Best of all, however, was Duck Soup (1933), starring the Marx Brothers.
![why a duck marx brothers why a duck marx brothers](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tDNLFZmo5sg/hqdefault.jpg)
He worked on a great many shorts with Charley Chase – including the hilarious Mighty like a Moose (1926) – and Laurel and Hardy, before making Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) and The Awful Truth (1937). One such is surely Leo McCarey, who made one of the most heart-wrenching Hollywood movies of all time (the extraordinary if woefully underseen Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), which was famously an influence on Ozu’s Tokyo Story), some of the most mawkish (I’ll refrain from mentioning the titles), and some of the funniest. And many of the most popular films of all time – think Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), Titanic (1997) – have been made by directors whose claims to auteur status are somewhat shaky. Indeed, full-blown auteurs are and always have been less numerous than the metteurs-en-scène who are less bothered about self-expression than about simply making the best of their material. I wouldn’t have included Cukor on that list – his abiding fascination with performance and pretence seems to me to warrant at least a degree of auteur status – but the point stands. The critic David Thomson touched on this in the latest issue of Sight & Sound in his feature about the late Mike Nichols he mentioned Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, David Lean and Stephen Frears as other important directors who might be considered members of the “assignment profession”. That’s all very well, but it does mean that some very fine talents tend to get forgotten about, simply because their strength is versatility rather than consistency. Very often, when people discuss film directors, they restrict themselves to those widely perceived as the great auteurs – the ones with identifiable thematic preoccupations and a discernible style. Comedy Genius is a season of side-splitting film and TV, at BFI Southbank, on BFI Player and at venues across the UK, from October 2018-January 2019