ABSTRACT

During the period that McCarey was under contract to Paramount Pictures <1933-6), he directed six films. Of the six, however, he was in future years to show affection for only two of them: Ruggles of Red Gap and Make Way for Tomorrow. He actively disliked Duck Soup and The Milky Way and seems to have liked Belle of the Nineties only in so far as it gave him the opportunity to work with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. It is significant that in each of these four films he was working with star personalities, whose already fully formed and widely known comedy characters would dictate to a large extent the structure, style and content of the films: the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup), Mae West (Belle of the Nineties), Harold Lloyd (The Milky Way) and W. C. Fields (Six of a Kind). McCarey must have felt that this restricted his scope for impressing his own personality and interests on the films. There is every reason to believe, then, that Ruggles of Red Gap and Make Way for Tomorrow give us the first clear indications of what this personality and these interests were.