Lo Leaps to the Fore.

• Position: Leo McCarey

Besides crafting the classic melodrama "Make Way for Tomorrow," Leo McCarey (1898-1969) arguably was the greatest comedy auteur during Hollywood's Golden Age, roughly from the early 1920s to the end of World War II. If one can count "Duck Soup" twice, a case can be made for McCarey having directed and provided story material for the best of all five comedy genres: personality, screwball, populism, dark, and romantic.

He teamed and molded Laurel & Hardy. Variations of the material he created for them resurface in many of his later films, such as his hat routines --always tweaked for the new film. For example, it is used as surrealism for the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup" (1933), and farce for Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in "The Awful Truth" (1937).

In addition to Laurel & Hardy, he directed many other personality comedians to some of their best work, including Mae West, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor (1932's 'The Kid from Spain" being his best film), Harold Lloyd (1936's "The Milky Way" being his best sound picture), Burns & Allen (1934's "Six of a Kind," being the duo's best feature), and the Marx Brothers ("Duck Soup").

Indeed, the American Rim Institute has "Duck Soup" listed anywhere from third to seventh--depending on its ever-changing "100 Best' lists--as the best American film comedy ever made. Woody Allen repeatedly has maintained that it is the best sound comedy ever made--anywhere. The brilliant French director Jean Renoir, a friend of McCarey's, said during the war, when much of Europe's film talent found themselves in California, "Leo is one of the few directors in Hollywood who understands human beings."

He would win an an Academy Award for directing "The Awful Truth." Like all of his "screwball" films, 'Truth" has a comically inspired courtroom scene. (McCarey, by the way, had a law degree.) Peter Bogdanovich has declared all movies in this genre must have a McCarey courtroom scene. Thus, one of the funniest scenes in Bogdanovich's...