China Seas (1935) Tay Garnett

Gable and Harlow battle it out on the high seas. A typhoon, marauding pirates and hidden gold are no competition for the fiery heat generated between two of MGM’s biggest stars. Gable is the hard drinking Allan Gaskell, Captain of a freighter heading from Hong Kong to Singapore. He wants to change his lifestyle, turn over a new leaf, after meeting upper class British lass Sybil Barclay, surprisingly played by Rosalind Russell. He plans to marry Sybil, and forget about the sassy  talky dame Dolly Partland, aka China Doll (Jean Harlow), who he has had an on again, and off again, love affair with.  Dolly still has a thing for the Captain and arranges to get herself on board the freighter for the trip in an attempt to win back him back from the upper crust Sybil. Also on board is Jamesy McArdle (Wallace Beery), a conniving worm who is in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to attack the ship seeking the stash of gold being transported. Losing out to Sybil in the Gable love triangle, Dolly licks her wounded heart by teaming up with the slimy McArdle in a revengeful attempt to steal the gold.

The Major and the Minor (1942) Billy Wilder

 

There was no love lost between Billy Wilder and film director Mitchell Leisen. Over the course of many interviews Billy expressed his strong feelings that Leisen ruined his scripts, he had no regard for the written word, changing, moving and deleting lines without a thought to storyline. Yet in Cameron Crowe’s essential “Conversations with Wilder,” Billy states, “Midnight, that was a good picture.” The distaste for Leisen seems to stem more from the making of “Hold Back the Dawn,” the final film Wilder, and his partner Charles Brackett, wrote for Leisen (their final screenplay before Wilder embarked on his directing career was “Ball of Fire” for Howard Hawks who Wilder admired). “As a director,” Wilder said to Crowe, “he was alright. You could get to be an old man writing just Mitch Leisen pictures.”  In “Hold Back the Dawn,” there was a scripted scene involving a cockroach that was never filmed. Wilder and Brackett worked on this scene for many long hours but Charles Boyer refused to talk to a cockroach as the script dictated, a bit which would have showed a softer side to his character. Leisen, siding with his star, just cut the scene out without regard. This burned Billy and they fought and fought but Billy, just a writer, low in the Hollywood hirarchy, lost the battle. In Leisen’s defense, one just has to take a look at “Midnight” and “Hold Back the Dawn” and ask how bad can he have destroyed them? Both of these films are good and still contain the wit and intelligence of Wilder’s and Brackett’s work. What’s lacking, is the acidic cynicism that Wilder’s self directed films contained throughout much of his career. I liked that cynicism, it is part of what separated and defined Wilder from most everyone else.     

Leisen was a successful and popular director whose films some claim were only as good as the script he was working with.  “Hands Across the Table” was penned by Norma Krasna. “Easy Living” and “Remember the Night” had Preston Sturges brilliance behind it, Sturges was another writer who had many of his own disagreements with Leisen. By 1941, Sturges had already paved the way for screenwriters to direct their own scripts with “The Great McGinty.” Wilder and Brackett were Paramount’s top screenwriters and from most reports, including Billy himself, the studio heads did not want Billy to  direct but they gave him a chance figuring the film would flop, he would get the directing urge out of his system and go back to script writing full time.