Mitchell Leisen directed Hold Back The Dawn (1941) from a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Famously the director and screenwriters didn’t get along. However, the resulting film from that collaboration remains one of Leisen’s best and an overlooked masterpiece of the classic melodrama.
The film finds Charles Boyer playing a Romanian gigolo looking to get American citizenship by marrying an American woman. It’s a scheme that worked for his old flame Paulette Goddard who is present to coach him in the ins and out of visas. But when Boyer sets his sights on school teacher Olivia de Havilland his plans begin to unravel as he falls in love.
Leisen’s films are full of character reformations in the face of romance. Boyer’s gigolo is one in a long line of rakish men who, against their wishes, fall head over heels for good working class American girls. In a way this reaffirms the fantasy of the American dream, playing into the social and political atmosphere of the Great Depression. For Leisen love is enough to escape poverty and find a true home.
There are two significant seductions in Hold Back The Dawn and each targets two suitors. First Boyer seduces de Havilland (and the spectator) then de Havilland seduces Boyer (and the spectator) on their honeymoon. In each instance Leisen uses an ample number of close-ups. These two sequences are the only ones that make significant use of close-ups in the entire film.
What Leisen does is to create an intimate space that doesn’t rely on setting. The viewer, Boyer and/or de Havilland are cast adrift in longing glances, deep looks, and loving sighs. Space, in the context of mise en scène is disrupted to pull the viewer into the space that doesn’t seem to exist between two bodies drawn to each other. When Leisen inevitably cuts to a wider shot there is a degree of shell shock as the viewer re-acclimates themselves to the characters’ surroundings.
The romantic melodrama is the centerpiece of Hold Back The Dawn but it is peppered with comedic asides designed to give character actors a moment in the spotlight. This also brings some “real world” humor into the mix suggesting that there is more to the world of the film than just Boyer, Goddard and de Havilland. These asides may center on visas, firecrackers, car parts, and olive trees but they all function the same way; to give the film some color.
In an interesting twist Hold Back The Dawn constantly reiterates that it is a film. The narrative plays out in flashback as Boyer tries to sell his story to a Paramount Pictures executive. Every time Boyer’s narration is heard on the soundtrack Hold Back The Dawn reminds the viewer that it is a film. This suggests the confidence that Wilder and Brackett had in their script. No comic aside, no longing look, and no gag ever breaks the illusion of the film even as the film itself remains relatively reflexive.
This allows Hold Back The Dawn to be self-critical sub-textually while still delivering the goods as a “weepie”. Leisen, with tongue in cheek, allows an absurdly improbable scene to play out seriously only to undermine and subvert the romantic gesture with Boyer’s tell-tale voice over. In this way Hold Back The Dawn predicts the early modernist films like The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Bitter Victory (1957). There is a subtle irony to Hold Back The Dawn that elevates the film from the “classic” to the “masterpiece”. Everything Hold Back The Dawn does it does well.
