“If I don’t run out of ideas —and I won’t— we’ll have some fun. There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and God willing, I will make some of them.”
So said writer-director (and early pioneer of that hyphenate) Preston Sturges, a few years prior to making perhaps his most wonderful picture “Sullivan’s Travels” —recently released on Criterion Blu-ray— and following the success of his first venture behind the camera for his own screenplay of “The Great McGinty.” That film, for which Sturges essentially waived his writer’s fee in order to direct, won him the first ever Screenwriting Academy Award. But of course it did: by the time of his directorial debut, Sturges was already one of the best-known and best-paid screenwriters in Hollywood during a period when screenwriters were mostly anonymous, underpaid drones working thanklessly in shared stuffy offices on studio backlots. Somehow transcending that lowly status to a $2500 a week salary and name-brand recognition seemed to come easily for Sturges, if not quickly.
Brought to Tinseltown following the extraordinary success of his second play “Strictly Dishonorable” and through a combination of inspiration and what must have been extraordinary salesmanship of his own talents, Sturges changed the Hollywood landscape with respect to the role of the writer. Working solo, and pioneering along with peers like Billy Wilder the very idea that a screenwriter might be able to direct, Sturges also set unprecedented price records for his completed scripts (his first such screenplay “The Power and the Glory” which went on to star Spencer Tracy and was an avowed influence on “Citizen Kane” netted him the unheard-of deal of $17,500 and a percentage of the profits). So there are ways in which an overview of Sturges’ career can seem as smooth and glib as that initial quote of his: there would be some wonderful pictures to be made, and he would make some of them.
Yet there’s another way in which that curious quote (characteristically egoist and humble at the same time) feels quite misleading. Contrary to the idea that these wonderful films were floating around in the ether and waiting to get themselves made, if not by this guy, then the next or the one after, Sturges’ movies could not have been made by anyone else. Although he was working during what we retrospectively now call the Golden Age of Classic Hollywood Cinema and had come from the three-act structure of stage plays, Sturges’ films are structurally hinky, narratively wonky, tonally bonkers. Stacked up against the tight-drum narratives of his contemporaries’ best films, the almost liquid, seamless storytelling that defines the age , Preston Sturges films are weird.
People fall off balconies at the oddest moments. Men don’t seem to notice that the woman they’re in love with now is very clearly exactly the same woman they just dumped. A lovers’ stroll takes in the unremarked-upon vista of a hanged body dangling from a tree in the background. A romantic contretemps is resolved when all the disputed parties are discovered to have identical twins in the last two minutes of the film. In any other hands, these contrivances would suggest bad, incoherent storytelling, but Sturges makes it feel as if he’s smashing together different, often contradictory and illogical elements at high speed, and releasing their own careening, breathless energy: the storytelling equivalent of nuclear fusion.
In his relatively short directorial career, he only made 13 features, 8 of which we consider essential (and many of which lucky New Yorkers can still catch at Film Forum‘s “Strictly Sturges” series this week) which gives Preston Sturges one of the highest hit rates we can think of. Hold on to your hats —it’s going to be a bumpy, brilliant, weird, wonderful ride.
“The Great McGinty” (1940)
By 1939, though he was well-established, well-paid and well-respected as an Oscar-winning screenwriter, Sturges had become irritated by directors not executing his screenplays as he felt they should be done, and reportedly took a $10 fee for “The Great McGinty” screenplay in exchange for the chance to direct it himself (this was reported as $1 in the supporting press for the film’s release). In many ways, it is typical of the films that Sturges would be most famous for —the satirical element is front and center; issues like poverty, class struggle and single motherhood are present; many of his recurring “troupe” of character actors including William Demarest, Esther Howard, George Anderson appear; there’s a certain cynical undercurrent, an upending of conventional Hayes-Code moralism whereby it’s doing the right thing that makes the hero lose; and Sturges employs non-linear structuring to tell the story, which unfolds largely in flashback. But in other ways, the shaggy dog tale of McGinty, the tough-guy tramp-turned-crooked-politician who is made over by love but falls from grace when he tries to do the decent thing, feels less idiosyncratic than his later films: there’s more satire than silliness here, and also less affection for his characters, so that you can read it as a straight drama, a slightly arch cautionary tale about the dangers of politics intermixing with gangsterism. Here the dialogue crackles with hard-edged nastiness rather than fizzing with champagne-buzz wit, and while Brian Donleavy does a great job in the role of McGinty, he is one of Sturges’ trademark leading men-of-no-conviction, buffeted by the winds of fate rather than their master, and thus a tough character to warm to. Yet it’s a remarkably solid debut and did decent business on release, but impressed critics even more: Bosley Crowther in The New York Times employed a now marvelously archaic simile saying the film “…blew into the Paramount yesterday with all the spontaneous combustion and pyrotechnic display of an old-time Tammany parade through the streets of the lower East Side.”
