Mitchell Leisen

I've only seen To Each His Own, which I think is a fantastic film, mostly because of Olivia's fabulous performance. A shame it's not available on DVD in America.

I like his two films with Stanwyck - Remember the Night and No Man of her Own. Screenwriter Preston Sturges however didn't like the way Leisen did Remember the Night and that's why he wanted to direct his own work. I am not a fan of ODH so I haven't seen To Each His Own or Hold Back the Dawn.

I recently saw Midnight. Claudette was darling as usual, John Barrymore brilliant even in his decline, and Don Ameche almost bearable for once.

I haven't seen MIDNIGHT yet. That's one I desperately want to watch. Another one is SWING HIGH, SWING LOW.

I also watched EASY LIVING, with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. I recently learned that Milland was overtly homophobic and that's tempered my enjoyment of his films slightly, unfortunately, but this is a great picture.

What is your source of Ray Milland's homophobia, r4?

[quote]What is your source of Ray Milland's homophobia, r4?

Milland is quite open and proud of it in his own autobiography, apparently. It's even mentioned on TCM's page regarding Lesien's GOLDEN EARRINGS:

[quote]Milland had not wanted to do the film, claiming the story was ridiculously lightweight for an actor who had just won an Oscar for playing the alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945). He also said that Dietrich, only two years his senior, was too old to be his love interest. For her part, she complained that he had body odor and was a lousy actor. In private, she even suggested that he'd gotten the part because Leisen, whose homosexuality was well-known throughout Hollywood, was attracted to him. This was a particularly nasty joke on Milland, who was one of the screen's most notorious homophobes and eventually refused to work with Leisen for fear that he might, indeed, make a pass at him.

I'm still not sure how true all this is, though; or how serious Milland was in his autobiography. He made several films with Leisen and they seemed to work very well together. And isn't Milland's character in THE LOST WEEKEND supposed to be gay, anyway?

OP, do you have the book "Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director" by David Chierichetti?

I think Milland worked so much with Leisen because both had contracts with Paramount, although I guess they could have gotten out of repeat projects if they didn't get along.

I love Mitchell Leisen, he's a totally underrated director. I've seen Easy Living, Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, Remember the Night, No Man of Her Own, and the precode musical Murder at the Vanities (which includes a delightfully surreal production number celebrating the joys of marijuana) --they are all wonderful.

To Each His Own, Swing High Swing Low, and Hands Across the Table are on my must-see list. I've also heard very good things about his costume drama Kitty, starring Paulette Godard.

I never did understand why Sturges was so unhappy with Leisen's films of his screenplays for Easy Living and Remember the Night. Nor why Billy Wilder was so critical of his film of Midnight (co-written by Wilder). I thought he did a beautiful job with all three of those.

Leisen was a art director at a great moment - 20's - when films could be wildly visual and film design reached unique ecstatic heights. Like Von Sternberg and Busby Berkeley - he took all that innovation and possibility concerning space and movement into the sound era. Von Sternberg kept a huge dose of the expressionistic surrealism coupled with kinky narratives, Berkeley was a visual artist and showman in an often innocent or clean matter. There's not much story. Leisen maybe managed the best collage cause his movies have it all - visuals including sets, costumes, movement, lighting, narratives, performances. And yet its so elegant it never feel "too much" - as Sternberg (who I do love) does feel. And that's why Sternberg lost his career. Audiences don't want to be troubled and have a sick feeling after viewing such orgasmic bizarrities. After Leisen you want to continue your delightful evening.

r7 No, but I definitely intend to buy a copy as soon as I can. It's the only book on his films, I think, isn't it? Is it any good?

The only thing I have on him at the moment is a long article in an old Film Comment magazine by Jack Shadoian, which talks a little about Leisen himself and his technique, but mostly concentrates on TO EACH HIS OWN.

Many thanks indeed for your posts r9 and r10. This is why I started the thread, as I know very little about him and most of his films and couldn't put into words that eloquently what I feel about the great Leisen films I've seen so far. The main reason I love DataLounge is to read the thoughts and opinions of people here who clearly love film and have an in-depth knowledge of classic cinema. Thank you both x

I like TO EACH HIS OWN as much as any gay man of a Certain Age and certain think Livvie was one of the most accomplished actresses of the period, but I still think Celia Johnson's performance in BRIEF ENCOUNTER is the one for the ages and should have won the award, but Miss deH was established Hollywood, had been nominated twice before, lost in front of her sister, and the film dealt with war-time losses. An interesting year for Best Actress--Russell doing a biopic a la Greer Garson's Madame Curie in SISTER KENNY, but bringing grit and reality to it, Jennifer Jones playing bad girl and Latina spitfire in the ludicrous but extremely enjoyable DUEL IN THE SUN, and Jane Wyman deglammed and glum as Ma in THE YEARLING. I would have put Johnson first, then probably de Havilland, and perhaps skipped and pushed for Myrna LOY in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, an underappreciated and understated performance. (The movie is one my five favorite of all time.)

I don't have the book on Leisen but I have seen it. I remember it has lots of interviews though it has been criticized for not providing a standard biography of the director.

Wilder was a homophobe then too (in his later years when he was collecting art he became friends with David Hockney) - Wilder often referred to Leisen as that fag set decorator.

[quote]I never did understand why Sturges was so unhappy with Leisen's films of his screenplays for Easy Living

He was? Can you expand on this? Easy Living is a favorite of mine; I thought Leisen did a wonderful job with it. I love the scene where Jean Arthur blindfolds her piggy bank before smashing it open.

Another Leisen directed film that I enjoyed was Take A Letter, Darling. If my memory serves me right, it stars Rosalind Russell as a high flying career gal who keeps running into trouble with business men (and their jealous wives) because she's unmarried. So she hires Fred MacMurray to pretend to be her secretary/ fiancé. Hijinks ensue.

That train crash scene in No Man of Her Own looks fun. Apparently the two actresses did their own stunts in being tossed around the toppling ladies room compartment.

Another thing about No Man of Her Own is that Leisen's credit is a readable signature.

Love him. He made some of my very favorite films. An interesting fact about To Each His Own. Livvy had been very sick before the beginning of filming. So Leisen decided to film in sequence, starting when she is a very young woman. So De Haviland is very skinny in the first scenes and grows heavier as the movie continues. She's padded for the last scenes. Also, he was a such a stickler for detail, that it's probably the only forties movie that the costumes actually look period and not a forties version of the eras.

Was Leisen considered a "woman's director" like George Cukor? Besides being gay, it sounds like they had some similarities, including an obsession with the small details.

I should say healthy obsession, as there's nothing wrong with that.

And no one has mentioned The Mating Season, one of my favorite films, and Thelma Ritter's best role. (She got an oscar nomination for it.) If you've never seen it, you're in for a treat! It shows up on TCM every once in a while. Catch it!

I just an old Robert Osborne introduction for MIDNIGHT where he says that Leisen didn't get along with the film's writers, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and even barred them from the set. He rewrote some of the material and Wilder, according to Osborne, made the decision to start directing as a result, so that his writing would never be tampered with again. He says that Leisen also didn't get along with Claudette Colbert, who insisted on being filmed on her left side. Mary Astor was pregnant during filming, which they had to hide; and John Barrymore wouldn't or couldn't memorize his lines and had to use cue cards.

Sorry, that should say "I just watched an old Robert Osborne introduction for MIDNIGHT..."

[quote]Was Leisen considered a "woman's director" like George Cukor?

Yes, I think so. All of his great films are centered around women.

So for that matter was Hitchcock's but he wasn't labelled with that insulting term.

Just saw No Man of Her Own a few days ago; it starts slowly, gets going with the train crash, then gets wickedly entertaining in the second half, cramming every conceivable soapy plot device into the narrative and I was on the edge of my seat, loving every second of it. Stanwyck acts to the rafters, allowing Jane Cowl to steal the movie with her smoothly understated performance.

I love the film's last lines referring to the murdered bad guy Lyle Bettger. Blonde: He was a skunk. Cop: You oughta know, sister. You killed him.

Leisen gives Stanwyck a long close-up when she marries Lyle and she changes from being miserably trapped to realizing she is going to kill him.

Was Billy Wilder really a homophobe? One of my favorite films is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which plays wonderfully on Holmes's homosexuality. Wilder later said that he wished he'd gone further with the gay stuff and made it more overt.

R26. Did you notice how No Man of Her Own got darker and darker as if unfolded until you think they must be filming by flashlight, and I love Jane Cowl coming down the stairs. Of course it is a Cornell Woolrich story called "I Married a Dead Man".

I love Remember the Night. I think its somewhat downer of an ending prevents it from being an annual holiday classic.

R30 the plot turned into film noir and the climax was set at night so it makes sense to be dark. However I don't recall Lyle Bettger's office being dark.

Easy Living and Remember the Night are two of my absolute favorite films. I feel whatever Sturges was bothered by, it may have been more ego than anything because both films have aged beautifully and their themes are universal. I cannot recommend them both more highly.

MIdnight is probably one of the most sparkling comedies of any year. Absolutely perfect.

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.”

I just want to thank you all for this thread. I happened to stumble upon No Man of Her Own on youtube last week, and I've been entranced ever since. Yes, it's schlocky, but very stirring.

fabulous monstera.

Masquerade Ball on the Zeppelin in Cecil B Demille's 1930 Madam Satan

Assistant director and co designer - Mitchell Leisen

OP - don't forget to go see some of his pre Director work such as this oddity. Shows you how he was bringing the 20's experimentation into mainstream cinema.

wrong link. Here you go

I Married a Shadow was also remade in the early 80s in France with Nathalie Baye and is definitely worth watching.

As spiritual and emotional autobiography, No Man of Her Own is stylistically, 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.

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.

Billy 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’ . "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."

R18 - To give an idea of how powerful and respected he was at the time, Leisen 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...’.

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.

It's interesting to me that as much as I love most of Wilder's films up until One Two Three (which isn't great but frenetically enjoyable,) after that, all his movies seem to be unsubtle over the top sex comedies, or unsublte over the top buddy movies. The bext of them, The Fortune Cookie, is still not even close to his earlier work. Mitchell Leisen made some not very good films, but over all, his good ones are as numerous as Wilder's, who is thought much more highly.

No love for Leisen's 1944 FRENCHMAN'S CREEK ? - a super period romp from a Daphne De Maurier novel with her Rebecca - Joan Fontaine - looking great in the period clothes. Love how Leisen lingers over the bare hairy chest of the pirate Arturo de Cordova - not a great movie presence but he has a stunning chest !

LADY IN THE DARK with Ginger Rogers should be an interesting view too.

I saw MIDNIGHT yesterday. A wonderful film. And Edith Head's gowns for Claudette Colbert are magnificent. It was made in 1939, which was Head's first full year as costume designer at Paramount after Travis Banton left. There's an interesting part in Jay Jorgensen's book on Head about this time and Colbert's attitude to Edith, which I found surprising...

[quote]Edith's first full year as a designer got off to a rocky start. Her relationship with her stable of "B" actresses seemed to not change at all after Banton left. Stars like Gail Patrick, Shirley Ross, and Frances Farmer still relied on Edith's judgment and good taste. But a few of the bigger stars who had been dressed by Banton were not pleased to now be turned over to his former assistant. The most vocal of these was Claudette Colbert. whom Edith was dressing in Zaza (1939).

[quote]Not helping the matter was a rumor being spread by Hedda Hopper, who was then acting at Paramount, that Edith had a hand in getting Travis fired. What went on behind the scenes can probably best he summed up in the words of Frank Richardson,who sent a memo to Fred Leahy in 1940 recommending Colbert's clothing be made outside of studio, rather than have Edith design it for an upcoming feature.

[quote]"Miss Colbert considers Edith Head an art student, has no faith in her designing ability. This means (as has happened before) continual changing of this line and that and more shopping while Miss Colbert experiments with her own ideas," wrote Richardson, "The dress becomes so disorganized and worn out after so many changes that it becomes necessary to build new one. Miss Colbert was a dressmaker herself In France, before the screen discovered her." Colbert began using Irene Lentz, a designer for the Ladies Custom Salon at Bullocks Wilshire. "She could have just as easily asked for Travis Banton," David Chierichetti says, "so l don't know ultimately how loyal she was to him."

[quote]Banton found work at Twentieth Century-Fox and Edith told Chierichetti that she was so anxious that he keep his job, she would wake him up and drive him to Fox before she had to be at Paramount in the morning. All of the idle talk about her usurping Banton's position put Edith on guard, and she responded by becoming more reserved around the other employees in the costume department.

Hedda Hopper has a role in MIDNIGHT, too.

Leisen on Mary Pickford's costumes for DOROTHY VERNON OF HADDEN HALL:

[quote]Mary’s costumes were so heavy they were almost more than she could bear, but she insisted on them. I used to carry her onto the set in the morning, to conserve her strength,. The sheer weight of her costumes was so great that she lost a lot of weight by the end of the day. She pulled on the bodice and complained that it was too loose and told me to take it in. I argued, but I had to do it, and the next morning, after she had eaten breakfast and had more water in her system, it was too tight and we had to let it out.

[quote]We really spent money on that one. Mary Pickford found out that Blanche Sweet had just made a Renaissance era film that had a gown that supposedly cost $25,000, so Mary wanted one that cost more. I gave her one that cost $32,000. It was embroidered with real pearls.

This is from a book I have on Costume Design. Roaul Walsh on THE THIEF OF BAGDAD:

[quote]The Thief of Bagdad, the first picture to cost a million dollars, was made in thirty five days. The costumes had been designed by Mitchell Leisen; his flair for period dress beautifully complemented the wizardry of [art director William Cameron] Menzies' sets. Doug Fairbanks got around in baggy pants, slippers, and his skin. This outfit showed off his athletic ruggedness to perfection. It is a toss-up whether the princess responded to his vehement declarations of love or his physical comeliness.

Here's a picture of Fairbanks in dress. He's incredibly beautiful...

More on the film at the link beneath, plus a picture of one of Leisen's sketches for Fairbanks's costume:

[quote]Mitchell Leisen started designing in the extravagant silent Cecil B. DeMille era, admonished by his boss never to design anything an audience member could buy in a store. Leisen told David Chierichetti, "We had 3,000 extras a day for The Thief, and I had to design different costumes for all of them. Western Costume made them, and they charged us the full cost of making the costume as a rental and they got them all back when it was over. The costumes were much more complicated than Robin Hood (his previous Fairbanks film) had been. We had a hundred Chinese soldiers' uniforms, all identical and very intricate. There were a hundred copies of something else. The principal problem with the extras on this was to keep the men from wearing long trousers rolled up under their costumes, which would suddenly unroll in the middle of a take and spoil everything." Raoul Walsh's recollection of his costume designer was succinct: "Yes, an arty fellow, very arty--had to have beautiful drapes all around, plush carpets and real silver." (Bogdanovich.)

I just saw REMEMBER THE NIGHT. It's incredible to think Stanwyck and MacMurray made DOUBLE INDEMNITY only four years later, as the films and the characters couldn't be further apart. I saw the Wilder film again only a few days ago, coincidentally. The latter is obviously a brilliant film on every level but it's also incredibly cynical whereas the Leisen picture is so warm and humane, and so too are Stanwyck and MacMurray; whereas in the later film they're both rotten to the heart.

To Each His Own was terrible. That's 1940's Hollywood sappiness and melodrama at its worst. It sure ain't Letter from an Unknown Woman in which Joan Fontaine gives her big sis a run for her money and delivers a performance that's just as good or perhaps even better than anything Olivia has ever done.

But I did like Hold Back the Dawn which is my favorite Olivia de Havilland film. And having Leisen appear as himself was an original plot twist. I also liked Paulette Goddard doing her usual sex kitten routine.

Lots of good info at the link. I need to find some pics of his lover, Billy Daniels, who is described as "rough trade."

Handsome John Lund showed up in several of his pictures.

r54 Apparently, this is Billy Daniels on the left (Leisen in the center):

Oops, hold on. Try this one...

He directed the last movie shot on the RKO lot before Lucy & desi bought it. THE GIRL MOST LIKELY (57)--with many shirtless boys choreographed by Gower Champion. Kaye Ballard camps it up. It was his last feature, too.

BEDEVILLED (55) has Steve Forrest as a hot priest.

Leisen cast Frances Farmer as the second female lead in Take a Letter, Darling. He thought she was great, but Farmer showed up for a few costume fittings and never answered another call. Although he wanted her, Frances' behavior got her bounced from Paramount and over to Monogram.

Constance Moore took the part meant for Farmer. Too bad. She was connected to the film in the early stages when Colbert was still cast in the leading role.....but Frances could have held her own with Russell as well. Another lost opportunity for her.

The two deHavilland films are good. Paulette Goddard in Hold Back the Dawn is evil and fun.

Yes that's him in the picture at r56 and we must not fail to identify the third person in that pic because it is DL fave Don " We will have it for you at NOOOOOOON!" Loper from the I Love Lucy fashion show episode in Hollywood with Sheila McCrae.

A better shot of Billy at work with Jane Russell.

Nobody, but nobody, rocked a halter top better than J.R.!

Seems to me that a Leisen Box Set would be perfect for TCM, something like the Lubitsch set.

I used to have a copy of Take a Letter, Darling but cannot find it. However I seem to remember that the part Frances Farmer was supposedly offered was surprisingly small. I guess she was still being penalized by Paramount at this time.

Definitely a supporting role.....she played one in WORLD PREMIERE and AMONG THE LIVING so they were definitely burning off her contract....even her loan out to Fox for SON OF FURY was a supporting role.

I watched 13 Hours by Air (1936) which doesn't have Leisen's credit as a signature. The film is a fairly unremarkable Paramount aviation programmer but has some odd moments like Fred MacMurray using the blonde Joan Bennett's powder puff to freshen his face in the morning, and an intense and homoerotic cigarette lighting between Brian Donlevy and Alan Baxter.

Saw Arise My Love (1940). This has the Leisen signature in the credits. Apparently screenwriter Billy Wilder was very unhappy with the direction, but one can see Leisen's touch in the romantic banter between Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland. There is a homoerotic scene where Milland is shaving in a bathtub naked, and two male friends of his are also in the bathroom (though dressed) chatting with him. Claudette tossing Mein Kemp out the window after she tries to read it as research for her journalist job in Berlin is another interesting touch, presumably from Wilder. And this was before the US entered the war.

I was shocked to read that Marjorie Main was fired from Remember the Night (1940) after she had been cast as Lee's mother. The story was that Main was supposedly playing the part too broadly, but couldn't Leisen just have given her direction?

Michelle Vogel in her biography of Main doesn't mention Remember the Night.

Attention Mitchell Leisen fans! Next week, TCM will be broadcast, in prime time, two of his most highly regarded films, Kitty (1945) and Frenchman's Creek (1944).

First up is Kitty, which will air on Sunday, April 3 at 10 pm Eastern. It's a costume drama starring Paulette Godard and Ray Milland. I've heard very good things about this one and am really looking forward to it--especially because it's been so hard to find. It wasn't released on DVD until last year--and even then in DVD-R format only, and the transfer is supposed to be awful. I'm sure TCM will be showing a much higher quality version.

Then, on Wednesday, April 6 at 8 pm Eastern, they'll be airing Frenchman's Creek. It's a Daphne du Maurier adaptation starring Joan Fontaine, and it's described as a romantic drama about a noblewoman who runs off with a pirate. Sounds fun! Again, this one has also been hard to track down, and has been available via DVD-R only.

Neither of these films are available via streaming, but recently I discovered that Leisen's The Mating Season (1951) is free on Amazon Prime. It's a class-conscious romantic comedy starring Gene Tierney at her most gorgeous and Thelma Ritter in one of her very best roles. It's terrific and deserves to be much better known. Definitely see it if you have Amazon Prime. And fire up your DVRs for Kitty and Frenchman's Creek!

Saw Frenchman's Creek last year; it's entertaining enough, memorable mostly for how Leisen's camera makes love to Artruro de Cordova.

I tried The Mating Game with a copy I got on ebay. Couldn't get into it and gave up. Then I went back to watch the rest and the DVD kept freezing so I gave up again. Looked like it was going to be a showdown between Thelma Ritter and Miriam Hopkins ...

I wouldn't count on the broadcast copy of Kitty being all that great either, R69. Last time TCM showed it was dismal. The last time a saw it in a very good copy was on AMC in the 90's where they showed it every so often (God, I miss the days when AMC actually showed classic movies).

And the print they showed of Frenchman's Creek last month was so washed out and light, it was almost impossible to watch.

I rarely see movies more than once but have seen "Easy Living" at least 3 maybe 4 times. It gets better each time especially the amazing automat scene. This movie made me a Jean Arthur fan in perpetuity. I also love most of the Sturges written and directed (especially Palm Beach Story, which is probably the most frenetic), but Easy Living is much easier on the eyes (Sturges really is not a visual director at all of course). And none of Sturges' heroines can match Jean Arthur for comedy (although of course Stanwyck is wonderful in The Lady Eve).

Most of Leisen's best work is controlled by Universal, which owns all of Paramount's pre-1948 product. Since Uni is doing a terrible job releasing their own classic films (save for the monster movies) why should they treat the orphaned Paramount films any better? LADY IN THE DARK is one example: will it ever be released to the home market? If it is, can Universal locate and restore all the cut footage that the fans want to see? And the story of SWING HIGH SWING LOW is unbelievably tragic: Fox bought the remake rights to SHSL to make something called WHEN MY BABY SMILES AT ME. The deal back then was Paramount had to ship the Release Print and all camera elements of Swing High Swing Low to Fox, so Para couldn't re-release the original film while Fox was marketing and releasing their own remake product. After the run of WHEN MY BABY was over the print of SWING HIGH was supposed to go go back to the home studio, but it got lost. That's it. There is NO decent print of SWING HIGH SWING LOW in existence, save for one at the LOC or some such place. The public domain prints are all that exist and are typical of what TCM shows... and for those wondering about Billy Daniels, he is featured prominently in the Circus Dream of LADY IN THE DARK.

THE LADY IS WILLING (42) did get a brand new strike by Sony recently and is showing up on TCM from time to time. Dietrich looks incredible.

I saw KITTY many years ago and it's that rare thing : an eighteenth century costume picture that charming, intelligent and extremely funny.

It was Paramounts version of FOREVER AMBER (which had still to be made by Fox).

Senses of Cinema on ML films:

He worked with so many actresses: Carole Lombard; Joan Bennett, Jean Arthur , Claudette Colbert ,Barbara Stanwyck Veronica Lake, Olivia De Havilland , Paulette Goddard, Marlene Dietrich Rosalind Russell ,Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell, Betty Hutton, Anne Baxter, Gene Tierney, Thelma Ritter, Miriam Hopkins...

If you're still around, thanks R45. Sometime back a friend lent me a boxed set of Sturges' films and couldn't barely tolerate them -- mainly because he relied and resorted to excessive mugging and busy-ness in seemingly all of his scenes. 'Sullivan's Travels', especially so. Poor Joel McCrea, who was SO underrated and such a natural actor, is surrounded by hams, almost smothered by them in that picture.

Leisen's "Song of Surrender" (1949) with Claude Rains is very good...it's sometimes on YouTube.