Oscar Profile #527: Gregory La Cava

Born March 10, 1892 in Towanda, Pennsylvania, (George) Gregory La Cava studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students’ League in New York. He was hired by silent film cartoonist Raoul Barré in 1913 to do odd jobs at his studio. By 1915, he was an animator on
The Animated Grouch Chasers. By the end of that year, he was hired by William Randolph Hearst to head his International Film Service which was tasked with making animated shorts of Heart’s newspaper cartoons.

La Cava’s work for Hearst was short lived, the studio he ran having closed by the end of 1918, although he continued his prolific output of shorts well into the 1929s. His first live-action film comedy was 1921’s His Nibs starring Chic Sale and Colleen Moore. He married first wife Beryl Morse Greene in 1924 with whom he would have one son. They would divorce in 1930.

The director’s late silent era films included 1927’s Running Wild starring W.C. Fields and 1929’s His First Command starring William Boyd. His early talkies included 1932’s The Half-Naked Truth starring Lupe Velez and Lee Tracy, The Age of Consent starring Richard Cromwell and Eric Linden, and Symphony for Six Million starring Irene Dunne and Ricardo Cortez, and 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House starring Walter Huston, Bed of Roses starring Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea, and Gallant Lady starring Ann Harding and Clive Brook.

Now a major Hollywood director, LaCava directed Helen Hayes and Brian Aherne in 1934’s What Every Woman Knows and Fredric March, Constance Bennett, and Frank Morgan in the same year’s The Affairs of Cellini which earned four Oscar nominations including one for Morgan. His flirtation with Oscar would continue with 1935’s Private Worlds for which Claudette Colbert would receive the film’s sole nomination, 1936’s My Man Godfrey which would earn six nominations including one for La Cava as Best Director. 1937’s Stage Door, for which he won the New York Film Critics award for Best Director would make it four years in a row, earning a total of four nominations including La Cava’s second for Best Director.

La Cava did not direct another film until 1939’s Fifth Avenue Girl starring Ginger Rogers and Walter Connolly. He followed that with 1940’s Primrose Path starring Rogers and Joel McCrea, which earned Marjorie Rambeau a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. That same year he married second wife, Grace Olive Nicholls Hoyt Garland, a marriage that would end in divorce in 1945.

There would only be three more films La Cava would direct, 1941’s Unfinished Business staring Irene Dunne and Robert Montgomery, 1942’s Lady in a Jam starring Dunne and Patric Knowles, and 1947’s Living in a Big Way starrign Gene Kelly. A deal to direct One Touch of Venus for producer Mary Pickford in 1945 fell through, causing him to sue her for breach of contract.

Gregory La Cava died of a heart attack on March 1, 1952 at 59.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE AFFAIRS OF CELLINI (1934), directed by Gregory La Cava

16th Century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, a combination Robin Hood, Scarlet Pimpernel, and Don Juan, was the film’s protagonist, another surefire hit for recent Oscar winner Fredric March who woos the Duchess of Venice (top-billed Constance Bennett) under the nose of her cuckhold husband, the Duke (Frank Morgan), but it was Morgan at his beguiling best who stole the film out from under its bigger name stars. Despite his clear supporting role, Morgan was one of just three Best Actor Oscar nominees that year, along with William Powell in The Thin Man and winner Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.

PRIVATE WORLDS (1935), directed by Gregory La Cava

It’s dated now, but Claudette Colbert straight from her Oscar-winning role in the previous year’s It Happened One Night, received her second nomination for her portrayal of the progressive female psychiatrist fighting for her professional survival in a man’s world as she locks horns with her hospital’s new administrator, played by Charles Boyer. Second leads Joan Bennett and Joel McCrea also turn in strong performances as do Helen Vinson as Boyer’s sister and Esther Dale as a psychiatric nurse from hell four decades before Nurse Ratched appeared on the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

MY MAN GODFREY (1936), directed by Gregory La Cava

The most successful film of La Cava’s career, this screwball comedy starred William Powell as the aristocrat posing as a butler to a family of nuts in which the scatterbrained younger sister was played by his former wife Carole Lombard, recommended for the part by Powell, because he claimed she was the character. Gail Patrick, who played her older sister was three years younger than Lombard in real life. Alice Brady, who played Lombard’s mother, was the same age as Powell, just six years older than Lombard. Oscar nominations for Best Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor (Mischa Auer), Supporting Actress and Screenplay, but not Picture.

STAGE DOOR (1937), directed by Gregory La Cava

Finally, a La Cava film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, as well as for Best Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actress (Andrea Leeds), but nothing for the film’s other female stars, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, and Constance Collier, all of whom are superb. Set in a boarding house for actresses between Broadway shows, Hepburn and Rogers’ on-screen rivalry was seen as a reflection of their off-screen relationship in which Hepburn was still the bigger star at RKO, while Rogers’ musicals with Fred Astaire brought in more money.

ONE TOUCH OF VENUS (1948), directed by William A. Seiter

It seems odd to consider a film he never made one of La Cava’s essentials, but had he made it, it might well have been the masterpiece it wasn’t. Mary Pickford had bought the rights to the film from the stage production, with La Cava scheduled to direct Mary Martin (reprising her stage role), Frank Sinatra, and Clifton Webb in the lead roles., but when Martin became pregnant and had to drop out, Pickford sold the rights to Universal causing La Cava to sue for breach of contract. Universal dropped most of the show’s songs and moved the principal location from a museum to a department store for the Ava Gardner-Robert Walker film.