Leo McCarey

Leo McCarey may be the most underrated major director of Hollywood's golden age, largely because his gift, spontaneity, resists the tidy theories critics prefer. Born in Los Angeles in 1898 and trained briefly as a lawyer, he found his calling in silent comedy at the Hal Roach studio, where he supervised gags and made a decisive contribution to film history: he teamed Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, shaping the timing and gentle rhythm that defined the greatest comedy duo of the age.

McCarey worked by feel. He famously directed from the piano, playing tunes to set a mood and coaxing performances through improvisation rather than rigid scripts. He steered the Marx Brothers through Duck Soup, the anarchic anti-war masterpiece now regarded as their finest film. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the screwball classic The Awful Truth, guiding Cary Grant and Irene Dunne through a divorce comedy of exquisite timing, and he always insisted the Academy had honored him for the wrong picture that year.

The film he meant was Make Way for Tomorrow, a devastating drama about an elderly couple separated by children who cannot be bothered to care for them. Unsentimental and quietly shattering, it moved Orson Welles to say it could make a stone cry. It flopped on release and remains McCarey's proof that the man behind the laughter understood loss as deeply as anyone.

He reached his commercial peak with Going My Way, the wartime story of a singing priest that swept the Academy Awards and won McCarey a second Best Director statuette along with an Oscar for its original story. Later he directed An Affair to Remember, the lush romance whose central image, a reunion missed by a cruel accident of fate, has echoed through movies ever since.

McCarey's later years were dimmed by anti-Communist politics that curdled some of his work and by declining health. He died in 1969. What endures is his unmatched sense of human warmth and comic truth, an ability to find the tender ache inside the joke. Few directors moved so freely between the hilarious and the profound, and fewer still made it look so effortless.