To watch Mitchell Leisen’s series of romantic comedy masterpieces is to experience some of the most moving, authentic, sensitive romances the cinema has ever produced. Leisen was Hollywood’s foremost expert on making movies about tough, wisecracking, emotionally closed-off people learning how to open themselves up to the vulnerability of falling in love. In his films, romance is not only unlikely, but downright improbable. His characters are always up against it: in Remember the Night, Fred MacMurray plays the prosecutor trying to send Barbara Stanwyck, who was arrested after stealing some jewelry, to jail; when Claudette Colbert slips away from Don Ameche after they spend a night together in Midnight, Ameche, in the hopes of rekindling their connection, has to recruit all of the cab drivers in Paris to help track her down. Leisen helps us to see how these insurmountable odds are conquered, over and over again.
Leisen’s films are not constrained by traditional notions of genre or form. Remember the Night seems to change what kind of movie it is every 25 minutes or so — from courtroom farce, to road movie, to pastoral portrait of small-town America, to heart-wrenching romance. In the nighttime scenes, Leisen favors a striking high-contrast black-and-white look that recalls German Expressionism more than the visual palette of other comedies from this era. Arise, My Love is a screwball comedy with a wartime backdrop; it opens with Claudette Colbert rescuing Ray Milland from a Spanish prison, and climaxes when their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine—a moment of life-or-death romantic intensity worthy of Frank Borzage. Death Takes a Holiday is a deeply strange film about the Grim Reaper spending a few days on Earth, where he falls in love with a mortal woman. The eerie horror movie atmosphere clashes with the comedic portrayal of an upper-class milieu, and Leisen treats the romance between Death and a woman as a seriously transcendent experience. “Love is greater than illusion, and as strong as death,” Death himself proclaims before walking into the afterlife with his beloved.
Part of the magic of Leisen’s films is seeing how these tonal changes and clashing formal elements coalesce in support of Leisen’s dominant theme: how love, in its senselessness and beauty, transcends improbabilities. Leisen conveys this just in the way he stages scenes of men and women meeting, or parting ways, or kissing for the first time. Swing Low, Swing High opens with a great example: fresh out of the army, Fred MacMurray spots Carole Lombard up on a boat while he's walking along the dock. They strike up a conversation as her boat is pulling away, with both of them unnaturally craning their heads to stay in each other's view. Leisen’s camera pulls dramatically up into the air and down toward the ground to emphasize the growing distance between them as the boat moves further out—a very obvious symbol of the gulf that separates them. Easy Living has an even better meet-cute, albeit an indirect one: the impoverished character played by Jean Arthur first comes into wealthy Ray Milland’s orbit when his father throws a $58,000 fur coat off of his balcony and it just happens to land on Arthur, who is sitting on a double decker bus in the street below.
Leisen’s tonal changes give his films a rich and unpredictable emotional texture that proves extremely affecting. Because these moments of seriousness and intensity are unexpected, they’re that much more deeply felt. When Jean Arthur and Ray Milland lay across from one another and finally kiss in Easy Living, for example, the film’s wacky comedy transforms into this truly disarming moment of sensitivity and grace.
With an understanding of love comes an equal understanding of heartbreak, of lonesome people withering as their chances at companionship become fewer and farther between. In Hands Across the Table, while the Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray romance flourishes in the foreground, you have Ralph Bellamy's character, a wheelchair-bound ex-pilot, on the sidelines as the third part of an uneven love triangle. Bellamy's character personifies the melancholy streak that runs through Leisen's romances. In his interactions with Lombard early in the film, you wouldn't be wrong to think that he's going to be her love interest. For example, after they first meet, there's this great scene where Bellamy excitedly tells his butler that he needs to shop for new clothes if he's going to see this woman again, and you can tell that their meeting was a kind of emotional awakening for this person who has been closed off to the world for some time now. It's beautiful, but it's also not meant to be. Leisen takes this idea to even greater heights in To Each His Own, his melodrama about a woman (Olivia De Havilland) whose life unravels when she has a child out of wedlock with a man she’ll never see again, a soldier who gets killed during World War I. The film uses an ingenious flashback structure to convey the depth and duration of De Havilland’s pain and grief. In an admirably odd touch, Leisen casts John Lund as both the soldier and the adult son, his reappearance like visiting with the ghost of past heartaches.
Above all, Leisen’s movies are attuned to the subtle gestures and glances of two people falling in love. They possess a remarkable honesty and sense of physical intimacy. Each gesture carries so much weight: the simplicity of Claudette Colbert resting her head on Don Ameche’s shoulder in their first moment of physical contact, or the swooning pan to Stanwyck and MacMurray engaged in a New Year’s kiss as streamers fly around them and “Auld Lang Syne” plays on the soundtrack. After Ray Milland kisses Jean Arthur in Easy Living, she turns on her side to face the camera with a slight smile on her face. It’s not the kiss itself that makes this moment so special, but the feeling of euphoria that it captures—that invigorating rush of emotion, hard to describe and yet instantly recognizable. Leisen’s luminous romances capture that sensation with unparalleled delicacy and grace.