Director: Preston Sturges
Having finally broken through as a director at Paramount after much persistence, Preston Sturges’ second effort in a string of masterpieces would adapt a stage play that he had written in 1931 which, as it turns out, Universal had previously purchased in 1934. Paramount was able to secure the script from Universal and the resulting picture, Christmas in July, is the first great film in Sturges’ career as director, a Capra-esque comedy with a bitterness towards capitalism that maintains its topicality today. Dick Powell, in his first film under a Paramount contract, plays a $20-a-week clerk who is tricked by his coworkers into thinking that he has won a $25,000 slogan contest for a major coffee company. Naturally, once he is perceived to be a success, the higher ups at his workplace bring him into their inner circle and award him a new office. His boss, just after almost firing him, quips that he’s always seen something in the kid. The way that Sturges films the office is highly reminiscent of King Vidor’s The Crowd, with a sea of desks that the workers approach daily in a militarized march. Unlike the protagonist of Vidor’s picture, however, Powell is able to transcend the crowd, and in doing so reveals just what it takes to find success in the corporate world – a great deal of success to begin with.
Director: Preston Sturges
When The Great McGinty premiered in New York in the Fall of 1940, critic Bosley Crowther praised writer/director Preston Sturges’ bitter satire of political corruption, suggesting that it was just the picture that audiences had been craving: “with graver matters to concern us and with a more comfortable sense of civic security, it is sublimely easy to laugh at the shameless tricks and vulgarities of out-and-out political buccaneers.” Even Crowther could not have guessed what Sturges would do for Paramount over the next two years, releasing masterpiece after masterpiece that were more daring, and, in the case of Hail the Conquering Hero, even more cynical in dealing with elected officials. The Great McGinty was the first film that saw Sturges as a director, and the story goes that, after years of trying to get a studio to give him that position, Paramount executives agreed to his demand with the condition that they only pay him $10 for the script. While the film is not upper tier Sturges – containing fewer laughs and not nearly the same energy as The Palm Beach Story or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek – it is nonetheless a terrifically wry desecration of political corruption, with Sturges’ ultimate punchline being that the elected mayor’s growing sense of morality is what takes the position away from him. Brian Donlevy plays the transition from tramp to wizened public servant with grace, and Muriel Angelus, who plays the woman that he marries for the benefit of his self-image, serves her role as the catalyst for Donlevy’s transformation sublimely.
Director: Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges’ eighth and final film for Paramount was his most scathingly satirical. Eddie Bracken, who Sturges came to admire after his performance in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, plays the exhaustingly named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, the son of a Marine hero who is dismissed from service due to his chronic hay fever. Too ashamed to confront his mother with the news, he works instead on a shipyard until, one evening, a few servicemen take a liking to him and offer to vouch for his bravery to his hometown. Upon his return, the community is sent into a frenzy of celebrity worship, going as far as requesting that he take the mayoral position that he had not even campaigned for. While such hero-worshipping is the subject of Sturges’ most blatant skewering, it is really a film about small-town politics. A veterinarian in town seems to be the ideal candidate for the community, however his lack of charisma has meant that the current mayor, a phony who cares little about anything but reelection, has reigned in the office. When Bracken is confronted about being a leader, he has a telling monologue about the town wherein he pleads, “Everybody thinking about little profits and how not to pay the taxes and reasons for not buying bonds and not working too hard. […] That’s why we need an honest man for mayor.” The people, though, don’t want a good, honest man. They want the flashiest blowhard who comes along. While The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and The Palm Beach Story were both exemplary masterpieces of satire, it was Hail the Conquering Hero that served as Sturges’ most urgent appeal to audiences.
Director: Preston Sturges
Between 1940 and 1944, Preston Sturges directed a total of eight features for Paramount Studios. It was a hyper-productive burst of excellence that has arguably gone unrivaled in the history of Hollywood. Though not as beloved as its predecessors (The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels), one could make the argument that The Palm Beach Story, released in 1942, was his most consistently hilarious film, from the unforgettable Ale and Quail Club sequence to Mary Astor’s parody of the idle rich. Joel McCrea was never better than with Sturges (or in Sturges imitators, such as George Stevens’ underrated The More the Merrier) – in this picture, he again plays a relatively bland straight man, but now with a manic energy imposed on him by both Sturges’ pace and the exceptional talents of his co-star, the seasoned screwball player Claudette Colbert. While Sullivan’s Travels is often considered to be Sturges’ most autobiographical picture, many historians have noted that Sturges must have saw more than a little of himself in Rudy Vallée’s sadsack John D. Hackensacker (also a thinly veiled reference to Rockefeller), as he himself was once married to an heiress. Robert Dudley’s hard-of-hearing Wienie King (“Lay off ’em, you’ll live longer!”) is a scene-stealer, and the ending is a delightfully preposterous contrivance in which Sturges pokes fun at the improbable conveniences of the romantic comedy genre.
Director: Preston Sturges
An oddity of Preston Sturges’ late career, Unfaithfully Yours is a macabre, visually splendid farce that considers man’s interaction with music – both our emotional contributions to the art of performance and the way in which music directly effects our relationship with the world around us. While conducting an orchestra, Rex Harrison imagines a series of responses to his suspicion of his wife’s affair. In one scenario, he is apologetic and wholly sympathetic to his wife and her new lover, whereas in another he painstakingly crafts the perfect murder. The film’s only slightly misstep is in the lengthy sequence of physical comedy at the end, which, as author Jonathan Lethem points out, is effectively Kafka-esque, but unfortunately becomes redundant after Harrison’s umpteenth fall. Keep a look out, however, for the hilarious instruction manual of the record player: “At 78 RPM the record will play brilliantly for two minutes and 56 seconds. At 33 1/2 RPM it will play nearly 7 minutes but the quality will not be quite so brilliant. You must be the judge.”
Director: Preston Sturges
Often considered the most personal of Preston Sturges’ films, Sullivan’s Travels is a loving tribute to cinema as escapism. While the performances of Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake are wooden – even Eddie Bracken had more sexual chemistry with the leading ladies of his Sturges films – the film touchingly reflects on the author’s muse: comedy itself. The mocking of “serious” entertainment in the film can be irritatingly simplistic as not only does it diminish cinema’s artistic potential but it doesn’t quite do justice to Sturges’ own work, which can be revealing in its depiction of the era. In this film, for example, we see conflicts of art vs. commerce, capital vs. labor, and so on – material above and beyond the mindless, intellectually passive entertainment that the film often romanticizes. Despite my reservations, however, there is little that needs to be said about the first ten minutes of the film, which contains some of the sharpest, quick-witted dialogue ever committed to celluloid.
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