Mitchell Leisen | Easy Living / 1937

innocents lost in a cynical society

by Douglas Messerli

 

Preston Sturges (screenplay, based on a story by Vera Caspary), Mitchell Leisen (director) Easy Living / 1937

 

Gay film director Mitchell Leisen began his career as a costume designer, dressing the likes of Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Natacha Rambova, Douglas Fairbanks, and many others. He then moved on, through working with Cecil B. DeMille, to become a notable set designer, including devising the look, as critic Cláudio Alves describes it, “of such opulent productions as the deliriously vulgar Madam Satan and the orgiastic hedonism of The Sign of the Cross. Had he been working primarily in the pre-Hays Code days before 1934, Alves wonders “what lewd camp spectacles he would have created otherwise.”

     His transformation into a director was rather by accident, but also emanated from the belief that perhaps the facile and multi-talented Leisen could do anything. New to film, Broadway director Stuart Walker was hired to direct a couple of films, the studio heads hiring on Leisen as co-director. Leisen, in fact, almost took over those productions for the inexperienced Walker. And soon after, he was given a chance to helm his own production with Cradle Song (1933) staring actor Leontine Sagan of the earlier lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform.

      In 1934, he directed Death Takes a Holiday and by 1937 had moved on to the screwball comedy under discussion in this essay, a work with a script by later director Preston Sturges. Alves suggests some of the reasons why Sturges ended up most unhappy with Leisen’s direction and points to a series of comments from Sturges, Billy Wilder, and others that for years helped to disparage and led critics and audiences to ignore Leisen’s rather remarkable directorial abilities.

 

“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.’"

     As Alves puts it, “One need not be a genius to read homophobia in Wilder's words or Sturges' pithy comments.”

     In many respects, Leisen was of an earlier generation, a romantic closer to someone like Ernst Lubitsch—who Mary Pickford had earlier described as a “director of doors”—than to the cynical cleverness and frenetic paced films of Sturges and Wilder. Yet while Leisen believed in the basic goodness of even his so-called villains (death included), his films nonetheless seldom demonstrate the open sentimentalism of some of Sturges’ works which, at moments, particularly in Sullivan’s Travels, but also in Hail the Conquering Hero veer dangerously close to Frank Capra territory. And although he certainly did encourage his art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté to come up with grand interiors for the film’s grand mansion and the Louis hotel room, he also wasn’t afraid to fall back on the pie-throwing, prat-falling antics of the silent film days, which also helps further ground this screwball comedy in the Depression even more so that Gregory La Cava’s more sophisticated work, My Man Godfrey (1936), with which Easy Living is often compared.

     And despite Sturges’ slightly homophobic comments, one might argue that, at heart, his script is a kind of “fairy tale,” beginning when an ordinary working girl, Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), riding on the top level of a double-decked bus is suddenly buried under the riches ($58,000 to be exact) of a sable coat which financier and banker J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold) is furious to find his wife has just purchased, despite a closet full of other fur coats.

      Playing something like hide and seek with his wife Jenny (Mary Nash), Ball finally catches her and the coat, tossing off the balcony of the penthouse, an action which ends in his wife immediately leaving Florida.

       Mary, on her way to work at the Boys’ Constant Companion, is so honest that she is willing to be late to find the owner of the coat, who, as she begins to go door-to-door in the row of wealthy townhouses by which the bus was passing, she quickly meets up with as he leaves the building on his way to work. He not only insists his chauffeur take her to work, but that they stop by a milliner to get her a new hat to replace the one destroyed by the coat. The coat is also hers to keep, he insists, she totally confused by the gesture, but not knowing its real worth or his identity, finds his generosity impossible to refuse.

       Evidently the dour folk overseeing the boys’ magazine are not able to see the humor of the situation, and fire Mary Smith for ostentatious behavior and lying, even as she speaks the truth. No one wears such a coat, in their prurient minds, without something naughty going on. One might wonder whether one should have wanted one’s boys to have such constant companions.

       The milliner, Van Buren (Franklin Pangborn), however, is not only perfectly aware the price of such an expensive coat, but is delighted when Ball choses one of the most fashionable of their hats, and recognizes Ball’s name when he presents his card for the billing, rushing out into the street to tell his friend Louis. 

        How Leisen ever got Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA)—who in 1933 had banned all pansies from films, and was a stickler about all sorts of issues that arise in Easy Living—to approve the prissy gossip which Van Buren represents is something I still need explaining—let alone how the board could ignore hotelier Louis Louis’ (Luis Alberni) spooner-like contortions of the English language such as, “I'm a man like this, I don't beat around de bush to come in the back door. I tell you, this is where you belong and this is where you have to be.”

      True, in this role Pangborn is perhaps prissier than he is sissier, but it comes down to the same thing, even if his doesn’t use as many hand gestures or sashay through any doors, it’s quite clear that he’s a swish, as so many dress and hat designers were represented to be in the pre-Code days. Perhaps he was one of the “excisable minor characters” who got some pruning, but his role here is still far more substantial than sissies were generally permitted in the early 1930s. Here he is not only the source of the gossip about Mary being Ball’s mistress, but in passing his interpretation of events on to Louis and others, he later becomes involved with further visits to Mary’s hotel suite, permitting for the first time in years a sissy to actually become a central player in the story. At one point he enters Mary’s suite with a handful of so many dresses and hats it appears that he is himself attired in the female costumes.

      In short, he serves the purpose in this film of the Mercury who reports to others what Hitchcock calls the McGuffin, the event that sets the entire plot in motion and keeps it rolling almost until the end of film. His “queer” reading of the situation and his sharing that piece of news with Louis, whose empty grand Louis hotel (based on the Waldorf apparently, which when it first opened could find no customers to fill it) is in debt to J. B. Ball who is prepared to foreclose, upends the lives of all the film’s central characters. If Louis can get Mary into his finest hotel suite, how can Ball close him down?

      And when Louis, in turn, passes the news on to the gossip columnist Wallace Whistling (William Demarest) that Ball’s mistress is now living in his hotel and that Ball (again quite by accident) has chosen to stay for night in the hotel, his actions further result in Mary suddenly being offered an automobile, jewels, and an entire wardrobe—proving the Depression-era adage that financial gains are awarded only to those thought to be privileged, never to those who were most need them.

      In fact, Mary demurs regarding almost all these lavish offerings, but the givers are so insistent and Arthur’s character is presented as so wonderfully clueless and overwhelmed by the magnificent presents that she cannot resist, and she ends up somewhat flustered with a world of possessions she has no need of. What she most needs early on in this film is simply something to eat. She now has a glorious place in which to sleep, but with only a few nickels she’s stolen from her piggy bank, she has nothing to put into her belly. Even at the local automat she can afford only a piece of pie.

     It is there, by the Dickensian coincidence of all such comic plots, that she meets John Ball, Jr. (Ray Milland), who in one of the first scenes of the film has become so frustrated with his father’s over-protecting financial control of his life, that he has determined to leave the house and find a job. He now works as a busboy in the automat, and is so taken by the poor girl in a sable coat that he attempts to obtain free food for her by pushing open the automated doors, a comic device that will appear over the years in numerous other films such as That Touch of Mink with Doris Day and Cary Grant (1962). Here, John junior is immediately found out and caught, but in an attempt to outrace his arresting pursuer—much like his mother’s race throughout the house that morning with his father on the chase—total chaos consumes their universe, eventually through the struggle opening up all the automated food slots and, after a diner shouts “free food” to the people in the street, ends up in a food fight where everyone is eventually engulphed in consumables on the automat’s floor.

 

     Only John and Mary escape, Mary asking whether he has somewhere to sleep the night, and inviting him up to her palatial hotel room. Once again, the Hays board seems more than bountiful in allowing them to spend the night together, permitted perhaps through Leisen’s clever architectural arrangement of a bedroom couch where they lay together in opposite directions toe to head. But that doesn’t mean they first don’t share a bath, in this case a huge conch-shell construction for which they cannot even figure out how to turn on the water, achieving the fountain’s effects only by accident while being fully clothed.

       Given everyone’s mistaken perception that J. B. Ball, staying, again by coincidence, in the hotel, has shared the night in Mary’s room, and the fact that his son really has spent the night there, one might argue that Easy Living is one of the raciest movies that has even gotten through the Hays Code restrictions without notable cuts. 

       To add to the general confusion of the central figures, who know nothing of the numerous scandals in which they’re involved—and applauded for—an investment broker sneaks up to the suite to see if she might be able to find out from the Bull of Wall Street via his mistress if steel is going up or down. When Mary asks her own “Ball,” he offhandedly jokes that since it’s going to rain, it’s going down. So the couple unknowingly send the market for steel into a plunge at the very moment that J. B. is buying, certain the price is on its way up.

       The disaster finally ends in his temporary financial ruination, in Mary being tossed out of the hotel, and in John discovering that the sable upon his now beloved Mary was given to her by her father. By the time they reach J. B. to resolve the crisis, he has reached such a fever pitch that all he can do is shout, which does indeed so dominate the other busy comings and goings and smaller gags that it truly results in some displeasure as noted by several commentators.

      The return of his wife finally quiets J. B. down somewhat, and Mary’s arrival finally convinces them that the only way out of the predicament is to have her call back the stock broker and report that J. B. now says steel is going up. It works, providing enough joy to permit all these loving innocents to explain whatever needs explaining, which is practically everything since everyone has imagined the worst. All of them being innocent and clueless at heart—even the bull-headed J. B.—is what makes Leisen’s film so pleasurably different from Sturges’ later films where, in fact, the beloved innocents are really found to be truly guilty. Which explains, perhaps, why there is something giddy, if not gay, about all of Leissen’s motion pictures.

       In his review on Zekefilm, Justin Mory very nicely summarizes Leisen’s ability to marry the high and the low, humor and drama, art and slapstick in this film:

 

“In all, balancing the sharp edges of the script with a seasoning dash of romanticism, Easy Living remains 1930’s entertainment at its zenith, with keen intelligence and lowbrow humor often co-existing in the same scene. And while one might assume this comic synthesis derived exclusively from the involvement of Preston Sturges at the scripting level, who later joined slapstick and satire to masterful effect in the high society nonsense depicted in, say, 1941’s Lady Eve, one of the most surprising revelations in….Kat Ellinger’s audio commentary [to the film] is that director Leisen himself developed the malfunctioning Automat food riot that ends up being one of the simultaneously broadest and breadlines-era incisive scenes in the film. Precisely the sort of thing Sturges might have dreamed up himself had it occurred to him first. ….A viewer today finds a perfect fusion of artistic sensibilities in Easy Living despite the later comic director’s dismissal of his earlier artistic collaborator….”

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).