BETWEEN 1940 AND 1948, Preston Sturges had an unprecedented Hollywood run of (mostly) successes with ten films he wrote and directed. Only Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles had anything like this auteur status, although it took Chaplin over 40 years to make as many features, and Welles crashed and burned after only one.
Following his WWI service, Sturges worked for a few years at a New York store owned by his mother’s fourth husband. He was goaded into playwriting, so the story goes, while on an unsuccessful date with an actress. He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1928; the following year, his play “Strictly Dishonorable” made him a small fortune and drew enough attention to him that he soon was working in Hollywood as a rewrite man, then contributing original screenplays. He proved versatile enough throughout the 1930s to allow him to talk his way into his first directing job, and at the end of 1939 began shooting “The Great McGinty” from an original screenplay. And it wasn’t all talk that got him the job. He agreed to sell Paramount the script for $10 if he’d be allowed to direct.
What links the nine seemingly disparate films that followed? Hilarious, manic dialogue, shot in long takes and featuring a stock company of character actors are obvious characteristics, but Stuart Klawans’ Crooked, but Never Common (Columbia University Press, 2023) delves far more deeply and draws fascinating speculation and conclusions from the tangled stories (and equally tangled stories behind them) of those like-no-other movies.
His goal in this book “is to increase your pleasure in Sturges by following the trains of thought, ambiguities, and semicovert artistic impulses that emerge in his films on a second viewing, or a fifth.” And therein is an important hint. You need to watch these movies more than once. (You need to watch any excellent movie more than once.) A Sturges biography is easy to find: they exist as books, one of them by the filmmaker himself, and there are plenty of online essays. Analyzing the movies is a different matter.
The internet is clogged with film reviews, coming from the keyboards of idiots – some of them in supposedly respectable positions. Variety’s Clayton Davis boasted in his debut column three years ago that he’d never seen “Casablanca.” When, in a Hollywood Reporter profile, writer-director Taika Waititi noted the evanescence of fame by quipping that nobody remembers the name of the director of “Casablanca,” Davis responded defensively, writing, “Not seeing a movie that opened in 1942 devalues my ability to talk about movies and entertainment awards in 2023? Totally makes sense.” Which epitomizes the arrogance and ignorance of so many of these self-styled savants. They write from a mountaintop of stupidity. They need to read books like this Sturges study.
Let’s start with “The Lady Eve.” Released in 1941, it was Sturges’s third outing as writer-director. From the title and the movie’s amusing animated opening credits sequence, there’s a suggestion of Biblical origins. A maraca-wielding cartoon snake slithers down a tree alongside the names of the supporting players. But Barbara Stanwyck’s character is nothing like Eden’s Eve, which Klawans explains by “going beyond the text of Genesis,” to the story of Lilith. She appears in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, among other ancient texts, as Adam’s first wife, devilish and disobedient enough to be banished from the garden. And now Stanwyck’s devious Jean makes sense.
Klawans describes Sturges’s first three films as writer-director (of which “The Lady Eve” is the third) as “exercises in concealment. One (‘The Great McGinty’) covers up the stinging experiences of failure that lay at its root. Another (‘Christmas in July’) takes the vitality and generosity that Sturges likes to imagine in wealthy men and displaces them, none too convincingly, onto the democratic parade. The third, while gleefullyflaunting the ruses of card sharps and grifters, carefully disguises the depths of its art, while making a case for the blissfulness of the audience’s ignorance.
“The principal deception in Sturges’s fourth film, ‘Sullivan’s Travels,’ is the pretense of self-revelation.” It’s the only Sturges film about filmmaking, with Joel McCrea’s Sullivan a possible stand-in for Sturges himself. Sullivan, a successful director of Hollywood fluff, longs to make a “real” movie, something with a message (drawn from a book of social protest titled “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”). But Sullivan lives in a bubble of privilege, so he sets out to experience the “real” world.
“Sullivan’s Travels” opens at breakneck speed, signaling an effective tempo shift that will inform much of Sturges’s subsequent work. Sullivan is his studio’s golden goose, but he will defy the bosses and travel incognito, meeting-cute up a companion along the way: Veronica Lake, who never was better or more beautiful. “Today,” writes Klawans, “it’s an article of faith that artworks ought to be rooted in an artist’s experience ... But the demand for authenticity can also become prohibitive, reserving entire realms for those who by birth or heritage are said to have the exclusive right to explore them.” (Which now is a phenomenon that has achieved the status of a fetish, wrongheaded in the extreme.)
Even as the movie explores this solemn social theme, it offers (as Klawans details) slapstick comedy, small-town comedy, screwball comedy, romantic adventure on the road, and even documentary. It almost defies analysis, so completely will it shift in tone – and its finale is a completely unexpected shift into racial commentary otherwise ignored (or lampooned) by Hollywood.
There’s no single style or idea to form threads that unite Sturges’s output. Each film warrants the individual analysis that Klawans gives. Not even comedy unites this output, although his one serious film, “Triumph over Pain,” was recut by the studio into the lifeless “The Great Moment.” But Sturges reached an apotheosis or sorts in his seventh film “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” breathtakingly daring for its time and one of the funniest movies ever made. It had the advantage of being made in wartime, when sex could be smuggled past the censors when couched in patriotism. In this case, it’s the story of a young woman who gets pregnant without quite knowing who was the father and whether she in fact married him – too many soldiers were going off to war that night.
Klawans casts a psychological probe over the relationships among the four principals: the three Kockenlockers – Trudy (who is pregnant), her sassy younger sister Emmy, and widowed father Edmund, a town constable (played by Betty Hutton, Diana Lynn, and William Demarest) and Norval Jones, the 4F sad sack who has always adored Trudy (Eddie Bracken). Because a small town teems with gossip, and some of it concerns Trudy and Norval, her father wants to force an enagagement. But who’s marrying whom? There’s an undercurrent of sexual tension between the father and putative son-in-law, especially as Demarest makes a show of fondling his service revolver when discussing the issue.
“It’s always difficult to define an artist’s intensions,” writes Klawans, “...but there’s no need to determine whether Sturges at this point really meant to make use of Freud, given that this consummation scene takes place in the most dirty-minded comedy any studio filmmaker had yet attempted.”
Ten movies are examined, ten movies that, taken together, add up to the recognizeable style of this maverick writer-director, even if those films seem to be so different each to each. As noted, Sturges’s movies reward repeated viewings. Having Klawans’s erudite examinations by your side make those viewings even more enjoyable. This was a unique, never-to-be-repeated period in Hollywood history. What’s missing is a deluxe boxset of Sturges DVDs. Perhaps this book will help inspire its release.
Crooked, but Never Common
The Films of Preston Sturges
by Stuart Klawans
Columbia University Press
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