Mervyn LeRoy

Mervyn LeRoy
LeRoy in 1958
Background information
Spouse(s):	Elizabeth Edna Murphy (1927 - 1933) divorce Doris Warner (1934 - 1942) divorce Katherine Spiegel (1946 - )
Children:	2, including Warner LeRoy
Occupation:	Film director, producer
Employer:	First National Pictures (1927–1929) Warner Bros. (1929–1938) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1938–1945) (1948–1954) Warner Bros. (1955–1959)
Years active	1928–1968

Mervyn LeRoy (/ləˈrɔɪ/; ✦October 15, 1900 – †September 13, 1987) was an American film director and producer. In his youth he played juvenile roles in vaudeville and silent film comedies.

During the 1930s, LeRoy was one of the two great practitioners of economical and effective film directing at Warner Brothers studios, the other his cohort Michael Curtiz. LeRoy's most acclaimed films of his tenure at Warners include Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and They Won't Forget (1937).

LeRoy left Warners and moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1939 to serve as both director and producer. Perhaps his most notable achievement as a producer is the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, of which he was also uncredited as a director.

Early life

LeRoy was born on October 15, 1900, in San Francisco, California, the only child of Jewish parents Edna (née Armer) and Harry LeRoy, a well-to-do department store owner. Both his parents' families had fully assimilated, residing in the Bay Area for several generations. LeRoy described his relatives as "San Franciscans first, Americans second, Jews third."

LeRoy's mother was a frequent attendee at San Francisco's premier vaudeville venues, the Orpheum and the Alcazar, often socializing with the theater's personnel. She arranged for the six-year-old LeRoy to serve as a Native-American papoose in the 1906 stage production of The Squaw Man. LeRoy attributed his early interest in vaudeville to "my mother's fascination with it" and to that of his cousins, Jesse L. Lasky and Blanche Lasky, vaudevillians during LeRoy's youth.

LeRoy's parents separated suddenly in 1905 for reasons that were not divulged to their son. They never reunited and his father Harry raised LeRoy as a single parent. His mother moved to Oakland, California with Percy Teeple, a travel agent and former journalist, who would later become LeRoy's stepfather after the death of Harry Leroy in 1916. LeRoy visited his mother as a child, regarding her more as "a grandparent or a favorite aunt."

"A LeRoy-Armer family legend maintains that the newborn—delivered on the kitchen table and weighing only two-and-half pounds—was placed in a turkey roasting pan and put in a warm oven to improve his chances of survival. The doctor who advised this procedure cautioned LeRoy's parents: "Make sure the flame is real low, however."

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire devastated the city when LeRoy was five-and-a-half years old. He was sleeping in his bed on the second floor when the quake struck in the early morning causing the house to collapse. Neither LeRoy nor his father suffered serious physical injury. His father's import-export store was completely destroyed. LeRoy retained vivid mental images of the city's devastation:

My memory is a kaleidoscope of pictures. I have always thought in visual terms and when I recall that morning of April 18, 1906, I see a mental album of tragic pictures...many years later in Quo Vadis, I shot the burning of Rome and I drew on my memories of the burning of San Francisco as a grim model.

Reduced to virtual penury, father and son lived as displaced persons at the military-run tent city on the Presidio for the next six months. The elder LeRoy obtained work as a salesman for the Heinz Pickle Company, but his business losses had left him "a beaten man." The young LeRoy emerged from the traumatic event with a sense of pride that he had survived the ordeal and to regard it as fortuitous: "The big thing in my life was the earthquake...it changed my life before I knew I even had one."

At the age of twelve, with few prospects to acquire formal education and his father financially strained, LeRoy became a newsboy and earned his first money. His father supported him in this endeavor. LeRoy hawked newspapers at iconic locations, including Chinatown, the Barbary Coast red-light district and Fisherman's Wharf, where he became educated as to the realities of life in the city:

I saw life in raw on the streets of San Francisco. I met the cops and the whores and the reporters and the bartenders and the Chinese and the [commercial] fishermen and shopkeepers. I knew them all, knew how they thought and how they loved and how they hated. When it came time for me to make motion pictures, I made movies that were real because I knew how real people behaved.

Juvenile acts in vaudeville: 1914–1923

Selling newspapers near the Alcazar Theatre, LeRoy was spotted by stage star Theodore Roberts. A personable and attractive youth at age fourteen, LeRoy was engaged for a bit part in a 1914 stage production of Barbara Frietchie. Gratified by "that lovely feeling—audience approval", he performed in productions with the Liberty Theater in Oakland, California playing the lead juvenile roles in Tom Sawyer and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Chaplin impersonator

As a 14-year-old, LeRoy carefully observed emerging screen star Charlie Chaplin at a number of film sets in the greater San Francisco area. From these studies, LeRoy devised a burlesque of the comedian, and perfected his imitation on the local amateur circuit. In 1915 he won a competition that hosted almost a thousand Chaplin imitators at the Pantages Theater. His outstanding performance earned him a slot as "The Singing Newsboy" in Sid Grauman's vaudeville show at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition titled "Chinatown by Night".

In 1916 his father died, leaving the 15-year-old LeRoy responsible for providing his own financial support.

LeRoy and Cooper: "Two Kids and a Piano": 1916–1919

Now a show-business professional, LeRoy left his newsboy job. Pairing with the 16-year-old actor-pianist Clyde Cooper, they formed a vaudeville routine "LeRoy and Cooper: Two Kids and a Piano." The duo struggled to find engagements, and LeRoy recalled "we would have played toilets if they had offered us some money." Soon they were discovered by the premier vaudeville circuits – Pantages, Gus Sun and Orpheum – and provided with regular bookings on national tours. LeRoy relished the lifestyle of a vaudevillian, occasionally appearing in shows that featured iconic performers of the era, among them Sarah Bernhardt, Harry Houdini and Jack Benny. After three years, and now "a fairly well-established act" in theater listings, the duo amicably disbanded after an unexpected death in Cooper's family.

LeRoy joined George Choos's mostly female troupe in musical comedies, and Gus Edwards act billed "The Nine Country Kids" in 1922. LeRoy's enthusiasm for the stage gradually waned and he left the troupe in 1923.

Early Hollywood career: technician and actor: 1919–1923

LeRoy accepted a bit role in a scene with former The Perils of Pauline (1914) star Pearl White filmed at Fort Lee, New Jersey. LeRoy was "thoroughly intrigued" by the filmmaking process, recalling "I knew I was finished with vaudeville. I knew, just as positively that I wanted to get into the movie business."

In October 1919 LeRoy, just turned 19, approached his cousin Jesse L. Lasky, a former vaudevillian who was twenty years his senior. Lasky was a partner with rising movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Adolf Zukor at its New York headquarters at Famous Players-Lasky. Lasky furnished LeRoy with note to the employment department at their Hollywood studios. A week later LeRoy began working in the Wardrobe Unit folding costumes for the American Civil War picture Secret Service (1919), earning $12.50 a week.

According to film historian Kingley Canham, Leroy's "enthusiasm, energy and push", in addition to a further appeal to Jesse Lasky, earned LeRoy promotion to lab technician in the film tinting unit.

LeRoy's next advancement was achieved through his own initiative.[34] Discovering that director William DeMille wished to create an illusion of moonlight shimmering on a lake to produce a romantic effect, LeRoy devised a technique in the lab:

I had an idea. That night I stayed late in the lab...I got a big wooden box about twelve feet square and lined it with tar paper. Then I filled it with distilled water...I got a spotlight and carefully set it up so the light played upon the surface of the water...I took one of the studio's Pathé cameras, found a supply of raw film and shot some five-thousand feet of my pseudo-moonlight-on-the-water.

Despite LeRoy suffering a stern reprimand, DeMille was delighted with the effect and used the footage in the film. LeRoy was immediately promoted to assistant cameraman.

After six months behind the camera, LeRoy experienced a disastrous contretemps when he improperly adjusted the camera focus settings, ruining footage on several scenes on a DeMille production. LeRoy describes it as "a horrible mess" which led to his dismissal in 1921 as cameraman.

LeRoy was soon hired as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic The Ten Commandments LeRoy credits Cecil B. DeMille, for inspiring him to become a director: "As the top director of the era, DeMille had been the magnet that had drawn me to his set as often as I could go." LeRoy also credits DeMille for teaching him the directing techniques required to make his own films.

LeRoy worked intermittently in small supporting roles in film during the early 1920s. The youthful and diminutive LeRoy (at 5 feet 7 inches [170 cm] and just over 115 pounds [52 kg]) was consistently cast in juvenile roles. appearing with film stars Wallace Reid, Betty Compson and Gloria Swanson. He performed his last role in The Chorus Lady (1924) as "Duke".[45][46]

Gag writer (comedy constructor) and Alfred E. Green, 1924–1926

During the filming of The Ghost Breaker (1922), bit actor LeRoy suggested several humorous skits, which were incorporated into the picture by director Alfred E. Green. Green offered him a position as "gag man". LeRoy recalled:

I didn't have to think twice. That was what I wanted—a chance to be in on the creative aspect of movie-making. It wasn't directing, but it was getting closer. It was inventing, not interpreting...I abandoned my acting career with no regrets.

While working at First National Pictures, LeRoy wrote gags for comedienne Colleen Moore in several films including Sally (1925), The Desert Flower (1925), We Moderns (1925) and Ella Cinders (1926). LeRoy served as acting advisor and confidant to Colleen Moore. In 1927 her husband John McCormick, studio head at First National in Hollywood, asked LeRoy to direct Moore in a version of Peg O' My Heart. When the project was canceled, studio president Richard A. Rowland, with Moore advocating, authorized LeRoy to direct a comedy, No Place to Go, starring Mary Astor and Lloyd Hughes and launching LeRoy's filmmaking career at age twenty-seven.

First National Pictures: transition to sound, 1927–1930

His success with No Place to Go (1927), was followed by "a string of comedies and jazz-baby dramas" that served as vehicles for actress Alice White and allowed LeRoy to hone his skills as director. His prolific output in the final years of the silent film era included the box-office successes Harold Teen with Arthur Lake and Oh, Kay! with Colleen Moore.

Warner Brothers acquired First National in 1925 as a subsidiary studio and producer Jack Warner became a mentor and in-law to LeRoy in subsequent years.

LeRoy eagerly anticipated his first sound picture assignment, Naughty Baby (1929):

My fifth picture, in 1929, was my first with sound. I had been watching the experiments with talkies with tremendous excitement...As a veteran of stage and vaudeville, I knew the value of the spoken and sung word. I understood dialogue, because I had been an actor...I couldn't wait until I had a change to direct a talking picture.

LeRoy's early directing efforts at First National were largely limited to comedies. His movies from this period include Gentleman's Fate (1931) with John Gilbert (filmed at M-G-M studios), Tonight or Never (1931), with Gloria Swanson, High Pressure, a proto-screwball comedy with William Powell and Evelyn Brent, and The Heart of New York (1932) with Joe Smith.

Warner Brothers: 1930–1939

LeRoy embarked on a period of enormous productivity and inventiveness at Warner Studios, creating "some the most polished and ambitious" films of the Thirties. His only rival at Warner's was fellow director Michael Curtiz. Film historian John Baxter observes:

Warners films were the most perfectly economical exercises in cinematic mechanics of which Hollywood was capable. There was no fat on them, either as art or entertainment...as a filmmaking tool, it functioned best in the hands of two great directors, Mervyn Leroy and Michael Curtiz.

In the studio's competitive crucible produced by the Great Depression demanding profitable entertainment, LeRoy directed 36 pictures during the decade (Curtiz filmed an astounding 44 features during the same period). Baxter adds: "No genius could function without variation under such pressure." The social perspective of films favored at Warner Brothers was distinct from those of its chief rivals: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), uncontested for its "technical virtuosity" aimed to serve "middle-class tastes" and Paramount studios identified for its "sophisticated dialogue and baroque settings" that catered to European sensibilities. In contrast, Warner Brothers films carried themes appealing to the working classes. Leroy biographer Kingsley Canham writes:

The topicality of Warner's material and its direct appeal to the working classes set it apart from other studios. What their film lacked in gloss in comparison to M-G-M or the sophistication of Paramount was more than adequately compensated for by their presentation of everyday material...the working classes could identify with people, the situations and surroundings...

LeRoy's output in the early thirties was prodigious. The director attests to the rate of film production at the studios:

"If the poorer Curtiz films are disappointing, LeRoy's failures are impossible to watch. When his initial concept was faulty or failed through heavy-handed scripting he could be as banal as Henry King at his worst. It needed a firm central theme to sustain LeRoy, a solid anchor for his speculation, and it was when he had this that his films reached heights at least as lofty as those scaled by Curtiz." – Biographer John Baxter, from his Hollywood in the Thirties (1970)

...While the world was struggling out of the depression, I turned out film after film after film. It was a period of tremendous activity for me—and for Hollywood in general...I threw myself into my work...we had to keep working to stay up with the demand. The public was voracious in its appetite for movies...Neighborhood theaters had double features, and the bill usually changed twice a week. That means they were showing four new pictures a week, 208 a year, and that's only one theater.

LeRoy admits in retrospect that "I shot them so often and so fast that they tend to blend together in my memory."

LeRoy's social realism mocked corrupt politicians, bankers and the idle rich, while celebrating the Depression Era experiences of "hard-working chorus girls...taxi-drivers and bell-hops struggling to make ends meet in the brawl of New York...gloss and polish were considered useless affectation."

Gangster genre: Little Caesar, 1930

"Mother of mercy—Is this the last of Rico?

—Iconic last words of fictional mob boss Enrico Bandello in "Little Caesar"

LeRoy first departed from his comedy-romance themed films with his drama Numbered Men (1930), a character study of convicts shot on location at San Quentin prison. The depiction of criminal elements had enjoyed popularity with Josef von Sternberg's silent classic Underworld (1927), a fantasy treatment of his lone Byronic gangster "Bull" Weed. The gangster film as a genre was not achieved until LeRoy's 1930 Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson, the first time that "any real attempt was made by Hollywood to describe the brutal reality of the criminal world."

LeRoy's Little Caesar established the iconography of subsequent films on organized crime, emphasizing the hierarchy of family loyalties and the function of violence in advancing criminal careers. LeRoy's adroit cinematic handling of Robinson's Rico incrementally shifts initial audience response from revulsion at the character's homicidal acts to a "grudging admiration" that provides for a measure of sympathy when the gangster meets his sordid death in a back alley. LeRoy recalled the topicality of his subject in 1930: "Al Capone was a household word and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre had happened only a year before."

LeRoy further demonstrated his talent for delivering fast-paced and competently executed social commentary and entertainment with Five Star Final (1931), an exposé of tabloid journalism, and Two Seconds (1932), a "vicious and disenchanted" cautionary tale of a death row inmate, each starring Robinson.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

Warner Brothers' most explosive social critique of the 1930s appeared with LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, dramatizing the harsh penal codes in Georgia and starring Paul Muni as the hunted fugitive James Allen.

Historian John Baxter observes that "no director has managed to close his film on so cold a note as LeRoy." Muni's escaped convict, falsely condemned to hard labor, is reduced to furtive prey: Asked by his estranged sweetheart "how do you get along, how do you live?" he hisses "I steal" and retreats into the night. Muni continued to work effectively with LeRoy in The World Changes (1933) with Aline MacMahon and in Hi, Nellie! (1934) with Glenda Farrell.

The versatile LeRoy portrayed both hard-boiled and clownish characters at Warner Brothers. His Hard to Handle (1933), James Cagney plays a fast-talking and remorselessly unscrupulous con-man, often to comic effect. His 1933 pictures Tugboat Annie (with LeRoy on loan to M-G-M), with Marie Dressler and Elmer, the Great, the final of three pictures that LeRoy made with comic Joe E. Brown, stand in contrast with the director's gangster melodramas.

LeRoy's socially-themed narrative is evident in his Three on a Match (1932) which follows the fates of three young women: a stenographer, a showgirl and a socialite played by Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak, respectively. His adroit transitions and cross-cutting provide quick and effective insights into his characters' social rise and fall. The "pitiless mileau of grimy backstreets and cheap motels" serve as an implicit social critique without making this the theme of the picture.

The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

The musical Gold Diggers of 1933 is one of the outstanding examples of the genre released by Warner Brothers in the Thirties. While the dance stagings—"surreal, geometric, often erotically charged" by choreographer Busby Berkeley dominate the picture, Warner's musicals, according to historian John Baxter "are distinguished enough to be worth considering outside any discussion of Berkeley's dance direction. The Gold Diggers of 1933 certainly deserves such attention." Offering more than mere depression era escapism, the musical depicts the mass unemployment of veterans of World War I and alludes to the recent Washington D.C. Bonus Army protests, violently suppressed by police and U.S. Army units. The movie closes with the "dark and pessimistic" number "Remember My Forgotten Man".

"From Little Caesar to Gypsy, Le Roy has converted his innate vulgarity into a personal style. As long as he is not mistaken for a serious artist, LeRoy can be delightfully entertaining." — Andrew Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)

LeRoy's control of the comedic elements and his direction of a cast endowed with "hard-boiled" heroines Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon and Ginger Rogers, would provide stand alone entertainment even if unencumbered by Berkeley's choreographed numbers. MacMahon, who plays the "ruthless" Trixie was later cast in the lead for LeRoy's dramatic Heat Lightning (1934) as a murderess. a picture which prefigures director Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest (1936).

LeRoy followed with musical-like comedies for Warners in 1934 Happiness Ahead with Dick Powell and Josephine Hutchinson, about a society heiress who woos a window washer.

Oil for the Lamps of China (1935)

Oil for the Lamps of China, an adaption of the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel, is an examination of an American oil company in China, centering on its paternalistic and humiliating treatment of an ambitious company man played by Pat O'Brien. Josephine Hutchinson portrays his long-suffering wife. LeRoy effectively employed cinematic techniques of montage, structural parallels in settings, chiaroscuro lighting and musical leitmotifs to develop atmosphere and convey O'Brien's struggle, ending in his vindication.

LeRoy returned to light comedy and romance in 1935 with a film adaption of the 1929 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II stage production of the same name starring Irene Dunne.[97] and a Marion Davies vehicle Page Miss Glory (filmed at Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures) and I Found Stella Parish, with a sentimental "tour-de-force".

Anthony Adverse (1936)

Based on the popular twelve-hundred page historical romance by Hervey Allen, Warner's Anthony Adverse (1936) was LeRoy's most prestigious undertaking to date. Only two-thirds of the vast and unwieldy picaresque tale, set during the Napoleonic era, is depicted onscreen (a sequel was planned but abandoned). The sheer scale of the project remains impressive, and Leroy's ability to handle a film with high production values that possessed a "Metro-like glossiness" recommended him to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a prospective executive producer.

The "lively performances" from a large cast including Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Anita Louise and Gale Sondergaard, as well as LeRoy's "technical excellence" was rewarded with five academy award nominations.

LeRoy reports in his 1974 memoir that "by the time 1936 arrived, I was slowing my pace somewhat. Gone were the assembly-line tactics, the grinding-them-out methods of a few years before...I was working slower, trying to achieve more beauty on film, looking for cinematic perfection."

Producer-Director at Warner Brothers: 1936–1938 In 1936, Warners began tasking LeRoy with both directing and producing assignments. LeRoy served as producer-director on Three Men on a Horse (1936), a "madcap" comedy starring Frank McHugh and a screenplay co-written by Groucho Marx. This was followed in 1937 with The King and the Chorus Girl, starring French actor Fernand Gravet . Both films costarred Joan Blondell.[111][112][113]

Leroy also produced director James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937), a historical comedy with Brian Aherne who plays the renowned English actor.[114]

They Won't Forget (1937)

"LeRoy's Thirties reputation [as a director] rests today on two films: They Won't Forget (1937), and Edward G. Robinson vehicle Little Caesar (1931)" – Film historian John Baxter

LeRoy's penultimate film for Warners was They Won't Forget (1937), a harsh indictment of lynch law based on the Ward Greene novel, "Death in the Deep South" (1936). According to critic Kingsley Canham, LeRoy's handling of tracking and low-angle shots, overhead composition, close-ups and dissolves possess a "visual power" that "retains its impact for modern audiences." LeRoy's unmitigated condemnation of lynching rejects misanthropy and adopts a tone of "righteous anger", in which there "is no forgiveness" for the instigators of mob law.

LeRoy was poised to move to M-G-M as head of production in 1938, with the fulsome support of the studio's Louis B. Mayer where "[LeRoy] would establish himself as a major force in Forties cinema." Before departing Warners, Leroy directed and produced his final film Fools for Scandal (1938), the studio's second – and failed attempt – to launch the American film career of French actor Fernand Gravet. Comedienne Carol Lombard costars.

Interlude as producer: M-G-M: 1938–1939

LeRoy arrived at M-G-M fully expecting to finish his career as the studio's chief production executive. His first assignments were modest:

Dramatic School ^↗ (1938) directed by Robert B. Sinclair: A romantic drama starring Luise Rainer and Paulette Goddard and LeRoy's first picture at M-G-M. Biographer John Baxter attributes Rainer's "coherent, moving and truthful" performance to producer LeRoy and "a fitting to [the filmmakers] rich Thirties career."

Stand Up and Fight ^↗ (1938), directed by W. S. Van Dyke: A Wallace Beery vehicle, with costars Robert Taylor and Florence Rice. The screenplay was co-written by crime fiction writer James M. Cain, and Jane Murfin, who wrote the adaption of Booth Tarkington's novel the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Alice Adams (1935).

At the Circus ^↗ (1938) directed by Edward Buzzell: A Marx Brothers comedy.[126]

Leroy's last picture as M-G-M's production executive was an adaption of L. Frank Baum's children's book The Wizard of Oz ^↗.

Director at M-G-M: 1940–1949

The onset of war in Europe in 1939 created anxiety in the Hollywood film industry as the overseas movie market contracted and currency restrictions mounted in Great Britain. Hollywood studios implemented salary reductions and limits on film content were imposed, particularly at M-G-M. Film historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg describe these developments persisting "almost to the end of the decade":

At Metro, the idea was to concentrate on nice people involved in heartbreak, finding their happiness at last in each others arms, and all in settings of an idealized and antiseptic beauty: an England full of sunshine and chintz and doves, an America full of white fences and rambler roses around the door. Hagiographies of inventors and reformers glowed with optimistic charm…

Critic Andrew Sarris disparages the "sentimental piety and conformist cant" that characterized M-G-M studios, as well as Warner Brothers in Hollywood's Golden Age

LeRoy limited himself to directing features at M-G-M for the next 9 years, delivering 11 pictures. The quality of his output during this period is generally viewed as a decline creatively compared to his early work at Warner Brothers during the Thirties.

He resumed directorial duties with an adaption of Robert E. Sherwood's romantic play Waterloo Bridge (1930).

Waterloo Bridge ^↗ (1940)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased the rights to Waterloo Bridge from Universal Studios, which had produced an adaption filmed in 1931 by James Whale and starring Mae Clarke as the fallen woman, Myra.

LeRoy's Waterloo Bridge (1940), served as a vehicle to capitalize upon the meteoric rise of Vivien Leigh, heroine of David O. Selznick's epic Gone with the Wind (1939). In a period when foreign markets were in jeopardy, profitable films were at a premium.

A silent film era technician and director in his early Hollywood career, LeRoy utilized silent film methods to film a key nightclub love scene with Leigh and costar Robert Taylor. LeRoy describes his epiphany:

No dialogue!...No dialogue at all!...I realized at that moment what all silent directors had always known...in great emotional moments, there are no words. A look, a gesture, a touch can convey much more meaning than spoken sentences [and] that's the way we played the scene...

LeRoy directed Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer and Conrad Veidt in the 1940 Escape, the first of a number of anti-Nazi features suppressed by Hitler and which ultimately led to the banning of all M-G-M pictures in Germany.

The Greer Garson pictures

LeRoy completed four features with English actress Greer Garson, an enormously profitable property cultivated by M-G-M to appeal to their British markets during WWII.

Blossoms in the Dust ^↗ (1941): The screenplay by Anita Loos portrays the struggle by social reformer Edna Gladney to redeem children stigmatized by illegitimacy. Termed "highly romanticized" and "shamelessly sentimental" by film historian Kingley Canham, LeRoy defended the picture as virtuous and socially significant:

Blossoms in the Dust ^↗ began my association with Greer Garson...the picture made an immediate and profound contribution to the world we live in. Between it and Fugitive, I think I have contributed toward making this a better country.

The pairing of Garson with Walter Pidgeon proved particularly appealing to their fans. They would appear together in a number of pictures, including LeRoy's 1943 biopic of Madame Curie.

As Leroy's first color film, Blossoms in the Dust demonstrates an aesthetically pleasing and an adroit handling of the new Technicolor technology.

Random Harvest ^↗ (1942): Leroy and producer Sydney Franklin paired Garson with fellow Briton Ronald Colman in a romance that dramatizes clinical amnesia suffered by a WWI combat veteran. Garson's genteel and largely desexualized screen image – "M-G-M's First Lady of Saintly Virtue" – favored by Louis B. Mayer, is countered by LeRoy's less inhibited Garson as the "impulsive Scottish lass" Paula.

LeRoy's leisurely narrative pace, the lavishness of the settings, the fulsome musical score and the balanced editing demonstrates his embrace of M-G-M production values and distinguish the stylish Random Harvest from his work at Warner Brothers.

Madame Curie ^↗ (1943): Apropos LeRoy's "lavish and lengthy biography" portraying the Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, critics Higham and Greenberg make these observations:

With money rolling in and attendance at all time highs, studios in the Forties could afford to indulge in 'prestige productions' as never before. Lives of the great and famous proved, as always, tempting material: authors, saints, politicians, scientists, inventors and tycoons received solid if none too accurate tributes…

LeRoy and producer Sydney Franklin made a genuine effort to make the "highbrow" subject of the film – the heroic discovery of radium isotopes – engaging to the public, resorting to romanticizing and simplifying the topic.

Madame Curie was one of nine pictures in which Garson was cast with leading man Pidgeon. Married to Buddy Fogelson, Garson earned the title "the daytime Mrs. Pidgeon" on M-G-M sets.

Desire Me ^↗ (1946): LeRoy attempted to reshoot an uncompleted George Cukor project starring Garson and Robert Mitchum, Desire Me, but abandoned the film, disparaging the "rotten script, a script that made absolutely no sense.". Neither Cukor nor LeRoy appeared in the credits.

Strange Lady in Town ^↗ (1955): LeRoy's first film after returning to Warner Brothers studios as a director-producer. Garson, passed over by M-G-M to star as opera diva Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955), signed with Warners to make Strange Lady in Town, a western set in Santa Fe, New Mexico and endowed to Garson's satisfaction "with horses and sunsets." Dana Andrews co-stars.

Wartime propaganda: 1944–1945

In the final years of World War II, LeRoy directed propaganda films dramatizing the American war efforts at home and overseas.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo ^↗ (1944) recounts the 1942 U.S. bombing mission over Tokyo by sixteen B-25s, coordinated by Lieutenant-Colonel James H. Doolittle (played by Spencer Tracy). LeRoy employs flashbacks in an effort to present the personal lives of the airmen and their spouses, including an emotionally wrought scene in which the wounded Lieutenant Ted W. Lawson (played by Van Johnson) has his leg amputated.

Conceived as a morale-builder for the homefront, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, with a script written by Dalton Trumbo "lacks the scope and organization" and compares unfavorably to director John Cromwell's 1943 Since You Went Away according to critic Kingsley Canham. The rescue sequences of the downed American flyers' by Chinese guerrillas were designed "to foster closer relations 'between the American People and their courageous Chinese allies'" and include a scene with Chinese children at a mission hospital honoring the airmen with a rendition of Katherine Lee Bates' patriotic anthem "America the Beautiful".

The House I Live In ^↗ (1945), Documentary short: LeRoy reports in his memoir "Take One" that Frank Sinatra approached him in 1945 with the idea of making a short movie version based on the song by Abel Meeropol The House I Live In. LeRoy thought it a worthy project and "a good thing to do during the wartime years." The script was written by Albert Maltz and produced by Frank Ross and Leroy, who also directed.

The House I Live In garnered LeRoy a special Oscar for his role as producer in the short film, the only Academy Award he would ever receive. In appreciation for LeRoy's contributions to The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra presented him with a medallion bearing the Jewish Star of David on one side and a Saint Christopher medal on the obverse.

Career

Wikipedia article: Mervyn LeRoy Career

Filmography

Wikipedia article: Mervyn LeRoy Filmography

Notes

Wikipedia article: Mervyn LeRoy

External links

Note:   Mervyn LeRoy was a volunteer at the Hollywood Canteen

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