One of Hollywood’s genuinely legendary directors, Preston Sturges redefined the boundaries and meaning of screen comedy as a filmmaker during part of the early ‘40s. The full range of his influence on movies, however, extended far beyond the director’s chair or the success of the pictures that he helmed. Sturges first made his mark in Hollywood as a screenwriter through a series of acclaimed (and still-admired) scripts across the 1930s whose qualities still resonate seven decades later.
The son of a socially prominent couple, he was born Edmund Preston Biden in Chicago in 1898. He had a cosmopolitan upbringing throughout Europe and America, and served in the Air Corps during World War I. He worked for a time in his mother’s cosmetics company before moving into other fields, including inventing. Sturges began writing plays in the late ’20s, creating one major hit, Strictly Dishonorable, which was subsequently filmed twice, the first time in 1931 by John M. Stahl (in a form surprisingly close to the source, in terms of sexually charged repartee) at Universal, and in 1950, as a musical, by Melvin Frank at MGM.
Sturges then got some experience writing screen dialogue and became a scriptwriter in 1933. His early notable work in this field included the screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933), starring Spencer Tracy and directed by William K. Howard, which is frequently cited as the structural antecedent to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Another, Thirty-Day Princess (1934), was a comedic romantic reversal of The Prisoner of Zenda, set in Depression-era America, which also wove some fascinating topical social commentary into its story. Sturges’ eye for social observation, as a writer and then as a director, would manifest itself ever more strongly as his career approached its peak in the first half of the 1940s; but his commentary and “messages” were presented so briskly and smoothly that audiences frequently absorbed them without feeling as though they were being lectured or imposed upon, which only enhanced their effectiveness.
By the middle of the 1930s, he had developed a reputation for his witty, sophisticated, but unpretentious writing, most notably in The Good Fairy (1935), directed by William Wyler at Universal and Easy Living (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen at Paramount. His stories freely mixed witty repartee and piercing social observations with finely etched characters and briskly unfolding narratives; the dialogue in his comedies, in particular, was also surprisingly up front in its sexual subtexts, even amid the stricter enforcement of the Production Code from 1934 onward. He also authored some screenplays, less well remembered today, that were distinctly more of a dramatic bent, especially on historical subjects. We Live Again (1934) was a romance between a nobleman and a peasant, set in Imperial Russia, while Diamond Jim (1935) dealt (in highly fictionalized, but effective terms) with a celebrated and colorful millionaire out of America’s not-too-distant past. His comedies have endured the longest in the memory, although Sturges was one of the writers who most easily crossed between (and bent) the various genres; in his own movies, the mixture of comedy, drama, and pathos would be one of the hallmarks of his most ambitious scripts. In that regard, a serious contender for his most finely written script is Remember the Night (1940), a comedy-drama directed by Leisen and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. The latter movie melded elements of light comedy, topical humor, and serious drama, all hooked around an improbable but ultimately highly credible romance, and carried its audience from an urban setting to small-town America (in its best and worst incarnations). The picture was a marvel of brilliant script construction and character study, all finely realized by director Leisen and a first-rate cast. But Remember the Night also marked the virtual end of Sturges’ stay in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
During the second half of the 1930s, Sturges absorbed all that he deemed necessary to know about filmmaking, short of actually making a movie. The most successful of his scripts had been directed by Wyler and Leisen, two of Hollywood’s most reliable hit-makers and formidable talents in their own right. But by 1939, Sturges felt that he could do the best job of bringing his scripts to the screen. He was already as busy as anyone in Hollywood, and the studios were notoriously reticent about letting people move out of their respective niches into new fields. Such mobility seemed to be tampering with established success and made department heads and moguls alike nervous, lest they break up winning formulas and lose control of valuable personnel. But in exchange for selling them his latest script at a cut-rate, he was able to persuade Paramount management to give him the director’s chair with The Great McGinty (1940). And the result was a hit that turned Sturges into the wunderkind of the filmmaking community, as well as transforming its leading man, Brian Donlevy (previously confined to villain roles) into a star. Even more remarkable was the fact that The Great McGinty was a political satire, a sub-genre that Hollywood had always regarded as extremely risky at the box office. Instead, the public took to it in droves, and its appeal — spurred by Sturges’ breakneck pacing of the dialogue and action — cut across cultural lines, to rural and urban filmgoers alike. The durability of that debut would be proved four years later in a subsequent Sturges written-and-directed movie, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, when he included small but key roles for Donlevy and co-star Akim Tamiroff as the same characters they played in McGinty, and audiences were not confused but delighted.
He succeeded a second time with Christmas in July (1940), a somewhat more modestly produced offbeat satire (based on his own play, A Cup of Coffee) of radio, advertising, and Depression-era industry. The latter movie was also laced — amid its rapid-fire humor — with elements of poignancy and sympathy for the working poor that seemed honest and heartfelt rather than cloying. After that second success, there was no stopping Sturges for the next four years. What followed was the string of masterpieces upon which his reputation came to rest: 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), all of which were solid commercial and critical successes, and seem even more extraordinary today considering their subject matter. Starting with The Lady Eve (1941), Sturges had proved an expert at sneaking dialogue filled with piercing and obvious sexual innuendo past the Production Code Office. How he did is anyone’s guess. B-picture writers and producers of the period, such as Val Lewton, succeeded in this task because they were making lower budgeted, seemingly bottom-of-the-bill fare, but Sturges’ movies were all high-profile A-pictures, which the Production Code Office usually paid close attention to; yet there is amoral confidence artist Barbara Stanwyck visibly seducing innocent “mark” Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, with dialogue that is unmistakable in its reference to sexual arousal. And The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is even more amazing, as it seems to parody middle-class sensibilities about marriage, as well as trading on the key plot element of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in which the woman is not punished in any lasting way. He also made Sullivan’s Travels (1941) — another picture that, like everything else he made between 1941 and 1944, is regarded as a contender for his best movie — and got it passed the studio management despite its being a savage and piercing satire of Hollywood, and one that, viewed today, cut dangerously close to insulting such serious, high-profile, big-budget Paramount productions of the period as For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Along with him for this extraordinary ride — and, in fact, a key element behind the success of these pictures — was the renowned Sturges stock company, made up of players he had seen at work during his time as a writer: William Demarest, Raymond Walburn, Alan Bridge, Harry Rosenthal, Harry Hayden, Elizabeth Patterson, sther Howard, Dewey Robinson, Franklin Pangborn, Julius Tannen, Jimmy Conlin, Edgar Kennedy, Frank Moran, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig, Robert Warwick, and Victor Potel were among the most familiar of them. Other directors and performers, from John Ford to Abbott & Costello, had stock companies, formal or informal, assembled around them, but Sturges seemed to get more than most of them from his players in terms of comedy and drama, in shorter, more precisely etched on-screen moments, and for many of these players, their work for Sturges constituted the highlights of long and varied careers. Their presence gave his movies an unusual unity, despite wildly varying subject matter and settings.
At his best — and he was at or near his best almost without exception from 1939 until 1948 — Sturges handled the making of movies in the manner of a prodigiously talented composer/conductor, authoring his scripts in very precise terms and, utilizing a stock company of players he could depend on, getting the finely nuanced performances out of his cast to bring those lines to life exactly the way he heard and wanted them. Watching most of the movies that he made across those eight years is, indeed, like watching a conductor push and lead and coax an orchestra (or an opera company) in a note-perfect performance. In fact, in Unfaithfully Yours he almost seems to be revealing a key aspect of his art in the work of the Rex Harrison character, a meticulously precise and demanding conductor (based, in fact, on Thomas Beecham) who consistently gets his orchestras to rise above their ordinary standard of playing.
In the process, he also pushed a lot of buttons — some of them very personal, for audiences — with his films. He got the movie business to laugh at itself without resenting his efforts and Americans to laugh at their own sentimentality and cultural sacred cows, exploding and debunking some of the more dubious assumptions Americans had about themselves without ever making audiences feel threatened or insulted. Although The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was regarded as his most daring achievement in terms of getting a subject past the censors, Hail the Conquering Hero may have been the more astonishing achievement as a successful release. Issued in the midst of the Second World War, at a time when patriotism and heroism were regarded at a premium in public and private life, or so we were told, it called the conventional notions and accepted wisdom of either into question, along with people’s willingness to accept them at face value, exposed serious fault lines in all of these matters as they were understood in middle America, and yet left audiences feeling good. It was, of course, all in the writing as well as the directing, not just merging but fusing the roles of each. And Sturges was so successful in combining those roles that many screenwriters began to move into directing. Others had gone that route before, from writing to directing, but not so directly or prominently, and with such startling results or yielding seemingly overnight directorial stardom. Without Sturges’ success to blaze the trail, it’s doubtful whether John Huston or Billy Wilder, to name just two notable writers-turned-filmmakers, would have moved up to directing movies in the early ’40s.
Sturges’ own career faltered, however, after a dispute with studio management and the failure of an ill-advised “serious” historical drama, The Great Moment (1944). He left Paramount in 1944 and tried to restart his career in collaboration with screen legend Harold Lloyd in Mad Wednesday (aka, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock) (1947). After that failure, Sturges moved over to 20th Century Fox and made the successful, sophisticated black comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which, again, pushed the envelope of audience sensibilities, this time about comedy, as well as satirizing some elements of film noir that were then in fashion. Additionally, the movie parallelled some of the experiments being done on the other side of the Atlantic by the writer-producer-director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (two other filmmakers who had fused the roles of screenwriter and director into one) using music as a determining structural element in key sections of the action. But his moment had passed, and he faded out of Hollywood after making The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949), a Western satire that was a shadow of his former work. A difficult partnership with Howard Hughes ended disastrously, and Sturges retreated to Europe, where he directed one more movie, The French, They Are a Funny Race, four years before his death in 1959.
A superb writer and dazzling stylist in his prime, Sturges’ reputation loomed ever-larger as the decades passed, as his movies — and even those that he’d merely written, such as Easy Living — retained their old audiences and found new admirers through extensive television showings. His Paramount films still easily sold out in theatrical revival showings into the 1990s, long after they’d been made available on home video. His dedicated following is even more remarkable when one considers that it rests on a handful of feature films, all made within a five-year period. —allmovie
