The very model of the crack studio director, Mitchell Leisen spent much of his career at Paramount, where he tackled projects as radically different as the archly theatrical "Death Takes a Holiday" (1934) and the frothy revue film "The Big Broadcast of 1938" with the same composure and elegance.

It's even possible to prefer "The Big Broadcast" -- essentially a series of comedy bits and musical numbers performed by the radio superstars of the day -- for Leisen's sensitive staging of "Thanks for the Memory," the song that would become Bob Hope's signature. In Leisen's hands, the song becomes a dramatic dialogue with Shirley Ross, staged in the lounge of an ocean liner. As she and Hope share their unexpectedly fond recollections of a marriage that failed, Leisen plays down the humor of the lyrics while emphasizing the emotional underpinnings of the scene, which ends with the characters' shared but discreetly unvoiced discovery that they are still in love with each other.

The same tension -- between a scintillating, witty surface and the more serious emotions that course beneath it -- is developed at feature length in two of Leisen's best films, both recently reissued by Universal: the 1937 "Easy Living," with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland in a romantic comedy written by Preston Sturges, and the 1939 "Midnight," a Parisian farce with Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore, from a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

Set in New York City, "Easy Living" anticipates the form of one of Sturges' later, self-directed fables about the arbitrariness of success and failure in America. Arthur's working-class heroine, Mary Smith, is riding in an open-air bus when a miraculous gift, a sable coat, drops from the heavens, having been hurled from a penthouse balcony by a millionaire (Edward Arnold) angered by his wife's latest extravagance.

The highly cultured Sturges would almost certainly have intended the allusion to Zeus' pouring his shower of gold upon the princess Danae. As if touched by magic, Mary finds herself being propelled up the social scale, as dressmakers rush to show her their wares, and the owner of a failing luxury hotel (Luis Alberni) offers her the use of a suite, all in the belief that she is the banker's new mistress.

But Mary's true love is the banker's son (Milland), a reformed playboy who is trying to prove his independence by taking a job in an automat. Her upward trajectory parallels his democratic descent, and when the two lines intersect, the result is perfect structural balance and romantic comedy bliss.

"Midnight" gives greater range to Leisen the visual stylist. A former production designer (notably for Cecil B. DeMille), Leisen revels in the details of his back-lot Paris, creating two very different looks for (again) an aristocratic beau monde and a proletarian street life. As in "Easy Living," appearances are everything: the unemployed showgirl Eve Peabody (Colbert) arrives in Paris after a disastrous sojourn in Monte Carlo with nothing but the shimmering evening gown on her back; after persuading a sympathetic cabbie, Tibor Czerny (Ameche), to chauffeur her around the city in an unsuccessful search for a nightclub job, she crashes a society party and, Cinderella-like, finds herself the belle of the ball.

John Barrymore, in steep decline but still capable of some brilliant line readings, is Georges Flammarion, the millionaire fairy godfather who saves her from exposure, financing her impersonation of a Hungarian countess in hopes of breaking up the flirtation between his wife (Mary Astor) and a professional ladies' man (Francis Lederer). All goes well until the love-struck Czerny appears, himself done up as a Hungarian count with the help of his cab-driving friends.

Among the first of Wilder's American screenplays, "Midnight" already reflects, to an unpleasant degree, this future director's obsession with the theme of prostitution: for much of the film Eve seems ready to sell herself to the highest bidder. But there is a softness and warmth in Leisen's direction that takes the edge off Wilder's cynicism, and Colbert and Ameche make a sparkling couple. (As in Ernst Lubitsch's later "Heaven Can Wait," Ameche proves what a soulful performer he could be when given the material.)

Leisen somehow contrives to give even the most obvious studio sets, like Flammarion's Versailles estate, a spatial coherence and conviction; if these are not real places (and who would want them to be?), they are fantasies constructed with the precise eye of an architect. (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $14.99 each, not rated.)