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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 07/27/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges, his father's last name was Biden but he took the name of his step-father, was born to a theatrical mother who carted him around with her as she explored the theaters of Europe as a performer. Educated in different boarding schools across the continent, he was as fluent in French as he was in English, calling France a second home. He never found a professional home as an adult until 1928 when he suddenly became Broadway's biggest playwright, joining the army's air service and working in a store that his mother's fourth husband owned.

The play that changed the direction of his life was Strictly Dishonorable, a comedy on Broadway. It premiered on September 18, 1929. The stock market crashed on October 24, 1929. The people were in a mood for comic antics, and Sturges was right there at the right time to give it to them. His star was made overnight, and Hollywood quickly came calling. By 1932, he was working in Hollywood for several studios, writing scripts for movies like William Wyler's The Good Fairy and Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living. He wanted to direct, though, and, in 1940, sold a script to Paramount, The Great McGinty, for $10 with the understanding that he would direct.

The Great McGinty was a large success, and Paramount had a new golden-boy: the best paid writer (and later, at one point, the best paid person) in America. He directed eight films over the span of years from 1940 to 1944 including The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, and Hail the Conquering Hero. I don't think any writer/director has ever burned so brightly for so short a time, for Sturges was in constant battle with studio bosses at Paramount, mostly Buddy DeSylva, until Sturges broke with Paramount and entered a business deal with Howard Huges to form California Pictures. His part of the company lasted one film, the Harold Lloyd legacy sequel to The Freshman, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. He was beginning the filming of another film for the company when Hughes fired him over the phone (never go into business with Howard Hughes). He got hired by 20th Century Fox, a situation that led to two box office, duds, and he was released from his contract.

He would spend the rest of his life trying to pull funds together for more films, only getting one production off the ground again, The French, They Are a Funny Race, made in France with French money and filmed in both English and French (it's kind of bad). Always having a problem controlling his intake of alcohol, he died of a heart attack in 1959 while writing his autobiography, less than four years after his last film and fifteen since his last unfiltered financial success (Hail the Conquering Hero).

And yet, despite the very concentrated timing of his directing career (for all intents and purposes, it was only five years from 1940 to 1944), his films are surprisingly well known for being eighty years old. That's hard for comedies which have notoriously short shelf-lives. Why is that? Why does Sturges stand the test of time?

Influence

When you spin up a documentary or interview about Sturges, you get a lot of platitudes about how Sturges was unique and couldn’t be replicated. I've heard that too many times about too many artistic figures to take it at face value, and watching Sturges' films, while I had a great time with them, I did not find them terribly unique. They felt like they existed in the space between Ernst Lubitsch and Frank Capra.

I came to this conclusion before watching Sullivan's Travels where both directors are name-dropped. Capra is entirely mentioned in the opening scene where Joel McCrea talks about how he wants to make serious films despite being known as a comic director while Lubitsch is brought up more than once as the director that Veronica Lake dreams of working for. The whole movie is pretty obviously a reaction to Capra's recent turn into making more serious-minded films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and, in particular, Meet John Doe which reached theaters eight days before Sullivan's Travels started production. He saw Capra betraying comedy by trying to be serious instead of telling stories of upwardly mobile Americans and a certain fantasy while real Americans suffered. As the butler character in Sullivan's Travels puts it regarding the portrayal of comedy on screen, "If you'll permit me to say so, sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous."

Where does this manifest in Sturges' films? Well, the connection started for me when I was going through Wyler's filmography and saw The Good Fairy. Despite Sturges' name, I saw the film as primarily a Lubitsch homage (Wyler, along with Billy Wilder, were huge Lubitsch fans and had a famous exchange when leaving the man's funeral). It had the battle of the sexes, the heavy use of masquerade with a character pretending to be someone else, and a heavy emphasis on class differences, all of which defined Lubitsch's work coming from a fan in Wyler. I walked into Sturges' filmography with that experience still fresh in my mind, and it didn't take long to see the influences.

Christmas in July, his second film is where the two main influences combine most clearly for the first time. On the one hand, you have obvious Capra-like elements of a young man, an everyman, finding a sudden windfall that brings him great wealth through his own good idea (he wins a contest for a coffee company's new motto), but there are heavy elements of the masquerade with the young man learning that he didn't actually win while also embracing certain class issues around the battle of the sexes (both guy and girl are poor, but the guy suddenly getting paid and huge promotions). It has the light touch of Lubitsch, the overall plot of Capra, but uses mechanisms that are a bit more Lubitsch than Capra.

Why bring this up? To tear Sturges down? Not at all. I just see precious little originality in the world of art and film, and I think pointing out influences, especially very successful application of influences like with Sturges, is important in trying to appreciate film as a medium while guiding people towards newer things to them that they might enjoy. Essentially, I'm saying that if you like Sturges films like The Lady Eve, check out some more Lubitsch films like The Smiling Lieutenant.

Writing and Directing


So, enough about his influences. What about him made him special? Having inspirations from other successful people doesn't make one special. Making the most of your inspirations and doing it well is what does that. And I think Sturges did that. His influences are obvious, but he was his own artist through and through nonetheless.

There are a few things he does that are relatively unique. The first thing that comes to mind is his use of hooks in dialogue where one line of dialogue will feed into the next. It's easy to see this in the early parts of The Lady Eve, in particular the string of dialogue from unnamed characters along the side of the ship that Henry Fonda is about to board. One line will end with a word, and the next line, spoken by the next person in the line but not talking to the previous person, takes it up as the topic for a quick line, ending with another word that gets picked up by the next. It moves quickly, but it's not hard to keep track because the structure within the dialogue allows for easy following. That's not just a writing thing, though, that's also a directing thing.

Sturges made movies in the early 40s, more than a decade after sound had been introduced. Sound remained fairly primitive for a while, waiting for stereo to be invented and limited to mono tracks recorded with primitive technology like early microphones, so there was a general best practice of using steady pacing in speaking with precious little, if any, overlap in dialogue. Sturges worked up against that, having people nearly talk over each other at high speeds, providing a nice clip to the movement of the scene, propelling the audience forward in the action as they try to keep up. It also helps that the lines are funny. This was happening when some others were trying the same thing, most notably Howard Hawks on His Girl Friday which came out the same year that Sturges started directing (1940).

The other interesting thing about his writing is this incredible adherence to the three-act structure that Sturges keeps to. Most of his films are right around ninety-minutes long, and you can set your watch to the transitions from one act to the next happening right at the 30 and 60 minute marks. This adherence to structure allows him to spend time with characters, establishing situations, and letting scenes play out with his fun dialogue for goodly amounts of time, allowing for this combination feeling of quick movement through the delivery of dialogue but without speeding through the actual story by keeping an eye towards his structural delivery.

Story


What his brand of quick line delivery and adherence to story structure allowed was actually pursuing character-based stories, and all of his films, no matter what else they're doing, follow that path. It's not just about delivery funny dialogue in quick style, but about doing that in service to a story with interesting characters. Well, except for The French are a Funny Race...that doesn't adhere to much.

Think of perhaps his best known film, The Lady Eve. We have the fast dialogue, mostly used to bring our two stars together, apart, and then back together again over the course of the film, but it's all done in the service of a love story. A love story between a low-class huckster played by Barbara Stanwyck and a high-class boob played by Henry Fonda. The first act is about them getting to know each other on a cruise ship. It's sweet, well written, and all about the characters, all while being very funny. The second act is Stanwyck's revenge against Fonda for dumping her once he found out she was a card shark, pretending to be the eponymous, English Lady Eve, wrapping him around her finger, and getting him to fall in love with her and marry her. The third act is them breaking apart and then finding a way to come back again. There's real story here. Every joke, whether funny lines from the main cast or bit players, is done in support of these two people going through this journey. There are no massive detours into different subplots for extended periods of time just because Sturges thought it would be funny. There's surprising focus here, and it's present in most of his work as well.

And I keep coming back to this whenever I think about comedic movies, but what gives them life after the initial laughs have worn off is whether they adhere to storytelling or not. Strings of funny things disconnected from something holding it up don't age as well over the decades. There will always be exceptions, but comedy supported by dramatic storytelling always feels stronger and more likely to last longer than comedy that's just disconnected jokes. Sure, we can point to The Marx Brothers or The Three Stooges because of funny routines (Duck Soup is one of my favorite movies, but I also latch onto story and satirical elements in there beyond just the zany antics), but most comedy of yesterday falls out and ages really badly. The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Great McGinty, Hail the Conquering Hero, and Christmas in July have all aged wonderfully.

You see, despite seeing influences from other filmmakers everywhere, despite not thinking of Sturges as a blazingly original talent with no equal, I still find so much to enjoy with his work because he was, you know, just really good at telling stories filled with laughs. He wrote well. He directed well. He burned very brightly for a very short amount of time, but he burned out.

His final two films are drudgery to get through, and he seemingly lost his mojo before his death. It's a sad end, something that probably could have been avoided, but it is what it is. At least we got his work from the early 1940s. They're treasures.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Deadpool & Wolverine

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Great McGinty (Rating 3/4) Full Review "However, it's still pretty solid. The acting is good. The camera tries to be sophisticated, but it's not exactly Wyler levels of composition and movement. It's pretty good, is what I'm saying." [Library]

Christmas in July (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a charming, winning film that does rely too much on miscommunication to be the source of its drama, but wins me over pretty well by the end." [Library]

The Lady Eve (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The Lady Eve may be something of a trifle, but it's a wonderful trifle." [The Criterion Channel]

Sullivan's Travels (Rating 4/4) Full Review "So, it really is a gem. It has fun comedy, a nice little romantic subplot, and even a message (about not having messages) that won me over by the end." [The Criterion Channel]

The Palm Beach Story (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Sturges had a winner on his hands, and it's all the more impressive because of how fast he was working in the first few years of the 1940s." [Library]

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Rating 3/4) Full Review "The final ten minutes or so are the highlight. The rest of the film has its moments, mostly from Bracken stealing every scene he's in (and he's in a lot of the movie), but the lack of any narrative focus robs the film overall of the kind of heightened comedy with dramatic underpinnings that marked his earlier efforts." [Library]

Hail the Conquering Hero (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a comedy with real laughs and real drama undergirding all of it. It's wonderfully performed, quickly paced, and a real treat to sit through. I think this might be my favorite Sturges film." [Library]

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Is this one of the great films from either men? Not really. Is it an entertaining trifle that builds well, elicits chuckles, and has some small thrills along the way? I think so." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 8/17, and it will talk about the films directed by John Landis.