His Girl Friday (1940)

Mike Wallace interviews Ben Hecht in 1958 via University of Texas:

HECHT: How do you know I wrote “The Iron Pettycoat”? I took my name off it.

WALLACE: I know you did. For reasons best known to Ben Hecht, the New York Times said, “He declined to have his name mentioned in the credits. A witness to the finished picture may readily figure out why.” Uh – why – why do you get involved in such trash?

HECHT: Well, uh, it wasn’t trash when I started. You see a movie begins like most things with an idea and then it turns out that the inventor of the idea who was usually the writer is a stowaway. He has the privileges of a stowaway. He has no powers to assert himself and about ten or fifteen villains including his own incompetence usually corrupts that he – the reason he thought of – in this particular case, “The Iron Pettycoat,” the corruption came through the recutting of the movie and the movie was written for a lady, Miss Katherine Hepburn, and ended up instead as a role for the hero, Mr. Bob Hope, Miss Hepburn was removed from in by fifty percent. I got irritated and took my name off it – it had nothing to do with the movie I wrote.

WALLACE: But the fact of the matter is that you’ve said time and again, Ben, that you’ve sold out – you sold out to make a buck, isn’t that true?

HECHT: Well, what do we all do – you’re making a buck, I’m making a buck, I don’t sell out anything. I’ve written three hundred short stories and kept alive by working in the movies. You cannot have two homes – one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast …

WALLACE: Well wait, wait, wait, Ben. Now in one breath you say Hollywood puts together trash and the next breath you say, “Give me a hundred thousand dollars and I’ll grind out whatever you tell me and who cares what it does to the American mind.” Isn’t that about what you say?

HECHT: No, well I – I leave that guilt up to the movie makers. I just do what I’m told. I take assignments, I used to work on newspapers. I took assignments. I take assignments from movie people and there’s very little a writer can do to improve a movie. The writer’s usually paid not to assert himself, not to intrude and one of the reasons that Hollywood has – come a cropper.

WALLACE: Well, now wait….

HECHT: The writer has had nothing to do with the situation.

WALLACE: The writer has nothing to do?

HECHT: Nothing to do.

WALLACE: We’ve talked about this – this week with another top screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, who admires you very much, by the way. He’s the fellow who wrote “Marty” and “The Bachelor Party” and he said this, he said, “It’ all up to the individual writer.” Chayefsky said, “I’ve never written just for the money in my life, I’d rather hand the money back than write something just because somebody else tells me to.”

HECHT: He sounds like little Goldilocks. (Laughs) He’ll change his mind after he’s been out here a while.
WALLACE: If I may switch the subject … abruptly Ben … do you get any consolation at all from religion?

HECHT: Uh, no. I regard religion as a part of a rather odd mythomania which has persisted in the world … I think that anybody that gets consolation from religion is much the same as scientists who might get consolation from the delusion that the world was flat. Religion is changed … God has different coloration, different meaning today…

WALLACE: You’re a Jew?

HECHT: Yes.

WALLACE: …. Means nothing to you?

HECHT: … no more other than I was a Kentuckian.

Easy Living (1937)

Senses of Cinema tries rescue director Mitchell Leisen's reputation by assassinating Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges:

“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.” (1) 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.” (2)
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.” (3) For Wilder, the problem with Leisen was simple. “He was a window dresser.” (4)

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.” (5)

Cornball excess? Has this guy even SEEN these movies?!?! There has to be a way to appreciate the work of one director without making this childish and two dimensional argument against Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)