Night and Day

Michael Curtiz was born Mihály Kertész in Budapest in 1886 and arrived in Hollywood in 1926, where he became Warner Bros.' most reliable studio director, credited with roughly one hundred and seventy films between the silent era and 1961. He worked across every genre the studio produced — swashbucklers, gangster pictures, melodramas, musicals — often several a year, and was as famous inside the industry for his mangled English ("bring on the empty horses") as for his visual control on set. His run at Warners in the late 1930s and 1940s is one of the great studio careers: Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney, Casablanca (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945), which brought Joan Crawford her Academy Award. Curtiz was not a stylist who cultivated a signature the way Hitchcock did; his interest in authorship was minimal, and he treated pictures as assignments to be executed with speed and professionalism, using cameraman Sol Polito and later others to deliver Warners' house look on schedule and under budget. He directed Grant only once, on Night and Day (1946), Warner Bros.' heavily fictionalized biography of Cole Porter, with Grant cast against type as the composer. Grant, who knew Porter socially, found the production dishonest about its subject — Porter's private life was scrubbed from the script — and the experience was among the unhappiest of his career; he rarely spoke of the film afterward. Curtiz won the Academy Award for Best Director for Casablanca in 1944 and died in Hollywood in 1962, having outworked nearly every director of his generation without ever attaching his name to a personal style.