Preston Sturges is a name that inspires nods of recognition and approval from critics, filmmakers and film buffs but which never quite broke through to the level of household name of a Hitchcock or a Spielberg, at least not in the aftermath of his Hollywood heyday. His films rarely get an airing on TV here in the UK, despite their general acceptance as classics by those who do happen upon them. A great screenwriter long before he took up the director’s chair, Sturges filmography is littered with brilliant works but I have decided to limit myself here to the twelve films he directed himself, all from his own screenplays, a trailblazing move that helped birth the notion of the writer-director. Do not let their exclusion here discourage you from seeking out excellent films like Easy Living, Remember the Night and The Good Fairy. But right now we will concern ourselves purely with those works that appeared under the legendary credit “Written and Directed by Preston Sturges.”
12.THE FRENCH, THEY ARE A FUNNY RACE
Preston Sturges final film, The French, They Are a Funny Race is generally perceived as a curious epilogue to a great career. While some mourn the fact that Sturges went out on such a flaccid note, the film is merely one more underwhelming entry in a filmography that had been petering out for a while. With his Hollywood career in tatters, Sturges was able to find work in France and he shot this final film in both French and English. The French version was well received and landed amongst the top 10 most popular films of the year in France, but the English version did nothing whatsoever to revive Sturges’ reputation in America.
The French, They Are a Funny Race is based around observations about the French by a stuffy British Major who has married a French woman. Affable enough, the various vignettes about the differences between the two nationalities quickly become repetitive, with mildly amusing narration describing the trivial events on screen. The film feels like a mishmash: an American director’s interpretation of a French novelist’s imagination of a British Major’s perception of the French. Although the tone is lightheartedly whimsical rather than aggressively xenophobic, the comedy still feels terribly dated merely through its inability to provoke much mirth in modern audiences. The French, They Are a Funny Race isn’t quite the disaster some will lead you to believe then, but even in its truncated English version, twenty minutes shorter than the French one, it feels overlong. And while you can occasionally hear Sturges’ trademark wit in a couple of phrases, all the energy and unique strangeness of his best work seems to have drained away completely by this point.
11.THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK
After Preston Sturges left Paramount, he set up the short-lived independent California Pictures with eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, a partnership designed to allow Sturges greater creative freedom. His first film for the company was based on the bold notion of tempting comedian Harold Lloyd out of retirement to star in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a story that began life as The Sin of Hilda Diddlebock but was gender-switched when Lloyd became involved. Lloyd’s major fame was achieved as one of the great silent comedians and, while he had made some good sound films too, it was as the star of silent classics like Safety Last and The Kid Brother that Lloyd was best remembered. Sturges seemed to think he needed to refresh the public’s memory of this, making the curious choice of opening his own film with about eight minutes of Lloyd’s 1925 classic The Freshman. While some claim this makes The Sin of Harold Diddlebock a sequel to The Freshman, Sturges differentiates his lead character from the one in the original film by giving him a different surname, thereby establishing a new timeline which begins with the ending of The Freshman but reimagines it as a different man’s story. However you chose to take it, the use of such a substantial chunk of The Freshman at the outset of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock makes the film feel strangely desperate and the failure to convincingly blend the silent slapstick with Sturges own style is an immediate indication of the error in judgment that scuppers the whole picture. Putting two comedic geniuses together is not necessarily a recipe for success if their approaches are incompatible. So it proves with The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.
In contrast with the well worked out narratives of Sturges’ Paramount films, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock feels like it is being made up as it goes along. It has the most in common with The Palm Beach Story, which played as a series of quirky sketches featuring Sturges’ stock company of supporting players, but that film was also a smart deconstruction of its own genre and revealed itself to have a tight internal logic in its closing moments. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, by contrast, feels less like a screenplay and more like a sneeze. There are nice ideas and funny scenes but the film feels slapdash and scattershot, its The Hangover-esque plot of a man trying to deal with the fallout of his drunken escapades allowing Sturges a little too much leeway to let go of the reins. It’s a pity because had Sturges maintained better control of the project, there’s every sign that it could’ve worked wonderfully. Lloyd, who scored a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, is excellent in the early sequences leading up to his intoxication and his performance of a monologue about falling in love with a series of sisters and their mother is beautifully executed. The scene in the bar, in which a despondent Harold has his first ever alcoholic drink, is one of the finest sequences in the Sturges canon, with Lloyd managing to fully sell the potentially overly-silly notion of his howling response to the booze, and Edgar Kennedy, himself a veteran of screen comedy, stealing the show as the eloquent barman (his line “You arouse the artist in me” is the film’s most famous moment, and one of Sturges’ finest pieces of writing). This extended scene is worth seeing The Sin of Harold Diddlebock for alone, but the fact that it so easily lifts out of the film as a ten minute YouTube sketch is indicative of the overall problem. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock undoubtedly has its moments of greatness, but it also has stretches of flaccid failure.
The worst scene in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock comes towards the end, when Lloyd is forced back out onto the ledge of a tall building to perform a routine reminiscent of his earlier thrill-pictures. Clearly referencing the classic Safety Last, a film already partly remade as Feet First, Sturges’ take on Lloyd’s deft mix of action and comedy just doesn’t work. Although he used slapstick liberally in his Paramount films, I’ve never considered Sturges a master of the form. His tendency towards wild, messy splurges of destructive chaos are a far cry from the elegantly choreographed routines of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and having one of those original kings of comedy at the centre of one of his clunky melees only highlights Sturges’ shortcomings. Lloyd himself seems uncomfortable with the whole sequence, having so deftly accommodated Sturges’ verbal wit into his repertoire. Reportedly, Sturges and Lloyd clashed on set over creative differences but there’s a tantalising glimmer of a notion that their collaboration could have been beautiful, had they only been able to agree on and stick with a direction. Instead, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock emerged as an unwieldy mess, which Hughes quickly pulled from distribution, recutting and rereleasing it years later as Mad Wednesday, to equal indifference. This inauspicious start led the legendary mercurial Hughes to very quickly sever connections with Sturges, putting a premature end to California Pictures and sending Sturges back to the studio system for a two picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox.
10.THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND
Preston Sturges final directorial job in Hollywood, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, on the rare occasions when it is discussed at all, is usually panned as his worst American film. It’s not hard to see why. Filmed in garish Technicolor and opening with a perky, goofball theme song that will recur later, the marketing department surely knew they weren’t dealing with a Sturges masterpiece when they slapped the poster with the tagline “She Had the Biggest Six-Shooters in the West.” Just in case anyone was still unsure, they appended no less than three exclamation marks to that tagline. Though we may laugh (“may” being the operative word), it was a canny piece of advertising because The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend just about works as a piece of entertainment if you take it on its own terms. It’s an unashamedly lowbrow, wacky, living cartoon of a film and Sturges slips in plenty of his uniquely witty dialogue to sweeten the pot. But there’s only so much you can do with lengthy scenes about a judge who has been accidentally shot in the bum (something, incidentally, that becomes a running gag, with no less than two more anal intrusions of hot lead happening to the same character across the film).
Betty Grable was a huge box office draw at the time of The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend’s release but even she hated the film and it gave her a rare commercial failure. Nevertheless, she is extremely good here, giving a perfectly pitched performance that has the right amount of energy but also anchors the mayhem with a shrewd believability. Despite the expensive Technicolor process, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend feels like a cheap B-picture, languishing on obvious studio sets that feel inappropriately claustrophobic for a light western. There’s little to care about in the way of story or characters but the short runtime means that Sturges’ often funny dialogue and Grable’s magnetism carry it through. Though not Sturges’ worst film in my book, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend is very much one for the completists and, while you may have a better time than expected, this is not the valley in which to search for hidden treasure.
9.THE GREAT MOMENT
Amongst my personal film collection, the boxset Written and Directed by Preston Sturges has pride of place. It contains seven films and beneath each disc is a quote describing the respective film. Beneath Sullivan’s Travels it says “…classic Sturges satire…” Christmas in July is described as “…a little gem.” The Palm Beach Story is “…packed with delightful absurdities…” Then we get to The Great Moment. The quote, taken from the Radio Times, states “…swings wildly from slapstick to drama…” It’s the one quote that isn’t wholly complimentary. In fact, it seems to be an implicit criticism of The Great Moment’s well-documented tonal peculiarity, suggesting that the makers of the boxset either couldn’t find a positive quote about this particular film or couldn’t be bothered to look that hard. Given its dire reputation, the former seems likely. And yet, for all its inherent strangeness, I’ve always rather liked The Great Moment. In its incorporation of Sturges’ wacky slapstick and sly black comedy into the stuffy structure of a classic Hollywood biopic, it emerges as endlessly fascinating, if not entirely successful. This lack of narrative success can be partially attributed to Paramount’s hack job on the film. Having never liked the film Sturges turned in, the studio withheld it from release and attempted to edit it in a way that emphasised the humour that audiences associated with Sturges. By the time The Great Moment was finally released, Sturges had already left Paramount but the film’s lousy reception was the beginning of a critical and commercial downwards spiral from which his career never recovered.
The usual problems of credibility associated with the biopic genre are present in The Great Moment. The film focuses on the story of Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the 19th century Boston dentist who is credited with discovering the use of ether in general anaesthesia. Based on Rene Fulop-Miller’s Triumph over Pain, a book that had proved controversial in its claims about Morton, Sturges’ film chooses to lean into the notion that Morton was a man of good character and the pioneer of ether in practical anaesthesia. Many other figures who made credible claims to have been instrumental in this discovery are here depicted as jealous opportunists. But when it comes to the notoriously inaccurate genre of the biopic, there’s a necessity to disregard the facts to an extent and accept that entertainment has taken priority. While it may seem irresponsible to put out unsubstantiated or roundly debunked versions of true stories just because they play better for an audience, Hollywood has been printing the legend long enough that those who take their biographical narratives as read must accept some responsibility in their own intellectual undoing.
Relieved of the burden of truth, The Great Moment is a surprisingly entertaining oddity. While certainly Sturges’ weakest film up to this point, there’s still plenty to recommend here. For one, Sturges doesn’t shy away from every unfortunate detail of Morton’s life. While many may have opted to exclude Morton’s downward spiral after sharing his discovery with the world, Sturges constructs a convoluted double flashback which front-loads the film with misery in order to be able to conclude on a high point. It’s a smart bit of structuring, similar to that employed by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction decades later, which allowed his leading man John Travolta to be killed in act two and walk off into the sunset in act three. With the depressing epilogue dealt with as a prologue, The Great Moment is then able to largely shed the creaky conventions of contemporary biopics in order to offer a well-paced, involving and humorous account of Morton’s pursuit of painless procedures. Given the horrific reality of surgery before anaesthesia, there’s an urgency to his quest, as well as a grisly edge which Sturges plays for both shock value and bleak comedy. Whether by Sturges’ design or at Paramount’s insistence, there are moments that are a tad too wacky for the film in which they appear, such as the wild reaction to ether displayed by William Demarest’s Eben Frost. It’s one of the most over-the-top sequences in any Sturges film and its incongruity is both jarring and oddly appealing. If the result is the sort of tonal messiness for which The Great Moment is frequently condemned, it also feels refreshingly unrestrained by the tenets of good taste and hagiographic respect that render so many biopics crusty and dull.
Could The Great Moment have been a masterpiece had Sturges been allowed to make it the way he intended? I would say no, probably not. In a curious turn of events, the comedic intrusions on which the studio insisted simultaneously clearly don’t work and are the making of the picture. Their very presence jars the viewer out of the experience and keeps them watching out of curiosity about when the next one will appear and how far it will go. But The Great Moment is not a so-bad-it’s-good film either. Sturges is far too canny a filmmaker for that, and his storytelling in the scenes of Morton’s ongoing experiments is often exemplary. Scenes of Morton doing research, essentially just a man reading a book, are enlivened by a simple but smart device in which the crucial pieces of information are presented in writing on the screen, first as part of their respective paragraphs and then in larger letters, isolated and emphasised by Joel McCrea’s excited reactions. The unenticing notion of a film about anaesthesia is rendered intriguing, if no less peculiar, at every turn. Though it’s tempting to call The Great Moment an interesting failure, it’s hard to think of a film that is so uniquely enjoyable as a genuine failure.
8.THE LADY EVE
Preston Sturges’ third directorial effort, despite retrospectively being lauded by many as his masterpiece, was only nominated for one Oscar: Best Original Story for Monckton Hoffe. It was a peculiar choice given that the weakest element of The Lady Eve is arguably its preposterous plot. Concerning a con artist who falls in love with her rich mark, the film appears to be living up to its reputation handsomely for approximately half the runtime. The portion of The Lady Eve that is set aboard an ocean liner is excellent. Funny, intriguing, romantic, sexy, it barrels along beautifully, buoyed by Sturges’ inimitable witty dialogue and the performances of its stars. For once, Sturges’ stock company of bit players struggles to steal the film from the headliners, in particular an on-fire Barbara Stanwyck.
Stanwyck has always been one of my favourite actresses but her turn in The Lady Eve single-handedly saves the film. When it is excelling, Stanwyck stands out amongst the numerous attractions, and when it is floundering she rallies to hold the whole thing together. While she has an able screen partner in Henry Fonda, his turn as drippy millionaire Charles Pike is hamstrung by a lack of personality in the writing. While this is partially the point, allowing Stanwyck’s indelible Jean Harrington to dominate, Fonda seems somewhat adrift when Stanwyck isn’t there to bounce off. Fortunately, there are a ton of old pros on hand in supporting roles, including Eugene Pallette, Charles Coburn and Eric Blore. Coburn is reliably witty as Stanwyck’s equally unscrupulous father and has a standout scene involving a card game, but it is Blore alone who succeeds in stealing a portion of the film from Stanwyck, as he feeds Fonda an unlikely tale ostensibly as part of a con but clearly for his own cruel amusement as well.
The Lady Eve is a difficult film to rate because it is almost exactly half great. When it is working it’s a five star classic but for the long stretches when it isn’t it is simply too silly and outlandish even for a film that to some extent aims for those qualities. Whether this becomes a problem for the viewer depends on how willing they are to take a very big leap when the plot requires them to do so. In this case, having fallen in love with Jean and then discovered that she is a con artist, we’re asked to believe that a heartbroken Pike could then believe that she was a different person entirely when she brazenly turns up masquerading as aristocrat Lady Eve Sidwich. The film offers all sorts of excuses for this logical absurdity. Jean has a speech about how falling out of love has made her unrecognisable to Pike. Blore’s fairy story about illegitimate twins aims to justify the gullible Pike’s acceptance of the situation. And Sturges inserts his regular collaborator William Demarest into the story as Muggsy, Pike’s uncouth minder, whose repeated, bewildered assertion that Eve is “positively the same dame” acts as a sort of meta surrogate for the more incredulous audience members. Sturges pulled off similar justifications for lunatic plot twists in other films, most notably The Palm Beach Story, but that film went out of its way to establish this goofball atmosphere from the outset. In The Lady Eve, the tonal switch in the second half feels like a bullish intrusion, exacerbated by the fact that Sturges suddenly seems determined for Fonda to communicate entirely through the medium of pratfall.
While I find the second half of The Lady Eve too hard to swallow, it does nonetheless come with its own charms. It is here that we find several of Sturges’ finest pieces of dialogue, notably Jean’s pre-revenge declaration “I need him like the axe needs the turkey”, as well as a justly famous scene in which a romantic moment is repeatedly interrupted by a persistent horse, a piece of physical comedy that works after so many that have fallen spectacularly flat. Yet I can’t help but long for the exquisite earlier scenes aboard the boat and when the film does eventually bring us full circle it feels rushed and unsatisfying. Though it is considered Sturges’ crown jewel by many, for me The Lady Eve occupies a similar place in his filmography as Some Like It Hot does in Billy Wilder’s: a sporadically great but unwieldy trifle that has been bewilderingly elevated to the top of the pile over many more deserving options.
7.UNFAITHFULLY YOURS
I remember being extremely impressed by Unfaithfully Yours the first time I saw it. Usually seen as the saving grace in Preston Sturges’ post-Paramount downturn, its lack of commercial success at the time of release has since be balanced out by a wave of retrospective praise that regularly names it among his best films. Quentin Tarantino even listed Unfaithfully Yours as one of his all-time top 10 movies. The film’s story was written by Sturges as early as 1932 but he struggled to find a buyer, with Fox, Universal and Paramount all turning it down. Fox obviously had a change of heart and, seizing the chance to sign up the commercially adrift Sturges, set him to work on a two picture deal with Unfaithfully Yours as the first. It’s easy to see why the film made studios nervous back in the early sound days. With the Hays Code coming heavily into force, the notion of a story of suspected adultery and attempted murder, and a comedy no less, was surely a risky proposition. By 1948, perhaps Fox perceived audiences as more ready for this pitch black humour, especially since Sturges had made hits out of similarly risky material by this stage.
On a rewatch, Unfaithfully Yours went down in my estimation. The problem I have with it is similar to that which I had with The Lady Eve. I referred to that as half a brilliant film, whereas Unfaithfully Yours feels like two-thirds of a brilliant film to me. While that may sound like an improvement, that weaker third really is the undoing of the film and the fact that it is also the finale is doubly damaging. It’s galling, because the rest of Unfaithfully Yours really is wonderful. Beginning as a simple story of famous conductor Sir Alfred de Carter, whose blissfully happy marriage to his young wife Daphne is shaken by an unsolicited accusation of infidelity, Unfaithfully Yours then becomes a series of daydream sequences as de Carter imagines various courses of action while he conducts a trilogy of classical pieces. These murderous imaginings are brilliantly paired with the respective classical pieces, driving the narrative with a knowing melodramatic verve. I’ve never been a fan of farces in which misunderstandings spark jealous rages but Sturges laces his variation on this formula with so much brilliant dialogue that the long build-up to Alfred’s daydreams is as hilarious as it is excruciating. And the daydreams themselves have a perfect otherworldliness, prefaced by an ingenious shot in which the camera zooms right into the pupil of Alfred’s eye in order to enter his thoughts. It’s one of the most memorable images Sturges ever put on screen.
So what went wrong with Unfaithfully Yours? Well, that final third of the film gives way almost exclusively to the sort of bulldozing slapstick at which I’ve never thought Sturges was especially good. Some find the very lengthy final sequence hysterical but watching Alfred systematically destroy his home as he bumblingly attempts to execute the homicidal plans that were so easy in his daydreams is a repetitive, tedious affair. It’s clear that Sturges is attempting to mine comedy gold through sheer relentless repetition and the cavalcade of destruction did at times wear me down and elicit a mild chuckle, but ultimately it’s a guttingly disappointing way to conclude such a devilishly delicious setup. The ending too is abrupt and unearned, a happy reconciliation that seems entirely dictated by the constraints of the runtime.
Rex Harrison is one of Sturges’ finest and funniest leading men, his dry delivery emphasising every last drop of cynical acid, but he is no more a physical comedian than Sturges is a great slapstick director. While some may vehemently disagree, Unfaithfully Yours is the perfect illustration of why I love Sturges when he exercises a little more restraint. The first two thirds of this film showcase the sparkling wit, killer dialogue and fiendishly clever ideas that make Sturges one of my favourite writer/directors. The final third pretty much packages up everything I dislike about him. Those brilliant opening thirds are so enjoyable that I’ve placed Unfaithfully Yours above The Lady Eve but overall the act of self-sabotage that it perpetrates on itself is far more damaging even than Eve’s.
6.THE PALM BEACH STORY
In his previous film Sullivan‘s Travels, Preston Sturges spent the runtime circling various potential messages about poverty, privilege and art, ultimately settling on the notion that “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh.” With The Palm Beach Story, Sturges seems to have taken his own advice and, to an extent, proved his point. There’s very little resembling a message in The Palm Beach Story but there are a lot of laughs and, while the whole thing is perhaps a bit too shaggy to amount to a true classic, that does prove to be enough. The story of married couple Tom and Gerry (their cat and mouse namesakes debuted two years before and, whether it was intended or not, that’s a bonus laugh for you), The Palm Beach Story begins with Gerry’s casual declaration that she is going to leave Tom in order to give them both a better shot at escaping their financial woes. Though Tom is reluctant to divorce, Gerry sets off for Palm Beach in search of a man who can provide a better life for her and, unbeknownst to Tom, bankroll his business plans. Gerry’s adventures see her cross paths with various oddball characters and, with Tom in pursuit, a farcical series of romantic misadventures eventually lead various pairings to the altar.
If that plot sounds quite basic, that’s because Sturges is far more interested in giving his fanciful little bits of business room to breathe. So we get outrageous set pieces like a train journey with the psychotically trigger-happy Ale and Quail Club, which descends into a vaguely motivated cavalcade of impulsive gunfire. It’s the sort of scene that would have many questioning its credibility but Sturges has laid the groundwork for us to accept such absurdities because, while The Palm Beach Story may be devoid of messages, it does boast one of the most daring formally experimental deconstructions of a genre I’ve ever seen. The film opens in the middle of a farcical, silent set piece that plays out over the credits and involves Gerry and what appears to be her doppelgänger involved in some kind of bait and switch wedding escapade in which one of them has been restrained and locked in a closet while the other dashes to the church. It’s a deliberately baffling beginning which puts the audience on the back-foot immediately but then we forget all about it as the main plot kicks in. Only at the end of the film does a knowingly preposterous deus ex machina suddenly reveal itself to be the reason for this non sequitur of an introduction, at which point we question the whole film. The fact that both the prologue and the epilogue end with weddings and the caption “They lived happily ever after…or did they?” recasts The Palm Beach Story as an interpretation of the screwball comedy as an endlessly repeating hellscape in which the convenient and implausible are the only way out but the supposed happy ending plunges everyone right back in again.
Sturges earlier films had been content with superb dialogue and clever satirical plots but The Palm Beach Story is evidence of a continued ambition to experiment. He fills the film with plenty of great lines, good gags and a stellar cast, including a scene stealing Mary Astor, who turns up less than half an hour from the end but crams ninety minutes worth of dialogue into that time, and Claudette Colbert who proves once again that she is one of Hollywood’s most effortlessly adorable leading ladies. But having given us this solid base, Sturges seems determined to disrupt it. The Ale and Quail Club’s double-barrelled rampage becomes something of a metaphor for the way Sturges blasts his way through his own material, grinning at his gleefully meta self-sabotage. For all its challenging audacity, The Palm Beach Story was still a hit, proving that there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh but also for confusing the hell out of them!
5.THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK
A lot of my Preston Sturges reviews begin by discussing how I prefer Sturges when he exercises a little restraint. By this I mean I prefer his witty dialogue and satirical content above his love of wild slapstick. What should also be noted though is that just because I have a preference for a certain kind of Sturges screenplay doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy another kind. Sure, I thought the majority of the physical comedy in The Lady Eve fell flat but that was because it felt to me like an unnecessary stylistic intrusion. Contrast that with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, a film that plays like a sort of living cartoon (albeit a very adult one) and it suddenly becomes clear that context is key. Because The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek starts out in a goofball register and escalates from there, its excesses make perfect sense to me, and Sturges creates a consistent world which can happily contain his penchant for pratfalls. These heightened tendencies are clear from the outset, in the casting of the caricature-like Eddie Bracken and the irrepressibly ebullient Betty Hutton, the elevation of regular Sturges supporting player William Demarest to the major role of the father, and in the naming of the central family, the Kockenlockers. All that is before we get to the main plot, which gave Sturges enormous problems with the censors. Although he was forced to make constant rewrites, it’s amazing that in 1944 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek got to the screens in any form, let alone went on to pick up an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek tells the story of teenager Trudy Kockenlocker, the daughter of the brusque small town constable. Against the wishes of her father, Trudy attends a farewell party for a group of soldiers under the pretence that she is on a date with the smitten but basically non-threatening Norval Jones. The following day, unable to recollect the events of the evening, Trudy comes to realise she is pregnant. Terrified of a scandal and what her father will say, she and her younger sister Emmy enlist the help of Norval who agrees to an elaborate scheme involving marriage under a false name. But when suspicions are raised during the ceremony, a series of misunderstandings land Norval in jail and Trudy without a plan.
When watching The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, you have to take certain elements euphemistically in order to appreciate Sturges’ original vision. It is clear, for instance, that Trudy gets pregnant due to the farewell party being a drunken free-for-all, but unwilling to see American soldiers or a teenage girl depicted indulging in such hedonistic activities, the Hays office insisted on a change. So instead we see Trudy hit her head on a chandelier, which causes the temporary loss of senses. In another classic own goal for the Hays code, it’s actually far more disturbing to imagine a GI having his way with a woman who has sustained a serious head injury than it is to imagine two drunk people having a sloppy assignation. Trudy is also shown to have gone through an impulsive marriage ceremony, something which makes no sense at all if alcohol is removed from the picture, and paints the presumably fully lucid GI in a much worse light given his abandonment of her. Ironically, Sturges’ heavily conservative intentions to “show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents’ advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity” seem far more in keeping with the pious aspirations of the Hays office than the nightmarishly cynical scenario they inadvertently imposed on the film.
Whatever The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek’s intended form, the result manages to be marvellously entertaining in its wanton tastelessness and frantic escalation. Bracken, Hutton and Demarest are perfectly overstated in the lead roles, keeping the film spinning dizzily through its romantic and farcical passages, while the young Diana Lynn quietly steals the show as the level-headed but cynical younger sister whose sedate, urbane delivery provides an anchor of sanity. There is the odd moment when the frantic pacing tips into the reaches of Sturges’ worst excesses, such as a running gag involving Demarest trying to kick people and falling down, but the majority of the action is pitched precisely on the right side of the line marked “Too Much.” One particularly hilarious scene involves Constable Kockenlocker trying to surreptitiously release Norval from prison without actually acknowledging any wrongdoing on his own part, but Norval just can’t grasp the hints he’s handing down. The same joke plays out again and again for several minutes but the longer it goes on, the funnier it gets. That’s the sort of film The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is. If it sees the opportunity for laughs, it’ll pursue them doggedly and to the logical, or illogical, extreme.
I recall not being overly impressed by The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek when I first saw it but on this rewatch I straight up loved it. Perhaps it’s a film that benefits from knowing what you’re about to get into to some extent, as this time round I went in prepared for its brazen, relentless absurdity. Or perhaps I’m starting to embrace the wackier side of Sturges more. Either way, I finally see why this risqué little taboo-buster is held in such high regard.
4.HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO
Although it was universally praised and earned Preston Sturges his third and final Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, the superb Hail the Conquering Hero has become one of the more forgotten films in Sturges’ golden run of Paramount comedies. Perhaps, as another small-town tale starring Eddie Bracken, it lives in the shadow of the more outrageous The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek or maybe the wartime themes don’t resonate as strongly with latter day audiences. Whatever the reason for its comparative obscurity, Hail the Conquering Hero is really overdue a reappraisal because it certainly sits amongst Sturges’ finest films.
Hail the Conquering Hero tells the story of a well-meaning lie that quickly and dramatically escalates beyond the control of its reluctant subject. As such, Sturges slows the pace considerably after the exhaustingly frantic Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, opting instead to let his farce escalate with an excruciating deliberateness. This allows for each successive embarrassment to be milked for every drop of cold sweat. The central deception involves Woodrow Truesmith, a down-on-his-luck ex-Marine discharged for chronic hay fever. Rather than face his friends and family back home, he has held down a job in a San Diego shipyard while pretending to be fighting overseas. After befriending a group of Marines in a bar, Woodrow’s new friends concoct a story that will allow him to return home a hero, and on the train journey one of them insists Woodrow swap coats with him, medals and all. When Woodrow steps off the train, he is greeted by the whole town who have turned out to greet their homegrown hero. And that’s just for starters…
While Bracken is nominally the protagonist, Hail the Conquering Hero is the finest example of Sturges penchant for giving great material to his supporting players. There are many of Sturges’ familiar stock company here, including perhaps William Demarest’s finest role for the director as head of the Marines, Sgt. Heffelfinger. Raymond Walburn, so memorable in Christmas in July, steals entire scenes once again as the corrupt Mayor Noble. Also very funny is boxer Freddie Steele as the thuggish Marine Bugsy, whose lack of a family of his own leads to him forming an uncomfortable surrogate son bond with Woodrow’s mother. Leading lady Ella Raines is the only real weak point of the cast and Paramount wanted her replaced, ostensibly because she didn’t convince as a small town girl but probably even more because she lacked box office clout. Still, injecting a bigger name into this cast would likely knock it off balance, and part of the beauty of Hail the Conquering Hero is the lack of star power, which makes its quirky cross-section of small town whimsy even more convincing.
While some have taken Hail the Conquering Hero to be a cynical takedown of small town patriotism, it is more accurately a patriotic wartime picture which doesn’t insist on pretending the country about which it waxes poetic, or that country’s inhabitants, are immune from being ridiculous. The conflation of patriotism with exceptionalism is rife at the time of writing but that is not the impression given here. Sturges keen awareness of the pomposity of nationalistic pageantry and the potential exploitation it can enable is balanced by a genuine reverence for those fighting against fascism. The characters’ flaws are due to them being human rather than being patriots. While some moments in the climax may seem mawkish to modern eyes, any viewer able to place themselves in the position of a wartime audience should have no trouble understanding and even enjoying a version of patriotism that is not just the thinly veiled racist bigotry of the Trump era.
3.CHRISTMAS IN JULY
There are few directors whose reputation rests on as concentrated a period of activity as Preston Sturges. Having finagled his way into the director’s chair with the legendary deal he struck on The Great McGinty, Sturges embarked on a furiously fruitful four years during which he released the majority of his most acclaimed work. Only a couple of months after McGinty’s success, Sturges put out another film, Christmas in July. Given the speed with which this film was produced, coupled with its extremely short runtime of 67 minutes, one might expect Christmas in July to be a rush job, a throwaway below the standards of Sturges best. Certainly, the film is the least well-known of Sturges’ opening salvo of classic comedies but it is also among his very best. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I tend to prefer Sturges when he exercises a little more restraint and Christmas in July is almost devoid of the maniac slapstick that would soon become a trademark.
Based on Sturges’ unproduced 1931 stage play A Cup of Coffee (which finally had its premiere over half a century later in 1988), Christmas in July tells the story of two young lovers, Jimmy and Betty (Dick Powell and Ellen Drew), who are despondent at their lack of financial means which is preventing their marriage. Jimmy longs for the valuation of his perceived superiors and is pinning all his hopes on winning $25,000 in a slogan writing contest for coffee company Maxford House. Unfortunately, his slogan is hopelessly convoluted to the point that no-one but Jimmy seems to understand it or even be able to repeat it accurately. As a gag, three of Jimmy’s co-workers create a fake telegram proclaiming Jimmy the winner of the contest, which they leave on his desk at work. Unfortunately, the joke immediately spirals out of control as Jimmy’s excitement is noticed by his boss J.B. Baxter, who promotes Jimmy to the position of advertising executive. When Jimmy goes to pick up his winnings, a misunderstanding causes Maxford House to pay off and Jimmy and Betty head out on a spending spree. But when company head Dr. Maxford learns the truth, Jimmy’s dreams begin to fall apart one by one.
A simple but fantastically executed concept, Christmas in July doesn’t have a wasted moment. It plays like a zippy, upbeat Frank Capra movie poisoned by a viciously satirical take on capitalistic meritocracies. It’s easy to get caught up in the joy of Jimmy and Betty’s celebrations but the audience’s complicity in the terrible truth means every scene is as excruciating as it is delirious. Perhaps it is the uncomfortable mixture of emotions it inspires that has kept Christmas in July from becoming a recognised classic. This is reflected in the title, which sounds like a festive classic until you reach the last word. The scene in which Jimmy presents his whole neighbourhood with expensive gifts plays like a curdled inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life’s conclusion.
Once the lie is exposed, Christmas in July finds its way to a satisfying low-key conclusion. Jimmy and Betty get their happy ending but the film ends before they even realise it. It’s a punchline rather than a heartwarming finale, so Sturges withholds the joy in the hope that the takedown of societal failings resonates more deeply than the love story of a couple who pin too much hope on those same failings. The happiness that is coming to Jimmy and Betty is deeply compromised and Sturges ensures we know this by not really letting any of his characters learn anything from the experience. In a startlingly prescient climactic sequence, company head J.B. Baxter admits that he needs the validation of higher powers in order to form his own opinions. An impassioned plea from Betty allows Jimmy to keep his promotion but this is achieved more through momentary befuddlement than a sentimental breakthrough and Baxter withholds the promised pay rise as proof. Ultimately, the final twist will inevitably see Baxter barrelling towards a feeling of validation for his terrible values. Again, no-one learns anything.
As well as presenting a cynical but astute worldview that few other’s could’ve gotten away with at the time, Sturges also pulls off the trick of having stars who are not the real stars. Sturges’ films would become famous for featuring his stock company of character actors whose supporting roles and cameos were crucial in giving the films that individual Sturges stamp. While Paramount were against this practice, fearing audiences would tire of the same faces, Sturges insisted these “little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures.” So while Dick Powell and Ellen Drew are fine in the lead roles, Sturges devotees will really be looking out for the likes of Raymond Walburn, Franklin Pangborn, Harry Rosenthal, Georgia Caine, Jimmy Conlin and, of course, William Demarest. The level of enjoyment derived from these performances is testament not only to the charm and talent of the performers but the knack Sturges had for writing excellent material even for those with very little screentime. It’s the epitome of the Stanislavskian principle “There are no small parts, only small actors.”
Sturges was about to have tremendous success with his next run of films but those who are tempted into his catalogue by the oft-lauded likes of The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels would do well to go back to the earlier directorial entries, Christmas in July and The Great McGinty. Better still, start with these ones as, for my money anyway, they are up there with his very best work.
2.THE GREAT MCGINTY
The story of how Preston Sturges manoeuvred his way into the director’s chair for The Great McGinty is more famous than the film itself. Reportedly, he sold the screenplay to Paramount Pictures for just $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it himself. The amusing boldness of this move was not lost on Paramount, who used the story in The Great McGinty’s marketing campaign, and the opening credit “Written and Directed by Preston Sturges” became a historic moment in screen history, opening the door for other screenwriters to step up to directorial duties in order to protect their own material. The Great McGinty also became the first film to win the newly created Best Original Screenplay Oscar, ensuring it was enshrined for its quality as well as its importance within the industry. In light of Sturges’ more famous subsequent work, The Great McGinty has somewhat faded from view these days and the comparative absence of the wild slapstick which quickly became a Sturges trademark seems to leave many viewers underwhelmed. For my part, I’ve always found The Great McGinty to be one of Sturges’ very best works and, while I appreciate the juxtaposition of physical comedy and verbal wit of his later films, I’ve always found myself favouring this more restrained version of Sturges. While he may have disdained the way in which directors like Mitchell Leisen interpreted his material (a sentiment shared by another writer-director, Billy Wilder), earlier screenplays like Easy Living and Remember the Night have a tighter level of control than the wilfully frenzied creations Sturges unleashed when given free rein. For that reason, I’ve always placed Sturges first couple of films as director, The Great McGinty and the equally underrated Christmas in July, among my very favourites.
As with earlier dramatic Sturges screenplays like The Power and the Glory and Diamond Jim, The Great McGinty examines themes of political ambition and corruption. Though it does so with a considerably more comedic bent, The Great McGinty does not skimp on drama itself. There are no happy endings for the sake of conventional genre expectations here. In fact, The Great McGinty’s ending would be deeply sad were it not carefully wrapped in cynical punchlines. This is not a film that does the expected. Sturges lets us in on that fact early on when, in a marvellous bait-and-switch, we learn that the film will not focus on the handsome family man brought down by a single moment of madness but rather the schlubby bartender from whom he receives morally ambiguous advice. That bartender is McGinty himself, working the bar in an unspecified banana republic after his political career imploded due to massive corruption. Played by a wonderfully brusque Brian Donlevy, McGinty is a brilliantly unappealing leading man, made palatable only by comparison with his even worse associates. When we first meet him in flashback he is destitute, drawn into a scheme in which the homeless are paid $2 to vote for a mayoral candidate under false names, something he proceeds to do thirty-seven times at different precincts. This brings him under the wing of a reprehensible politician known as The Boss (a splendidly oily Akim Tamiroff), whose successful grooming of McGinty as a political asset is contrasted with the two men’s tempestuous personal relationship which, in one of the film’s best running gags, repeatedly ends in chaotic scuffles.
Sturges’ cynicism in examining the deep-rooted sleaze of the political world is offset by a moral viewpoint which is proffered by the writing but never unconvincingly forced upon the characters. The growth that McGinty experiences courtesy of his secretary Catherine, whom he marries for the sake of appearances but falls in love with over the course of their sham cohabitation, is not enough to save him from his ultimate comeuppance. This goes against the more pious conventions of the era, which would usually serve up redemption as the denouement, even if the lead character had to heroically accept their imminent debt to society as part of that deal. The Great McGinty dangles the possibility of change but ultimately has McGinty flee conventional justice and end up in a self-imposed purgatory away from his beloved wife and adopted family, with only the promise of endless scrapping with The Boss to fill his days. It’s a brutally brilliant way to end the film, which works so well because Sturges spends as much time setting up the redemptive potential of domesticity as he does the corrupting potential of power. A key factor in this respect is the performance of Muriel Angelus as Catherine, a sympathetic though not oblivious figure who is left without a husband for the second time in her life despite, or perhaps because of, her laudable efforts to correct McGinty’s moral path. The sequences of Catherine and McGinty’s unusual courtship are moving, sold by Angelus’s smart, sympathetic performance which proves to be a perfect foil for the seemingly impenetrable exterior with which Donlevy imbues McGinty. This is key in achieving the masterful mixture of tragedy and farce on which Sturges ends his story.
Though The Great McGinty was only a moderate hit, Sturges clearly retained an affection for these characters, bringing back McGinty and The Boss for cameo appearances in his later film The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Though it has subsequently been overshadowed in the Sturges filmography by more popular films like Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty remains a film that is as superb as it was important, to both the career of Sturges and the development of the concept of the writer-director as an invaluable staple in intelligent Hollywood cinema. Not a bad deal for just $10.
1.SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS
When you get to know a fellow cinephile, it’s fairly easy to build up a general idea of their taste in films from the opinions they express and the favourites for which they advocate. After a while, you can say with some degree of confidence, “Oh, you would love this film” or “this probably wouldn’t be your kind of thing,” and find you’re frequently correct. But arguably even more exciting is when you find yourself getting it wrong, and your movie-loving friend throws you a complete curveball. The cinematic experience can be such an impulsive thing and reactions, even our own, sometimes surprise us. Certainly, I myself am a mess of contradictions, declaring myself not a fan of a particular genre before suddenly naming an entry in that genre as my film of the year, or roasting a film for the exact same failings that are rife in a closely-guarded personal favourite. Rather than allow these contradictions to cause needless doubts, I’ve learned to embrace them and the way in which they ensure film fandom remains an irresistibly unpredictable experience.
Sullivan’s Travels is my favourite Preston Sturges film. There’s nothing too surprising in that, given that I consider myself a Sturges fan and that Sullivan’s Travels is regularly listed among his greatest films. But when I discuss Sturges with other fans of classic Hollywood, my opening gambit is invariably a speech about how I prefer Sturges when he exercises a little restraint; the urbane screenwriter whose impeccable turns of phrase were like no other. Much is made of Sturges’ technique of combining razor wit with frantic slapstick to create a unique juxtaposition, but much of the time I find myself resistant to the pratfalls in favour of the acidic bon mots. Sullivan’s Travels is not a restrained film. It features some of Sturges’ worst slapstick sequences, a largely redundant narrative cul-de-sac about a man-hungry widow, a confounding and contradictory message, and a heavy dollop of sentimentality the like of which was refreshingly absent from Sturges earlier directorial efforts. By all accounts, Sullivan’s Travels ought to be one of my least favourite Sturges films… but somehow ingredients that should curdle instead create the most satisfying confection in the box. I’ve never seen pieces that obviously come from several different puzzles so convincingly assembled into something so beautiful.
Sullivan’s Travels turns Sturges’ satirical eye towards the hand that feeds him, Hollywood. But rather than take a gargantuan gobble at its digits, Sturges instead presents an argument in which the studio heads trying to railroad their artist, Joel McCrea’s filmmaker John L. Sullivan, into forsaking his dream project and creating something crassly commercial are eventually depicted as being right, even if their financial concerns are not the motivating factor in either Sturges’ or Sullivan’s conclusion. Instead, Sullivan’s Travels becomes an exposé on what we now call Poverty Porn, the insulting presentation of destitution by rich artists who know nothing about the subject first hand. A good chunk of Sullivan’s Travels focuses on Sullivan naively trying to rectify this by living as a tramp for an indefinite period. Of course, the fact that he can and does give up the charade at any moment ensures that Sullivan can never truly understand the plight of those for whom he is hoping to advocate.
And so Sullivan eventually realises there is value in the comedic trifles that have become his forte, abandoning his envisaged dramatic masterpiece in favour of delivering laughs to those who so badly need them. There’s the risk of inverse snobbery in this thesis but Sturges focuses on the positivity of comedic escape rather than decrying its alternatives. However, in arriving at this conclusion Sturges himself submits his own serious rumination on hardship. There is a lengthy, dialogue-free sequence known as the Poverty Montage in which Sullivan and his travelling companion, Veronica Lake’s nameless “girl”, sleep in homeless shelters, eat in soup kitchens and rifle through bins. It’s a beautifully conceived and directed moment, depicting real poverty offset by the crass intrusion of well-meaning but misguided tourists. When faced with another trash can dinner, Sullivan and the girl finally slam down the lid and take off into the night, leaving behind them that with which their recent companions are permanently saddled. Then, in the third act, Sullivan’s Travels turns very dark indeed, with a series of misunderstandings landing an amnesiac Sullivan on a brutal chain gang from which there is seemingly no escape. By the time he emerges and decides he still doesn’t have the experience to make his proposed humanist masterpiece, it’s hard not to think that Sturges may have hypocritically stumbled into his own equivalent.
Despite plenty of excellent comic lines in its early stages, Sullivan’s Travels is one of Sturges’ least funny films but that is partially because it reaches for so much more. In toying with Hollywood’s preferred response to the realities of poverty, Sullivan’s Travels is a film that tells us one thing and shows us another. It’s difficult to tell whether this was by clever ironic design or simply because the ambition of the project resulted in too tangled a set of contradictions to negotiate. Either way, the result is plenty of food for thought for viewers and, while their feasting on those questions, Sullivan’s Travels is simply a gorgeous thing to look at and listen to. There are tighter and funnier screenplays in the Sturges canon but nothing quite so rousingly unique or comfortingly sentimental. This is one cockeyed caravan that, in my book, doesn’t need righting.
