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Hail Preston Sturges
Celebrating the Genius of Writer-Director Preston Sturges
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"Directing was easy for me," Preston Sturges noted in his autobiography, Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, "because I was a writer-director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started and do a little homework."The first Hollywood writer to graduate from typewriter to director's chair was born Edmund Preston Biden on August 29, 1898 in Chicago. Celebrations last year for the 100th birthday of the creator of some of the smartest comedies ever to come out of Hollywood included retrospectives, the reprinting of his autobiography, the publication of Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges and the release of the films written or co-written by Sturges by Universal Home Video. Not bad birthday presents, considering the American Film Institute didn't see fit to include any of Sturges's work on its much-publicized list of "100 Best U.S. Films."
Compared to his writer-director contemporaries, like Billy Wilder, John Huston and Joseph Mankiewicz, Sturges had a relatively short career. But in an incredible creative burst between 1940 and 1943, Sturges made the seven films which constitute his legacy: The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. Between 1944 and his death 15 years later, he only made three films and never regained his momentum in Hollywood. Of his work in film, he wrote, "The only amazing thing about my career in Hollywood is that I ever had one at all."
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| With Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941). |
At various times in his career, Sturges was a Broadway playwright, the inventor of "kiss-proof" lipstick, a restaurant proprietor and the owner of the Sturges Engineering Company, but he enjoyed transitory success in his endeavors. His eccentric, flee-spirited mother had dragged young Preston around Europe, following the trail of her idol, Isadore Duncan. Freedom (in dress, lifestyle and economy) and living for the moment were the fruits of this education, not common sense and a respect for authority. If his upbringing failed to give Sturges the head for business that would make him a successful entrepreneur, it did provide an invaluable background for making him a remarkable filmmaker.
A Preston Sturges film moves. Sturges himself said that one of the reasons he wanted to start directing was that when others directed his screenplays they did a too slowly. Sturges wrote situation-based, rather than character-based stories-hard to believe when the principals have names like Trudy Kockenlocker, Woodrow Lafayette, Pershing Truesmith, and Harold Diddlebock-which combined a brilliant, idiosyncratic mixture of social satire with manic physical comedy. James Agee noted that The Miracle of Morgan's Creek had "enough mental, creative and merely brillant energy for a hundred average pictures." These are not, however, screwball comedies. Sturges was far more interested in satirizing the mores of middle class America than the wacky peccadilloes of the rich. In Hail the Conquering Hero, he manages to ridicule hero worship, patriarch; patriotism, politics, war rationing, mother love and the girl back home at the height of World War II without seeming mean-spirited.
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| Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea in The Palm Beach Story (1942). |
If feminists have impugned the Golden Age of Hollywood for offering few strong roles for women, then they haven't seen a Preston Sturges film. Sturges women are smart, strong, independent and well aware of their effect on the opposite sex. "You don't know very much about girls, Hopsie," Barbara Stanwyck cautions Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, "the best ones aren't as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren't as bad."Women like jean Arthur in Easy Living (written by Sturges), Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels take matters into their own hands when faced with adversity. Even Betty Hutton, knocked up by a soldier whom she might have married and whose name she can't remember in The Miracle of Morgan 's Creek, has a shrewd kid sister (the terrific Diana Lynn) to help her out of trouble.
Whether on his film sets or at his restaurant, The Players, Sturges enjoyed a loyalty among those who worked for him. He maintained a corps of supporting actors who appear throughout his films, many of whom were former silent screen actors, like Chester Conklin, or vaudeville veterans, like Jimmy Conlin and William Demarest. Some, like the notoriously close-fisted Rudy Vallee, later helped Sturges out financially with the continually cash-strapped Players. Eddie Bracken, a favorite leading man, was his best man at his wedding to his fourth wife, Sandy. Sturges was less likely to endear himself to his producers, however, and his incredible run at Paramount ended in December, 1943 when he and the studio couldn't agree on contract renewal terms (The Miracle of Morgan 's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero had not yet been released). Although his films had made money for the studio and he had a relatively free reign in shooting his pictures, the growing mutual animosity between Sturges and producer Buddy De Sylva (a successfial former songwriter) exacerbated the break-up.
During his lifetime Sturges
made and lost several fortunes, was continually behind in his
taxes, married four times and alienated much of the Hollywood
hierarchy. He loved eating, drinking, curious hats, entertaining,
writing, sailing, traveling, talking and being in love. By the
end, he was shuttling between Paris and New York, scrambling
to make a living by writing for television and theater. He died
of a heart attack on August 6,1959 in NewYork at the Algonquin
Hotel two weeks before his 61st birthday. Shortly before his
death he wrote, "I know that my life, even in these disagreeably
trying times, is complete, although I don't know exactly why" Because
he lived it, that's why. MM
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This story was published in the April/May 1999 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Hail the Conquering Hero / Celebrating the Genius of Writer-Director Preston Sturges
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