The Professionals: MGM's Robert Z. Leonard

Robert Z. Leonard was an MGM house director for more than thirty years. Like most of the filmmakers who toiled under Leo the Lion's powerful roar (among them, W.S. Van Dyke, Richard Thorpe, Jack Conway, Victor Fleming), Leonard is all but neglected by today's film historians and run-of-the-mill fan-critics. And while his filmography has its share of clunkers - as anyone who made over seventy movies would have - a careful look at Leonard's films also show a great number of underrated and still entertaining movies.

Robert Z. Leonard (above) was known as "Pops"
to nearly everyone who worked with him.

Born in Chicago on October 7, 1889, Leonard originally studied law but dropped out to pursue a career in the theater. Leonard crashed the burgeoning movie business when his family moved west to Hollywood, and by 1916 he had established himself as an actor - a reliable leading man. It was behind the camera that Leonard was most interested, however, and he began by directing dozens of shorts between 1913 and 1917. Under contract to Universal Pictures, Leonard was paired up with actress and diva-deluxe, Mae Murray. (Nicknamed The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips, Murray, who was a Ziegfeld Follies star before she was in the movies, is best known today as the title character in Erich Von Stroheim's 1925 version of The Merry Widow opposite silent film heartthrob, John Gilbert.) Leonard and Murray fell in love and were married in 1918. The union lasted until 1925. The next year Leonard married another actress, Gertrude Olmstead. By that time Leonard had been signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where he would flourish for the next thirty years.

Leonard on set, sitting to the left of Marion Davies

During his years at MGM, Leonard worked with nearly every top star at the studio, including Norma Shearer in her Oscar-winning performance as The Divorcee in 1930; Greta Garbo and Clark Gable in their only film together, 1931's Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise); Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady, the 1933 musical that also introduced a young Broadway hoofer named Fred Astaire to the movies; William Powell in 1936's Best Picture Oscar winner, The Great Ziegfeld; and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in the still entertaining 1940 adaptation (written by Aldous Huxley) of Pride and Prejudice. That is just a sample of Leonard's vast record of work. His two biggest hits from the 1930s, The Divorcee and The Great Ziegfeld, also garnered him Oscar nominations for Best Director, though he lost the golden guy on both occasions. A company man body and soul, Leonard rarely refused an assignment and, like all contract directors, stepped in at times when a fellow lensman was ill or had moved on to another project. He did this, always without credit, in such films as Jack Conway's 1935 adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. 

Freud would have a field day: Gable and Garbo in their only film together,
the underrated Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise)

I don't claim to have seen every film Robert Z. Leonard directed, but I can tell you to avoid - I mean AVOID - Strange Interlude, the 1932 adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize-winning play with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. Staying faithful to the style of the original stage production, the story is presented with the actors detailing their inner thoughts via a series of increasingly distracting (and often plain silly) voice-overs. It succeeded only in making the performers look like overacting amateurs. 

The Great Ziegfeld is, at nearly three hours, also a bit of a chore to sit through. It may qualify as one of those overrated Best Picture winners, in spite of the work of William Powell, who never gave a bad performance, Myrna Loy, Frank Morgan, and Louise Rainer in her first Oscar-winning role (whether that award was deserved over the other Best Actress contenders like my personal favorite - Carole Lombard's wacky socialite in My Man Godfrey - is debatable). Similarly, 1948's B.F.'s Daughter, starring the always compelling Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin and based on John P. Marquand's bestselling novel, is another movie that may cure insomniacs. As for Leonard's silent output, I don't think I've seen any.

A still from Maytime, the Jeanette McDonald-Nelson Eddy starrer
in which John Barrymore (far right) steals the show.

With all this said, I have enjoyed and do recommend several of Leonard's films - some surprisingly. While he collaborated with the singing team of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald several times, their best effort was Maytime. Made in 1937 when the duo was at the peak of their popularity, the film is a fascinating take on love, jealousy, and good old-fashioned showbiz. John Barrymore does a great job playing up his obsessive love for wife MacDonald who, in turn, is in love with Eddy. It's the classic love-hate-jealousy triangle that was already old in 1937, but the performers - Barrymore especially - make it work.

Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise), with the unlikely pairing of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable - the latter just beginning his long reign as King of Hollywood - is better than I was ever led to believe. In it, Garbo plays the daughter of Swedish immigrant, Jean Hersholt, who runs away one rain-drenched night to escape an arranged marriage to the hulking Alan Hale (long before his immortal turns as Errol Flynn's best buddy in Robin Hood, Don Juan, Dodge City, and others). The story is classic pre-code: Garbo hooks up with Gable after he discovers her taking shelter in his garage. Their connection is short-lived, however, when Garbo must again escape when daddy Hersholt and dumb-bell Hale find her while Gable is away. She hides out with a circus, becomes a cooch dancer, and compromises her virtue with the circus owner when the police come looking for her. All ends happily (unfortunately, perhaps, as the pre-code appellation might indicate a conclusion a bit more complex), but the journey is worth the trip thanks to wonderful sets, atmospheric camera work, and the magnetic once-in-a-career pairing of the two leads. 

MGM gloss at its finest: Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers start to fall in love in Week-End at the Waldorf.

Week-End at the Waldorf, starring Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon, Lana Turner, Van Johnson, Edward Arnold, Keenan Wynn, Robert Benchley, and Xavier Cugat, is the kind of movie they don't make anymore - that is, the kind of movie MGM could make with its eyes closed and audiences eventually lost its taste for. A sort of Reader's Digest remake of the studio's 1932 Oscar winner, Grand Hotel, updated to New York City circa 1945, Week-End at the Waldorf gives barely a hint of the original's Berlin angst, but the ease and professionalism is really a marvel to behold, with Leonard juggling egos, budgets, and the front office while making a first-rate entertainment. Every year or so when I watch it, I am reminded of what the Hollywood studio system could do at its peak: recreate a time and place without ever leaving the friendly confines of a California studio.

The next year Leonard directed one of his and MGM's most interesting films from this period, The Secret Heart. With a starry cast that includes Claudette Colbert, Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson, and Lionel Barrymore, The Secret Heart is about Larry Addams (Richard Derr), a brilliant pianist who must earn his living working in a bank. A widower with two small children, Larry meets Lee (Colbert) and falls in love. Love, however, isn't enough and Larry, who has a drinking problem, commits suicide, though his daughter Penny (Allyson) believes it an accident. With her father's death leaving her in in a near-constant state of depression, her brother, Chase, and Lee try to bring Penny out of her despair with the aid of psychotherapy. Post-war movie audiences were beginning to move past the escapism of the pre-war days and become more willing to accept the complex, adult themes the film presented. Nonetheless, it was an unusual film to open on Christmas Day, 1946. While it did moderately well at the box office, it was perceived a failure. Today, The Secret Heart seems refreshingly modern, though the psychobabble is a bit cliched seventy years on. Still, his interest in such a topic is a credit to Leonard, and the against-type casting of musical comedy star June Allyson as the depressed Penny is daring. For me, it works and remains an underrated and neglected film ripe for rediscovery.

 Dangerous beauty Ava Gardner with Robert Taylor in the noir, The Bribe

Robert Z. Leonard's excursion to noir's dark side was also his last truly notable film, 1949's The Bribe. Since returning from World War II, star Robert Taylor had displayed an aptitude for weak, fallen men, starting with his first post-war role in 1946's Undercurrent and continuing with the exemplary High Wall in 1947. Working with an outstanding cast that included Ava Gardner, John Hodiak, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price, The Bribe was a flop upon release, losing nearly $400,000 (about $4 million in today's dollars); however, intervening years have seen it slowly gain a following among fans of noir. The assets of the picture, which is a bit slow paced and lacking in subtlety, include a Miklos Rozsa score, appropriately oppressive cinematography by the renowned Joseph Ruttenberg, and south-of-the-border art direction by the legendary Cedric Gibbons. The film may have been better executed in the hands of a Nicholas Ray or Robert Siodmak, but Leonard must be given points for his sense of style. He was also fortunate in having Ava Gardner, then at the height of the beauty and sensuality that made her career, as the female lead.

Ava in The Bribe (Need I say more?)

Leonard's final MGM film was The King's Thief in 1956. He directed two more movies, an Italian production with Gina Lollobrigida called Beautiful But Dangerous and the family film, Kelly and Me, in 1957. Nicknamed "Pops" by nearly everyone whom he worked with, Robert Z. Leonard was a well-liked, talented craftsman who always gave his best. The results lie in his body of work.

Sources: IMDB
               Wikipedia
               Turner Classic Movies