DVD of the Week: No Time for Love

We’re living now in an age of unrivalled cinematic audacity, but Mitchell Leisen’s 1943 romantic comedy, “No Time for Love” (which I discuss in this clip), is the kind of classic movie that makes me nostalgic for an age I never knew—a particular time of the big-studio movie. I saw bits of it on television years ago, and it always stuck with me for its boldly detailed depiction of the world of physical labor. In the movie, sandhogs are tunnelling under the East River (others of whom are now clamorously at work on the Second Avenue subway line), and the field of glossy publishing sends a photographer to cover the job. The story involves the cross-class romance of the photographer (Claudette Colbert) and a laborer (Fred MacMurray), and it takes seriously the question of their cultural clash. What’s more, Leisen’s direction has a loose-limbed, spontaneous whimsy—including Freudian symbols, slapstick entanglements, and flights of dreamland fancy—that suggest what the Coen brothers now call “the new freedoms.” For Leisen, as for many other filmmakers, the great liberator was Orson Welles, whose “Citizen Kane,” released in May, 1941, was an act of revolution: it wrenched the keys to the kingdom from producers and handed them to directors. Leisen was only one of the filmmakers—not a vastly original genius but a sensitive and thoughtful artist—who swung his arms with more confidence, held his head a little higher, opened the door, and looked outside, even while looking a little more deeply inward. The example of European filmmakers who had immigrated, such as Fritz Lang (who had been in Hollywood since the mid-thirties), Robert Siodmak, and Jean Renoir also helped, as did, ultimately, the 1948 Supreme Court decision that sparked the rise of independent producers and led to the films of the freewheeling fifties. But then came the New Wave, television, the end of the studio system, and the social changes of the sixties, and something broke—few studio-era filmmakers found themselves able to develop new forms to fill the inconceivably open field of possibilities (which is why Nicholas Ray’s 1971-1972 film “We Can’t Go Home Again” is such a colossal achievement—one that, had it been more widely seen at the time, may well have offered other filmmakers other radical possibilities).