“Christmas in July” (1940)
If “The Great McGinty” had established a trademark character in the Sturges canon —the down-on-his-luck Everyman who rises through the ranks due more to circumstance and coincidence than his own talent— he returned to it straight away for this slip of a film. Just 67 minutes long and based on an unproduced play of Sturges’ called “A Cup of Coffee,” the film follows Jimmy, a dreamy-eyed clerk in a coffee company (Dick Powell) who just wants to marry his best girl Betty (Ellen Drew) and take care of his loving old mother. But lacking the money to do so, he enters every complete-the-slogan contest he can find. A particularly lucrative competition is being run by rival coffee company Maxford House, but the committee assembled to pick a winner is a “12 Angry Men“-style hung jury, with Sturges regular William Demarest playing the choleric holdout. When some colleagues decide to trick Jimmy into believing he’s won, the ruse snowballs, and Jimmy, newly injected with self-worth and a check for $25,000 (even the head of Maxford House believes he’s the winner) gets a huge promotion at work and goes on a shopping spree that sees him buying gifts for his whole neighborhood. In fact, that might be “Christmas in July”‘s most charming and gently subversive social subtheme —the spirit of community that Jimmy and Betty experience and exemplify in their inner-city home environment. With a few gentle sideswipes at the nature of corporate cowardice and the corrosive, numbing effect of wage slavery thrown in for good measure, it’s a sweet little rush of a film that doesn’t stick around long enough to make any of its points too thoroughly, but nor does it overstay its welcome. And the slogan that Jimmy writes (and has to explain to everyone) is itself a brilliant piece of well-observed Sturges writing in its inane nonsensicality: “Maxford House. If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee —it’s the bunk!”
“The Lady Eve” (1941)
About as screwball as screwball comedy gets but maybe ten times sexier due
to the sparkage that strikes up between Henry Fonda‘s millionaire snake expert and Barbara Stanwyck‘s bombshell con artist,
“The Lady Eve” is one of the highest profile of Sturges’ outings due to its high-wattage cast. But if you were worried that these big names might tamp down his innate goofiness, never fear: “The Lady Eve” is
nutty as a fruitcake. Or at least it becomes so in its second half after
a somewhat conventional (though still utterly delightful) beginning.
The story follows the shipboard romance between gold-digging trickster
Jean (Stanwyck) who along with her equally crooked tag-teaming father
(who doesn’t love Charles Coburn?), as she sets her sights on ale heir “Hopsie”
(Fonda) as a mark but falls for him despite herself. It feels like we know how this is going to go: the bad girl gets
reformed by the love of a good man and, though he must eventually find out her true
nature, some sort of gesture will mark her repentance and he’ll take
her back. But this is Sturges, so Jean’s reaction to Hopsie dumping
her after he discovers her lies is not repentance but wildly
convoluted and unlikely revenge. She “disguises herself” (read:
“affects a British accent”) as the titular Lady Eve, throws herself into
his path again, makes him fall for “Lady Eve” all over again, and after
an utterly hilarious declaration scene which both Stanwyck and Fonda
play utterly straightfaced despite a horse repeatedly batting Fonda in
the head throughout, she marries him. At which point her long
game reveals itself as she tortures Hopsie with fictitious revelations
about Lady Eve’s promiscuous history. Stanwyck is little short of
mesmerizing in the firecracker main role(s), and it’s hard to imagine
anyone selling Hopsie’s desperately sincere awkwardness as well as Fonda. And in this film more than maybe any other in Sturges’ catalogue of appealing leading couples, the herky-jerk nature of the offbeat narrative
magnifies their chemistry and gives added zip to the skewed comedy of these ludicrous situations. By the end, the lines are so tangled up that, back in their original personas as they embrace and whisper confessions to each other about being married, it’s hard to tell if either actually believes/knows they’re married to the other. While any other filmmaker would be at pains to make those motivations clear, Sturges makes us feel like it simply doesn’t matter.
