Faithfully ours

Celebrating the genius of Preston Sturges

by Steve Vineberg

"PRESTON STURGES CENTENNIAL," At the Brattle, Sundays through October 18.

You're certainly a funny girl to meet for anyone who's been up the Amazon for a year. -- The Lady Eve

When Hollywood embraced the talking film in the late '20s, verbal wit wasn't the first item the studios went searching for. The early talkies were stuffed with performers from Broadway, vaudeville, radio, even opera -- every medium that relied on voices; but it took a few years for Hollywood to get the idea that what came out of all those open mouths might make a difference. That concern prompted the second great influx of New York writers to the West Coast (the first had been at the height of silent movies), including just about any playwright with a hit in his or her pocket who could be prevailed upon -- and the temptations, financial and otherwise, were irresistible. Preston Sturges, whose comedy Strictly Dishonorable had opened triumphantly in New York in 1927, was among these cultural emigrants, and what he brought along was the most imaginative approach to language that American movies have known.

The eight-film centennial tribute to Sturges that opens at the Brattle this weekend celebrates his heyday (1940-'48), when he was America's premier comic filmmaker, but he spent a decade on the Paramount lot as a writer before he could persuade William LeBaron, chief of production, to let him debut as a director. (The movie was The Great McGinty -- which the Brattle will screen October 18; Sturges, one of the highest-paid writers on the Paramount books, appealed to LeBaron's greed, offering the script for a minimal fee if he might be allowed to direct it himself.) Among the films he worked on prior to McGinty are several that carry the Sturges verbal signature more or less intact -- The Good Fairy, Diamond Jim, Easy Living, If I Were King, and Remember the Night; but the styles of other directors (or, in some cases, their lack of style) blur the edge of the writing, even in the delirious screwball comedy Easy Living, the most Sturges-feeling of his '30s movies. Nobody talks quickly enough in these pictures, and Sturges wrote characters who are frantic talkers, amphetamine talkers. They chatter as if terrified that if their mouths stopped moving, they'd fall into paralysis. They babble like salesmen who know that exhaustion is the surest path to capitulation. And in fact most of them are selling something, whether it's a phony identity (Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, September 27), an invented war hero (William Demarest in Hail the Conquering Hero, October 18), a marriage of convenience (Betty Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, October 11), or a slogan for a brand of coffee (Dick Powell in Christmas in July, September 27).

That's the war. They take away your men and don't send them back. Or else they send them back unexpectedly to embarrass you. -- Hail the Conquering Hero

Sturges exploited the comic potential of language in every conceivable way. His characters have improbably vivid, hothouse-blooming names: Woodrow Truesmith, Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith, John D. Hackensacker III, Harold Diddlebock, Daphne De Carter, Trudy Kockenlocker (lewdly perfect for the pregnant heroine desperate for a husband in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek -- this joke slid right by the dull-brained Hays Code office). They have a tendency to pun: "Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel!" gushes an admirer to the famous conductor Rex Harrison plays in Unfaithfully Yours (October 11), and his literal-minded twit of a brother-in-law confesses, "With me music goes in one ear and out the other." Sometimes the puns are so oddly mixed that they throw you off balance, like Groucho Marx routines -- the phrase Dick Powell's Jimmy MacDonald dreams up to win the coffee-slogan contest in Christmas in July is, "If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee -- it's the bunk."

Whether the tone is berating ("You not only make the same mistakes year after year, you don't even change your apologies") or menacing ("He was made for it," says Trudy's scheming kid sister Emmy about Trudy's marital target, "as the ox was made to be eaten"), the lines never take you down the path you anticipate they will when you start out. A character who remarks disdainfully, "You'd sell your grandmother for a hundred dollars," is met with the cool reply, "That's an entirely different matter. She's almost 80 and not at all well preserved." It's hilarious when his characters misspeak, or even when they mishear, as in this exchange between the hero and heroine of The Lady Eve. Charlie: "Most men are more careful in choosing a tailor than in choosing a wife." Eve: "That's why they look so funny." Charlie: "No, dear. They're more careful in choosing a tailor than in choosing a wife."

Sturges's scripts demanded high-style comic actors with very distinctive personalities and equally distinctive vocal styles. He relied on an endearing stock company of idiosyncratic supporting actors -- among them Raymond Walburn, whose specialty was dyspeptic blowhards, the wised-up lug William Demarest, the Yiddish-dialect comedian Torben Meyer, and the twin princes of priss, Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore -- to create an environment of workaday lunacy. They provided the living backdrop for his principal actors, most of whom were proven masters at talking the talk: Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, Claudette Colbert and Mary Astor in The Palm Beach Story (October 4), Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours, and his favorite leading man, Joel McCrea, who stood in for him as the movie-director hero of Sullivan's Travels (October 4) as well as squiring and sparring with Colbert in The Palm Beach Story.

Flatter you! Compared to the truth, I'm insulting you! -- Unfaithfully Yours

These were brilliantly accomplished line readers, among the best in the business. Sturges seized on the sputtering fireball talents of the musical-comedy star Betty Hutton, positioning her opposite Eddie Bracken -- a more radically brain-fried version of Danny Kaye -- in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. (Bracken also carries the comic weight of Hail the Conquering Hero.) He resurrected the lost career of the warbling troubadour Rudy Vallee -- a casualty of the early talkie musicals -- by casting him as a flat-footed, monocled, bats-in-the-belfry second banana in The Palm Beach Story, and he called on him again for Unfaithfully Yours. It makes sense that Sturges, whose ear was unparalleled, would have a fondness for musical performers -- Christmas in July was one of Dick Powell's few non-musicals until he began a second career in tough-talking PI and G-man roles a few years later. But no one else would have thought of using them in the ways he did.

Sturges's best movies are heavenly talkfests (and the Brattle series offers almost all of them). But he had other kinds of writing gifts too. He was a brilliant satirist: the Hollywood scenes that open Sullivan's Travels are the sharpest in the movie (which falls, uncharacteristically, into a sentimental trap). And the small towns in Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek are savage inside-out versions of the ones Frank Capra loved to imbue with so much fraudulent virtue. (The venal conduct of the grasping politician played by Raymond Walburn in Conquering Hero is matched only by the machinations of Diana Lynn's steely-eyed Emmy Kockenlocker in Morgan's Creek.) It's hard to believe Sturges got away with his take on patriotism in Conquering Hero, which came out toward the end of the war; he almost didn't get away with his treatment of social and sexual mores in Morgan's Creek, which ran into censorship problems and took two years to get released.

He was at his ease at the other end of the emotional spectrum too. Only a handful of classic romantic comedies equal The Lady Eve, which has some of Sturges's funniest set pieces as well as the most affecting scenes he ever wrote. This picture's wonderfully constructed plot shows off his often astonishing narrative deftness. The heroine sets out to scam the millionaire hero, then falls for him and decides to become the true-blue woman he thinks she is. When he finds out what she used to be -- a cardsharp and con artist -- he assumes that she's been faking her affection for him and dumps her. So she directs her energies toward teaching him a lesson by scamming him for real. (If you think that's convoluted, try The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.) My favorite moment in The Lady Eve is the one where Fonda's Charlie Pike thrusts the photo of Stanwyck's Eve Harrington that reveals her shady past in her face, and, realizing she's lost him, she comments, "Rotten likeness, isn't it? I always hated that picture." The delicately shaded line and Stanwyck's wounded reading of it deserve each other.

When the movies finally found verbal wit, the discovery came at the expense of physical humor, which had reached its zenith in the silent days -- an observation James Agee made woefully in his famous 1949 essay "Comedy's Greatest Era." But Agee short-changed Sturges in this regard. When he began to make his own movies, Sturges proved that he was adept at farce as well as dialogue; he even coaxed the great silent comic Harold Lloyd out of retirement to star in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (the one conspicuous omission in the Brattle series).

Unfaithfully Yours is the darkest and perhaps the most remarkable of all of Sturges's movies -- Rex Harrison's Sir Alfred de Carter fantasizes three kinds of revenge on the wife (Linda Darnell) he presumes unfaithful, each scored to a different piece of music he conducts. The film culminates in a sequence, devoid of dialogue (though not of sound), of such escalating hilarity that it's most emphatically not recommended viewing on a full stomach. Sir Alfred goes home after the concert and tries to realize his fantasies, only to be barricaded at every turn by his own ineptitude and the ridiculousness of his scenario. I remember a stunning scene in Bob Fosse's 1978 Broadway revue Dancin' where a dancer had to perform an entire number with his shoes nailed to the stage floor, and the climax of Unfaithfully Yours is a comparable coup. No American filmmaker, in my estimation, has accomplished more with language than Preston Sturges; in Unfaithfully Yours he shows that he could do something of genius even if he nailed his main character's mouth shut.