale (Dorothy Lamour). At last, a dying MacMurray sinks, Camille-like, into Lombard’s protective arms. “When it is funny and happy,” writes David Thomson, “it is as light as play; in love it nearly swoons; but when it turns somber it is a love story noir in 1937!”
 
Not all Leisen’s projects were so exalted. Under duress from Paramount, he made a trio of films his biographer calls “the banal musicals.”  Banal, possibly, but The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), Artists and Models Abroad (1938) and The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) are rich in minor pleasures. The last is set on a streamlined (and obscenely phallic) Art Deco luxury liner called SS Gigantic – staffed entirely by hunky sailors in clinging white uniforms, who seem to have strolled out of a Jean-Paul Gaultier ad. In its camp highlight, raucous comedienne Martha Raye sings “Mama! Oh, Mama!” while turning cartwheels with a chorus-line of sailors.
 
One of those dancing sailors was named Billy Daniels. Shortly after Big Broadcast, Leisen suffered a nervous breakdown. His homosexuality, by now, was common knowledge in Hollywood. When Clark Gable complained to wife Carole Lombard about her lack of girlfriends, she quipped: “I have two great girlfriends – Mitch Leisen and Billy Haines.”  (Haines, ominously enough, was a silent-screen heartthrob whose sexuality had cost him his career.) Once he recovered from his breakdown, Leisen began to share his life openly with Billy Daniels.
 
If eyebrows were raised, Paramount executives were unwilling to complain. Leisen was now on a critical and box-office high. Easy Living has Jean Arthur as a penniless Manhattan career girl whose life is transformed when a millionaire throws his wife’s sable coat out a window. It lands on her as she is riding to work on an open-top bus. Mistaken for the tycoon’s mistress, she is installed in a lavish hotel suite “so luminous that it looks as if it had been decorated by a silversmith.”
 
She now enters a realm that would obsess Leisen for the rest of his career. That of mistaken identity, role-playing and masquerade. By some queer trick of illusion, an outsider has strayed into a world that would normally exclude her. Survival depends on wit, on charm, on talent for playing the role that others expect. Should her true identity ever be known, her luck will run out. Unless, like Jean Arthur, she can marry the tycoon’s playboy son (Ray Milland).
 
Such themes, for obvious reasons, were common to gay directors in Hollywood. (Think of George Cukor from Sylvia Scarlett [1935] to A Woman’s Face [1941] to My Fair Lady [1964]). Yet none captured their ecstatic pain as acutely as Leisen. In Remember the Night (1940), Barbara Stanwyck is a shoplifter bailed out for Christmas by her prosecuting attorney (Fred MacMurray). He takes her for the holiday to his family in small-town Indiana – who mistake her for his fiancée. At last, the two fall in love for real…but first she must serve her sentence in prison. Mistaken identity, role-play and redemption through True Love. His themes had begun to coalesce.
 
In Easy Living and Remember the Night, both scripted by Sturges, the heroine’s deception is involuntary. A role is thrust on her, and she has no choice but to play it. Each has a role thrust upon her, and is left with no choice but to play it. But sheer cold-blooded deception can be found in Midnight, the first of three films scripted by Wilder. In Paris, an amoral American showgirl (Claudette Colbert) impersonates a Hungarian baroness. She hopes to separate a married woman from her rich lover, and bag him for herself. Yet Leisen refuses to despise or condemn a single character, and his “lyrical treatment of romantic luxury” hits its apotheosis.
 
Arise My Love (1940) is a freewheeling lark in which Colbert, a tough-talking reporter, saves charming wastrel Ray Milland from a Spanish Civil War firing squad by posing as his wife. Much darker is Hold Back the Dawn, third and last of the Wilder films – the only one to lack the sparkling surface of farce. Stuck in a grim Mexican border town, a Romanian gigolo (Charles Boyer) marries a virginal schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) purely to immigrate to the United States.
 
For the first and only time in Leisen’s oeuvre, the deceiver is a man, not a woman. Adeptly as he plays the smarmy “Latin Lover” (a cruel parody of Boyer’s own screen persona) his bride’s innocent ardour pushes him into a pit of self-disgust. As Boyer walks down a squalid street at dawn, de Havilland’s footsteps echo behind him. She is wholly oblivious to the illusory nature of their “love”. Even when he repents and falls in love with her for real, we are left suspecting that True Love will only carry them so far. “I thought a lot about Emmy Brown and Georges Iscovescu,” de Havilland said, “and wondered what would become of them. I eventually came to the feeling that they would separate.”
 
Our heart tells us this marriage is doomed, that Boyer will drift into an affair with a woman like his old “dancing partner” (Paulette Goddard). “I’m his sort,” Paulette tells a shocked Olivia. “I’m dirt but so is he. We belong together.” For the first time in a Leisen film, we see love fall short of the ideal. It can only be as pure – or as sordid – as the two people involved.
 

 
 
If you carry a torch long enough, it burns out. I’ve scorched my hands.
 
– Paulette Goddard, Hold Back the Dawn
 
As the ’40s dawned, Mitchell Leisen was at his creative and commercial peak. Indeed, his best years were precisely those invoked by Gore Vidal’s hero(ine) Myra Breckinridge, who declares: “the films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture, completing what began that day in the theatre of Dionysos when Aeschylus first spoke to the Athenians.” How much Leisen’s decline in the late ’40s is linked to that of Hollywood as a whole, and how much to the torment in his personal life, is a question that has no answer.
 
Parting company with Wilder, Leisen shot a handful of lesser films. I Wanted Wings (1941), a wartime flag-waver starring Ray Milland, William Holden and Veronica Lake, was a poor substitute for Leisen’s unrealised pet project, a film of Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun. Next, a trio of romantic comedies all centred on high-powered, glamorous women who fall for men of lower status. The Lady Is Willing (1942) stars Marlene Dietrich as a Broadway diva who adopts a baby and finds love with its doctor (Fred MacMurray). Take A Letter, Darling (1942) stars Rosalind Russell as a lady business executive who falls for her male secretary (Fred MacMurray). No Time for Love (1943) has Claudette Colbert as a highbrow photographer who falls head over heels for a “sandhog” digging a tunnel under the Hudson River. (Yes, he’s played by Fred MacMurray.)
 
It is hard to overlook the parallels with Leisen’s love life. Most of his Hollywood friends rejected Billy Daniels. “Nobody could understand how this could happen to Mitch. He was a person of such taste and refinement, and Daniels was so crass. He brought Mitch nothing but sorrow and yet Mitch just couldn’t pull himself away. It was just like Of Human Bondage.” When MacMurray enters Colbert’s drawing room in No Time for Love, her effete friends stare as if he were a gorilla fresh out of its cage.
 
The film is disarmingly frank about the gay fascination with “rough trade”. As Colbert enters a tunnel full of workmen, her camera and Leisen’s linger lovingly on their nude, muscular torsos. One photo shoot has a body-builder in a leopard-skin thong. In the dream sequence, MacMurray appears in a clinging Superman outfit. (A cut scene shows Colbert swimming naked, with a man’s nude buttocks mounted behind her on a plinth!) Suspecting her passion is purely physical, Claudette muses: “Maybe one person really is better than another, and there couldn’t be any real happiness – just momentary infatuation.”
 
Yet Leisen seemed to have no such doubts. After a bit role in Midnight, Billy Daniels “acted” in Lady in the Dark, Frenchman’s Creek and Masquerade in Mexico (1945). He also served, more ably, as choreographer on those films, as well as on Kitty (1945), Golden Earrings and Dream Girl. All six of these films mark an artistic, as well as a personal, “coming out” for Leisen. Camp is present throughout his work, but here it becomes the ruling aesthetic. “Camp,” writes Sontag, “is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” She might have just finished viewing Leisen’s work from the mid and late ’40s.
 
Lady in the Dark, from Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s Broadway musical, has Ginger Rogers as a fashion magazine editor plagued by indecision over men (Ray Milland, Warner Baxter and Jon Hall). She seeks help in psychoanalysis, and Leisen visualises her erotic longings in dreams. (Incredibly, this was his first film in Technicolor.) A Blue Dream features a blue-faced chorus, swirl upon swirl of dry ice and a dazzling sapphire Rolls Royce. A Gold Dream takes place in a mythical sylvan glade, where gold candelabra rise among the trees and extras sport butterfly wings on their heads. A multi-coloured Circus Dream sees Ginger in court with a jury of giant Easter eggs. She sings her defence in a dazzling (if gynaecological) ball gown, mink skirts slit to the waist and lined with crimson and gold.
 
Leisen’s biographer dismisses Lady in the Dark as “a feast for the senses but little else.” Yet it is, perhaps, his most autobiographical work. A full-blown exercise in “dream reality”, foreshadowing Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965) – or even “avant-garde” films like Jim Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971) or Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 5 (1997).
 
Frenchman’s Creek is still more flamboyant. A Daphne du Maurier tale of an English Restoration lady (Joan Fontaine) who falls for a dashing French pirate (Arturo de Cordova), it has its heroine roistering along the Cornish coast dressed as a boy. Her virile lover is adamant about preferring her in male guise. (They recall Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro in Serge Gainsbourg’s gender-bending romance of 1976, Je t’aime…moi non plus.) Pirates cavort about the ship in an impromptu drag ballet, as one dons a corset and kisses another on the cheek. James Agee called Frenchman’s Creek a “masturbation fantasy triple-distilled.” At its “climax”, Fontaine crushes a would-be rapist (Basil Rathbone) beneath a suit of armour. An orgy of Technicolor sadomasochism – worthy of Hammer or a Roger Corman film of Poe.
 
Leisen took a breather with his next films. Practically Yours (1944) is a drab comedy with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Masquerade in Mexico, a dreary rehash of Midnight, has Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova plus a lavish ballet on Mexican history. Suddenly It’s Spring (1947) has Fred MacMurray and Paulette Goddard as a couple who almost get a divorce, but don’t.
 
His next major work is Kitty, a sly social comedy about an adventuress in 18th century London, hailed by many as his finest film. A dissolute nobleman (Ray Milland) picks up a gorgeous guttersnipe (Paulette Goddard) and grooms her into a “lady” à la Pygmalion. He catapults her to the social stratosphere by marrying her to the right men. For two years, Leisen studied the painting techniques of Thomas Gainsborough – copying the wigs, breeches, hats and fans of Georgian England to the last detail. Although Paramount denied him Technicolor, Kitty is a film whose visual splendour rivals Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975).
 
Yet its warmth and wit put Kubrick’s rather glacial movie to shame. The trollop Kitty is far less sordid than any of her suitors. Her cheerful amorality evokes the Oscar Wilde epigram – “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” Infiltrating the beau monde, she is the supreme Leisen “passing” in an alien world. Milland’s foppish anti-hero, more a stylist than a lover, shows no sexual interest in her until the end. Their final marriage recalls, perhaps, that of Mitchell Leisen and Sondra Gahle.
 
Provocation of a more serious sort came in To Each His Own (1946). The story of a small-town girl (Olivia de Havilland) who bears an illegitimate baby, its script was rejected outright by the Hays Office. Leisen shot it anyway, feeling that “if you did something in good taste, it didn’t become offensive.” The preview reduced the censors to tears, and they passed the film. Olivia’s secret affair, her separation from her child, her frantic efforts to get him back over 30 years, all gain an Oedipal twist by the casting of one very handsome actor (John Lund) as both lover and son. They also foreshadow the maternal masochism of Leisen’s last memorable film, The Mating Season (1951). As de Havilland herself says, “What other Madame X story still holds up like that?”
 
Kitsch exotica held sway again in Golden Earrings. A story of a stiff-upper-lip British spy (Ray Milland) and a glamorous gypsy (Marlene Dietrich) in Hungary on the eve of World War II, it is a film “universally despised by spoilsports and the humourless.”  It is also in dubious taste for reasons of history. “In 1939,” Steven Bach reminds us, “Hungarian gypsies, along with Jews and other non-Aryans, were being rounded up by real-life Nazis.” What redeems it is a fevered and perverse sexuality. Disguised as a gypsy with shawls, kohl-black eyes and the titular jewels, Milland becomes a near mirror image of Dietrich. A man serenades him by a campfire with the famous title tune – Murvyn Vye as a dusky, bare-chested gypsy chief.
 
Golden Earrings was Leisen’s last big commercial hit. His oneiric fantasy Dream Girl was an unqualified disaster. He had fought for years not to make a film with the strident bleach-blonde star Betty Hutton, described by Myra Breckinridge as “the demonic clown, the drum majorette of Olympus.” Faced with the inevitable, he staged an operatic dream where she is Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and a tropical dream where she is Maugham’s South Seas siren Sadie Thompson. Gossip hinted at trouble between Leisen and his lover. Dream Girl was Billy Daniels’ last credit on a Leisen film. Their relationship ended shortly after.
 
At his lowest ebb since his 1938 breakdown, Leisen turned out a string of flops: Song of Surrender (1949), a dour New England drama with Claude Rains; Bride of Vengeance (1949), an ambitious fiasco starring Paulette Goddard as Lucrezia Borgia; Captain Carey, USA (1950), a thriller shot in Italy and remembered for its Oscar-winning theme song, “Mona Lisa.” Such a run of turkeys might have ended a lesser career. But Leisen would transcend his pain, transmute it into two great films.
 
 

 
 
Anyone who lives a normal life in this world of ours becomes a cog in a wheel, a unit in a system. To me that is intolerable. I have become a rebel and an outcast, but I have escaped from such a world.
 
– Arturo de Cordova, Frenchman’s Creek
 
Mitchell Leisen’s break-up with Billy Daniels is swamped in rumour. Kenneth Anger writes salaciously in Hollywood Babylon II: “The gay Hollywood couple, seemingly Semper Fidelis, until Billy’s one indiscretion was discovered by Mitchell, who complained cuttingly. Billy snuffed himself.” Doubtful, as Daniels went on to choreograph films with Esther Williams – Dangerous When Wet (1953) – and Jane Russell – The French Line (1954). Moving to Germany, he had one of his last credits on Fritz Lang’s remake of The Indian Tomb (1958). His death in 1962 was officially put down to a heart attack.
 
Twenty years older and less mobile, Leisen did his best to stay on at Paramount. Early in No Man of Her Own (1950), a middle-aged woman (Barbara Stanwyck) is cruelly dumped by a vulgar and epicene younger lover (Lyle Bettger). In a scene that reeks of masochism, she drops the money he has slipped her, flees into the night and hops aboard a cross-country train, which promptly crashes. Surviving the wreck, she is mistaken for the widow of a rich Midwesterner. She finds shelter in that mythic Middle American suburb of Leisen’s own childhood, that world of “perfect peace and security”. (Stanwyck’s voiceover is as haunting as Joan Fontaine’s in Rebecca.) Yet her lover, and shared memories of a sordid past, will not let her go.
 
As spiritual and emotional autobiography, No Man of Her Own is up there with Lady in the Dark. Stylistically, it is a film without equal. Leisen recreates the haunting shadows of film noir, that classic male urban genre, for a female protagonist in a small-town setting. He wraps it all in his cloak of masquerade. Based on I Married a Dead Man by alcoholic gay pulp novelist Cornell Woolrich, it captures that author’s tortured essence as no other film has done, apart from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974).
 
A comic variation on similar themes, The Mating Season has Thelma Ritter as a working-class woman who moves in with her ambitious yuppie son (John Lund) and his high-toned wife (Gene Tierney). She hides her identity by posing as their servant. If every other Leisen character “passes” for the sake of security or status, Ritter abases herself out of pure love for her son. She suffers the snobbery of Tierney’s mother (Miriam Hopkins), a café society Gorgon who “fills every corner of the flat like poison gas.” The world in which Lund hopes to rise is not exotic or glamorous. It is an ugly and philistine place, embodied in the young couple’s flat – where hideous floral curtains clash with vile pagoda wallpaper.
 
Beneath its acerbic wit, The Mating Season is Leisen’s cruellest study in masochism. A more trenchant critique of America’s class system than George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (a ponderous and preachy drama made the same year) it shows a bitter disenchantment with love in any form, a revulsion at the rules of the social game. His career rescued by No Man of Her Own and The Mating Season, Leisen was still a Hollywood player. But had he lost the will to play?
 
He made a few more minor films: Darling, How Could You? (1951), a fey romance with Joan Fontaine; Young Man with Ideas (1952), a comedy with Glenn Ford; Tonight We Sing (1953), a biopic of music impresario Sol Hurok. Bedevilled (1955) was a gloomy thriller shot in France with Anne Baxter, and The Girl Most Likely (1957) a frothy musical with Cliff Robertson and Jane Powell. None of these did much for him, but none harmed him appreciably. Leisen was too much the aesthete to make a truly ugly film.
 
As his film work ebbed away, Leisen continued to design gowns, stage nightclub acts, decorate luxury homes. He found employment on TV, with episodes of Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, Shirley Temple’s Storybook and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. It did not depress him unduly. “There was always something of the old grand manner about Mitch,” Ray Milland said, “even when he was doing television.” In a pinch, he would decorate the shabby sets with art and antiques from his own apartment. Bits of his nightclub work showed up in two documentaries, Here’s Las Vegas (1964) and Spree! (1967), on which Leisen preferred not to comment.
 
Shortly before his death, he gave interviews to film scholars eager for titbits about the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was the start of a posthumous career, in which has films were revived and rediscovered by new audiences. In a Post-Modern world that revels in moral and gender ambiguity, in a mingling of style and genre, in a gleeful anarchy of masks and androgyny and camp, Mitchell Leisen seems very much a man of our time. We can still bask in the light from a Star That Exploded. Leisen’s oeuvre was decades ahead of its time. Can it be the world is starting to catch up?
 
 
Notes on an Exploding Star. By David Melville. Senses of Cinema, October 2005.