Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy [Hardcover]

Leo McCarey directed Laurel and Hardy in their first team efforts, Carey Grant and Irene Dunne in the Awful Truth, and Bing Crosby in Bells of St. Mary's, to cite just a few examples from a film career spanning 1920 to 1963. Gehring (film, Ball State U.) profiles his life and career, often offering critical reaction to McCarey's oeuvre, which spanned the gamut from the subversively screwball Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup to the anti-communist My Son John....[Gehring] opens up the cultural landscape with fascinating links to Thurber, Benchley, Hemingway, and the McCarthy era in this wonderfully readable story. Recommended. All collections; all levels.A fascinating career clearly, and long overdue for the detailed treatment offered by author Wes D. Gehring in Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy...McCarey is unquestionably a pantheon director, and his contributons to cinema and popular culture are vast; Gehring's book is highly recommended, and is especially enlightening regarding the director's early work at Roach with Charley Chase.This first full-length biography of a legendary and award-winning Hollywood writer, producer, and director (Duck Soup, My Favorite Wife, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, and The Bells of St. Mary's) explores the director's life as filtered through his art. Gehring maintains that McCarey's films were often a reworking of his antiheroic self. In addition, the apparent diversity of his films actually represents an interrelated web of various comedy genres and a pattern of antiheroic characters and themes.Early in his Hollywood career, Leo McCarey honed his skills by working with some of the great names of comedy, including Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, and The Marx Brothers, whose 1933 classic, Duck Soup, McCarey directed. Later, as a writer and/or director, McCarey was responsible for a number of classic films, including Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth, Love Affair, Make Way for Tomorrow, My Favorite Wife, and An Affair to Remember. lW