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.
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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
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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!
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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.