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.