Preston Sturges: Subversive Screwball
From December 24 to January 1, Film Forum will be hosting Essential Sturges, a series comprised of 10 of the director’s best-loved films, including several early films, rarely screened, which he scripted for other directors. In addition to this overview of the director’s career, Blank Screen NYC will provide daily updates as the series progresses. The full schedule is available on Film Forum’s website HERE.
From 1940 to 1944, writer/director Preston Sturges unleashed an unheralded torrent of cinematic anarchy. While his career began in the 1930s as a screenwriter, and he continued directing into the early 1950s, it is this five-year period that proved to be the most fertile in his career. The back-to-back releasing of Christmas in July (1940), The Great McGinty (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) is among the most impressive runs in film history. He took the screwball comedy from its inventors Hawks, Capra, La Cava, and Wellman, and made it completely his own. While 1930s screwball was characterized by machine gun dialogue, Sturges used words like music, composing sharp, elegantly eccentric dialogue, and then allowing listeners to revel in slightly cryptic phrases like, “I positively swill in his ale!” (That phrase, in fact, was so good that it was used in two different movies!)
Sturges somehow channeled the pandemonium of the Marx Brothers into a sedate, middle class milieu, and unearthed an encyclopedia of white-collar hypocrisy, idiosyncrasy, and hilarity. Small towns and big cities, ocean liners and offices—none of them are safe from Sturges’ apocalypse. Only those that jettison their safe, conveniently ways and embrace the chaos are able to come out on top. Invariably, a Sturges film starts with an idealist—be it the earnest herpetologist (Henry Fonda) of The Lady Eve, the office worker who dreams of writing advertising slogans (Dick Powell) in Christmas in July, or the comedy director (Joel McCrea) who longs to make a “serious” movie (whatever that may be) in Sullivan’s Travels. These All-American good-boys face hardship with an almost nationalistic sense of pride (which is only the tip of Struges’ subversive humor), and however fantastic or unrealistic their goals may be, they are allowed to follow them wholeheartedly, regardless of the mayhem that may ensue. In short, Sturges lets dreams come true—even if they result in nightmares.
Talk about a screwball world, the real heroes of these films are not the delusional idealists, but their opponents: liars, thieves, card sharks, con-artists, opportunists, racketeers—not to mention bums, alcoholics, and anyone else with a chronic, insuppressible eccentricity. Who can resist gambler Barbara Stanwyck’s hardboiled allure in The Lady Eve? Try as he might, even Fonda must eventually capitulate.
Often it takes a deus ex machina to bring temporary resolution to the most cockeyed circumstances—such as The Palm Beach Story’s unemployed lovebirds-turned-gold diggers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) who find everything they want in a pair of rich, Florida siblings except each other, or the overly patriotic small town girl (Betty Grable) of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek who says “farewell” to a mysterious soldier named “Ratskywatsky” (she thinks that’s his name) and wakes up pregnant. Such happiness, however, can only be short-lived. And perhaps that is what lies behind Sturges’ subversive smile—the knowledge that as soon as the movie ends and the lights go up, the fantasy is over. All of us—those in the movie and those in the audience—must eventually return to reality, whether we like it or not. Thankfully, we still have Sturges’ movies, which allow us to escape whenever we want.
