In 1941, when Preston Sturges, the master of the screwball comedy, won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, he stumbled onstage and attempted a joke. Sturges, who won for “The Great McGinty”—a satire about a poor man, in an unnamed American city, who fails upward until he becomes governor—wasn’t fond of institutions and their puffed-up accolades, and his speech, which ridiculed the ceremony, was particularly on brand. “Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning an Oscar,” he said, “that he was unable to come here tonight, and asked me to accept in his stead.” The room went quiet, Sturges recalled, and he slunk back to his table. His gag had bombed.
Or had it? In truth, everyone in the room likely knew who Sturges was. By the time he made “The Great McGinty,” he was one of the highest-paid men in Hollywood, pulling in ludicrous sums for a single screenplay. His contract with Paramount insured that he could direct his own scripts, minting him as one of cinema’s first major auteurs. In 1940, he had released two films (“McGinty” and “Christmas in July”), shot another (“The Lady Eve”), and opened the Players Club, a rowdy, two-story restaurant and night club on Sunset Boulevard, where he held court among industry nabobs. If Sturges’s speech was coolly received, it was not, as he suggested, because “nobody knew what I looked like.” The more probable reason is that, in a room packed with vain celebrities, nobody found it even slightly amusing that a person, when offered a moment of glory, might pretend to be someone else.
But Sturges was a fan of false fronts. He believed that how someone presented himself—his actions, his appearance, whatever name he chose on a given day—was as revelatory as any “true self” within. He was not a director who sought to probe the depths of humanity. The exquisite irony of being alive, he thought, was that, despite our genuine desires, we still had to walk around in the meat suits of our bodies, trying to get by. There was an essential tension between who we believed we were and the person others saw, and this tension lent life its absurdity, its richness, and its potential for surprise.
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Take “The Lady Eve,” perhaps Sturges’s most beloved film, in which Henry Fonda plays Charles (Hopsie) Pike, a lanky heir to an ale fortune who dabbles as a snake expert. While travelling on a cruise ship, Hopsie falls for a con woman named Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck). After realizing that Jean has been deceiving him, he sulks off to his Connecticut manor, where he encounters Jean again, though this time she has disguised herself as Lady Eve Sidwich, a louche aristocrat. The zany setup involves several layers of self-deception: There is the idle rich boy who thinks he’s a bona-fide scientist (he is not) and the grifter who thinks she’s pulling off a brilliant ruse by slapping on some diamonds (she is not). Jean believes herself too pragmatic to fall in love, and Hopsie believes himself too clever to fall into a woman’s trap. (They’re both wrong.) Although Jean can’t see herself clearly, she has a hawklike ability to spot the delusions of others. She knows how to pick a vulnerable mark precisely because she shares Sturges’s eye for people putting on an act.
An early scene makes this especially vivid. In the ship’s dining room, Jean, who has not yet spoken to Hopsie, spies on him with a mirror from her evening bag. A carrousel of young women are trying to attract the bachelor, who sits alone, reading a tome titled “Are Snakes Necessary?” Stanwyck’s commentary on the spectacle—a spin on a technique that Sturges called “narratage,” in which a character delivers a monologue during a montage or a flashback—is wry and chatty, as though she were a mouthpiece for the audience. (You can draw a straight line from Jean Harrington to “Fleabag.”) As one glossy-haired débutante decides whether to make her approach, Jean digs in: “You see those nice store teeth, all beaming at you? Oh, she recognizes you! She’s up! She’s down! She can’t make up her mind! She’s up again! She recognizes you! She’s coming over to speak to you! The suspense is killing me!” The repetition, paired with a certain ditziness of tone, captures the silly, often disingenuous dance of flirtation, its choreographed guile. Of course, Jean is trying to seduce Hopsie, too; she’s both inside the scene and critiquing it, a heckler trapped onstage. Sturges passes no judgment on this fact. It’s enough, for him, that it’s funny.
Few genres are more desperately tied to the tracks of their times than comedy. It’s still enjoyable to see Abbott and Costello joust over a linguistic misunderstanding, but an act such as “Who’s on First?” was much funnier in 1938, when audiences knew that it was mocking the nicknames of popular baseball players. Humor tends to wilt through the decades; what was once a bite becomes a sloppy kiss. Not so with Sturges. In 1990, the Times critic Vincent Canby, writing about a New York showcase of the director’s work, argued that Sturges’s films not only balk at narrative convention but buck expectations so completely that each viewing feels like a radically different experience. “When, at last, a movie fails to change, one may be sure the movie is dead, ready for chilly embalming at the hands of academe,” Canby wrote. “This retrospective demonstrates that anyone who attempts to embalm Sturges does so at risk.”
Of course, the embalming had to come eventually. In “Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges” (Columbia), the veteran film critic Stuart Klawans performs the kinds of close, obsessive readings that one rarely encounters outside a graduate seminar. By analyzing Sturges’s every move, Klawans hopes to pin the director down—to “read” his films as if they were “reasoned arguments about subjects of real concern.” In the book’s opening pages, Klawans informs us that he will not be offering “yet another overview of Sturges’s life.” There are plenty of other books for that, including studious biographies by Diane Jacobs and by James Curtis, as well as Sturges’s unfinished memoir, which his fourth and final wife, Sandy Sturges, cobbled together for publication in 1990, thirty-one years after Sturges died.
Still, the broad strokes are worth noting. Preston Sturges was born in Chicago in 1898, to a travelling-salesman father and a mother named Mary Dempsey. Dempsey was a creative type, the sort of searcher who, in the Gilded Age, was known as an adventuress. When Sturges was a toddler, Dempsey tried to become a singer in France, but her career fizzled, her marriage ended, and she returned to the U.S. to wed Solomon Sturges, a buttoned-up financier who treated Preston as his own child. Dempsey refused to stop wandering, however. She went back to Europe, changed her name to Mary d’Esti, took an interest in witchcraft, and began palling around with the modern dancer Isadora Duncan. She went by many names and told many fabulous lies. She said that she had been fifteen when Sturges was born, that she had attended medical school, that she was descended from Italian royalty. Sturges later wrote, “My mother was in no sense a liar, nor even intentionally unacquainted with the truth. . . . She was, however, endowed with such a rich and powerful imagination that anything she had said three times, she believed fervently. Often, twice was enough.”
D’Esti schlepped Sturges around like a steamer trunk, but she regularly shipped him back to America, where he stayed with his stepfather for months at a time. As a result, Sturges’s childhood was marked by whiplash: between home and Europe, between a rigid capitalist ethic and a sybaritic salon culture. It is not difficult to see how this created a bemused sense of dissociation, along with a healthy skepticism of his parents’ best intentions. His mother wanted him to be sophisticated, but in practice this meant dragging him to the opera and alienating him from his peers. His stepfather wanted him to go into finance—Sturges worked for several New York stockbrokers as a teen—but he didn’t care for the field, and he joined the Army during the First World War.
A turning point came in 1927, when Sturges was in his late twenties. He was working for his mother’s perfume business in New York, and d’Esti and Duncan were travelling in Nice. Duncan decided to join a dashing French auto mechanic for a car ride, and she insisted on wearing a red silken scarf that d’Esti had given her. According to Sturges’s memoir, Duncan called out “Mes amis, je vais à la gloire”—“My friends, I am off to glory”—before the car peeled out. Her scarf, flapping in the breeze, became caught in the car’s front wheel, snapping her neck and killing her. The accident devastated Sturges’s mother—she died three years later, still distraught—but subtly imprinted on Sturges as a prime example of how an action meant to be glamorous could, instead, render a scene darkly absurd. That year, he began dating an actress who confessed that she had only pretended to find him charming, and that she was using him to test her ideas for a play. Sturges, as revenge, decided to write one himself. He finished it in just a few months; then he wrote another, “Strictly Dishonorable,” in less than a week. It ran on Broadway for a year.
By 1932, Sturges was living in Los Angeles and being paid exorbitant fees to write comic screenplays. But, when directors adapted his work, something was getting lost. They would play it too straight, or move too quickly through kooky side plots, though Sturges felt that much of a film’s energy could spring from a bit player with a handful of lines. In 1939, he sold “The Great McGinty” to a Paramount producer for ten dollars, with the stipulation that Sturges oversee the project himself. This marked the birth of the writer-director as a concept, and the start of one of the hottest streaks in film history. Sturges churned out seven pictures for Paramount in four years, including classics such as “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek,” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.”
Klawans, like many before him, notes the echoes of Sturges’s life in his work: the juxtaposition of bohemians and stern squares, the fluency in both American vernacular and European argot, the linking of slapstick and hypocrisy. But he also wants to make this reading “wobble a bit,” and he peers between every snappy line for cultural references, Biblical allegories, political sympathies, and philosophies about love and suffering. A Sturges film, Klawans believes, is more than just its witty banter: “One of the chief distractions from thinking your way through the films is their most universally admired trait: the dialogue.”
This is a compelling idea, but it misses what makes Sturges’s films so fascinating. His rat-a-tat scripts aren’t running cover for some hidden meaning; they are the meaning. His characters make sense because they slip the yoke of explanation. In “The Palm Beach Story” (1942), Sturges’s effervescent comedy of remarriage, Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) is the broke wife of a broke inventor named Tom (Joel McCrea). One day, a stranger touring her New York apartment—a bespectacled ground-meat magnate who calls himself the Wienie King—hands her enough money for rent, a new dress, and a drunken dinner. In most films, this would mark the ending: the couple is spared eviction and lives happily ever after. Sturges, though, is just getting started. The following sequence—in which Gerry wakes up the next morning, decides to leave Tom, and strikes out for Florida in search of a wealthier mate—so thoroughly skirts the usual conventions of plot (internal motivation, cause and effect) that viewers are left grasping. Why would Gerry leave her husband just when their prospects have brightened? Why does she think Florida, of all places, will solve her problems? Yet the result conjures the mysteries of real life, in which, as Tom notes, “the way you are is the way you have to be.”
That belief pervades one of Sturges’s final films, “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), starring Rex Harrison as Sir Alfred de Carter, a natty orchestra conductor who believes that his wife (Linda Darnell) is having an affair. While conducting a symphony in three movements, de Carter has three visions of catching his wife in the act, including one in which he uses a voice recorder to entrap her lover before stabbing his wife to death. In a raucous set piece, de Carter, trying to pull off one of the schemes, fails so outrageously that he destroys his apartment. He repeatedly trips over his phone cord, he can’t fit his hands into gloves, he can’t stop sneezing, he breaks a chair attempting to pull the recorder off a shelf. When he finally manages to retrieve the device, he finds the instructions impenetrable. (“So Simple It Operates Itself!” the directions claim.) Klawans aptly describes this scene as “a solid fifteen minutes of slapstick indignity”—it goes on for so long, and Harrison is so pathetic in it, that it becomes almost moving. In de Carter’s erudite, arrogant mind, he is a genius who can get away with murder. In reality, he is clumsy and useless. It is not our private yearnings but our public follies that finally define us.
Klawans makes a case for Sturges as a topnotch visual director, a quality obscured, he thinks, by Sturges’s facility on the page. The author spends many chapters poring over two-shots and camera angles, music cues and credit sequences, the “breakneck tempo” that became a “defining trait of his style.” The result honors the full, thrilling scope of Sturges’s craft, though one senses that any magic in the frame flowed from the magic of the scripts. “Directing was easy for me, because I was a writer-director,” Sturges wrote in his memoir. “It was probably harder for a regular director,” who “had to read the script the night before shooting started and do a little homework.” Sturges was being glib, of course; he knew that there was more to directing than memorizing the screenplay. But he did believe that the profession was becoming too precious, and he made an entire film lampooning the self-regard that he saw spreading among his peers.
“Sullivan’s Travels,” my favorite Sturges work, follows Joe Sullivan (Joel McCrea), the writer and director of light, hugely popular comedies such as “Hey Hey in the Hayloft” and “Ants in Your Plants of 1939.” Sullivan is famous, beloved, and very wealthy, but he also wants to be serious, and he decides that his next film will be a socially conscious drama about poverty called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (The fake movie was turned into a real one by Joel and Ethan Coen, Sturges superfans.) Sullivan’s butler tells him that this is a terrible idea—the poor don’t want to see films about their troubles, and the rich will buy tickets only out of guilt—but Sullivan pursues the project with brio. As research, he pretends to live as a pauper, and a studio bus follows him as he tramps across the country, carrying a bindle. He eventually lands in a work camp full of downtrodden men, whose only joy is watching Warner Bros. cartoons in a small church. With a shock, he realizes that he was wrong: comedy is cathartic in a way that drama can never be. As Sturges wrote, “I saw a couple of pictures put out by some of my fellow comedy-directors which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message. I wrote ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish; to leave the preaching to the preachers.”
If Klawans stumbles, it’s because, for all his trenchant analysis, he veers too often into deep-dish territory. There is a moral impulse to put Sturges in context, to show how the church scenes in “Sullivan’s Travels” relate to the religious fervor of the day, or to reveal how the work-camp scene comments on the Roosevelt Administration. These readings aren’t wrong, but they favor the message over the fun. In fact, upon rewatching Sturges, one realizes that most movies today do the same. Oscars are still awarded largely to solemn, neatly packaged studies of social issues; blockbusters, straining to cater to everyone, forgo invention, idiosyncrasy, and the tang of irony. Even Sturges felt the market contracting for sophisticated, elegant comedies: “Efforts to make all motion picture plays suitable to all ages from the cradle to the grave have so emasculated, Comstocked and bowdlerized this wonderful form of theatre that many adults have been driven away from it entirely.” We live in an age of slickness and hypocrisy, fake news and extreme wealth. Sturges would likely look around and see a lot of fodder for a good script.
Not that he lacked material. In 1944, Sturges launched a production studio with the volatile billionaire Howard Hughes. The venture imploded, and Sturges became a sort of beleaguered journeyman, releasing a few poorly received American films and one stinker of a farce in France. The I.R.S. put a lien on his assets—the Players Club hadn’t paid taxes in years—and Sturges sank deep into debt. In 1956, he moved into the Algonquin Hotel after agreeing to stage a play called “The Golden Fleecing,” but he was fired when one of the financiers, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, allegedly tried to helm the production himself. It was the kind of dénouement that Sturges would revel in: a once powerful Hollywood icon, by dint of his own actions, ends up jobless, on the other side of the country, and at the mercy of another director’s hubris. But Sturges didn’t take it too seriously. He scrounged up a book contract and began his final act of self-mythology, a memoir he never got to finish. The working title was “The Events Leading Up to My Death.” You have to laugh. ♦
