Thrust with a Rapier and Run: The Critics and Preston Sturges

This chapter addresses two major questions in regard to the critical reception of the career and films of Preston Sturges. The first question is how Sturges’s public persona as a “madcap” personality working in the Hollywood studio system created a master narrative that both informed and influenced the critical reception of his films and thus proved to be a precursor to what would come to be identified as “auteur” criticism. This leads to a second question: how did the theme of public spectacle in both Sturges’s personal/professional life and in his films that take a satirical and/or cynical view of public figures, influence critical debates in regard to the director as “auteur,” as well as inciting theoretical debates regarding the final purpose and/or ideological effect of his comedies as satire and/or irony reflecting cynicism and/or nihilism? Finally, the chapter explores how a study of the ambivalence that marks the history of critical writing on both Sturges’s life and his films provides an insight into the cultural practice of film criticism itself. To that end, the chapter gives particular attention to the critical debates provoked by three films, The Great McGinty, Sullivan’s Travels, and Hail the Conquering Hero.

The Eye of the Storm: Preston Sturges and Performance

This chapter analyses performance in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story with comparisons and contrasts to several other Sturges comedies. It examines performative choices by Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, and Charles Coburn in The Lady Eve and acting choices by Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, and Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story. Using Laban methodology, it describes the affective qualities of expressions, gestures, and voices as well as the impact of costuming. Consideration is given to Sturges’s cinematic presentation of actors’ movements and physical attributes with particular attention to how differences in gesture and expression shape audiences’ perception of characters. The essay also considers characteristics of screwball comedies and gender representation within them.

“They Always Get the Best of You Somehow”: Preston Sturges in Black and White

There is no question that the films of Preston Sturges present racist stereotypes. But we must remember the profound racism in America when Sturges was working. There is even evidence that Sturges respected his African American actors, making sure that they were treated as professionals. Several blacks even became members of his repertory company, working alongside a group of actors who often embodied a range of ethnic stereotypes. And in many of his films, Sturges’s blacks actually express a wry suspicion of white Americans, thus advancing the satiric projects of his films. Rather than concentrate on Sturges’s habit of presenting racist images of black people, we should be attentive to what his African American characters actually say and do.

“The Edge of Unacceptability”: Preston Sturges and the PCA

This chapter poses one of the most fascinating questions about Sturges’s career: how did he manage to insert so much sexual innuendo in his comedies of the 1940s, given the notorious vigilance of Joseph Breen and other members of the Production Code Administration? Part of it was in the PCA’s quixotic mandate; part of it arose from the filmmaker’s greater skill in exploiting the Code; part of it also stemmed from changing, more expansive conceptions of what met the Code’s censorship requirements. Through close examinations of script drafts and correspondence with the PCA, this chapter explores how Sturges deftly negotiated with the censors to satisfy their demands while ensuring that his satires of war and sexuality made their way to the screen, revealing that in addition to his prolific comedic imagination, Sturges was often aided by the very body that was alleged to be censoring him.

The Unheard Song of Joy

This chapter illustrates some of the untapped riches of Preston Sturges’s unproduced screenplay for the musical Song of Joy, both in terms of its pivotal timing in his filmmaking career and its unappreciated achievements in screenwriting. When compared with Sturges’s other written-and-directed films, Song of Joy often shows less restraint and more exuberance in testing the boundaries of the Hollywood studio system, especially in terms of plotting, meta-cinema, and dialogue. Tracing these extremes clarifies why the script was so disliked and why so many studios rejected it. These analyses also illustrate the intensity of Sturges’s creative ambitions at this point in his career—that period between his roles as playwright and writer-director when he took an even more over-the-top approach to screenwriting.

Falling Hard: The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

This chapter addresses The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Preston Sturges’s independent production after leaving Paramount.Diddlebock is an idiosyncratic film that takes many of the implications of Sturges’s cinema in some new directions. An expensive film that nevertheless looks low budget, Diddlebock is a film in which American ideals of money and social and economic success are the targets of ruthless satire. In addition, Sturges is obsessed here with temporality, the film’s images dominated by stasis, decay, and decline. In the title role, the aging silent comedy star Harold Lloyd embodies this idea of decline with a particular clarity. The film, while self-consciously drawing upon the “Harold” myth of Lloyd’s classic silent period, relentlessly exposes the fact that Harold has aged, his words and gestures now reduced to the level of cliché.

Sturges’s Many Mothers

A notable aspect of Preston Sturges’s comedies is that they routinely include mothers—though Hollywood comedies, as a whole, include very few of them. Motherhood, for Sturges, is a powerful, and admirable force. This chapter discusses the role of motherhood in two Sturges comedies: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, as well as his ideas about motherhood found in the unproduced screenplay for Matrix. Sturges’s ideas about motherhood changed over time, reflecting shifting cultural norms.Through these changes, however, his films and his ideas about motherhood remained intriguing.

O Preston, Where Art Thou?

Compared to other directors of Classical Hollywood films, Sturges has faded from view. This chapter illustrates his continued influence on contemporary cinema’s general penchant toward wordplay, verbosity, irony, and postmodern pastiche. Joel and Ethan Coen and Wes Anderson acknowledge their debt to Sturges. This chapter also argues that a contemporary French romantic comedy, Heartbreaker (Chaumeil, 2010), comes closest to capturing Sturges’s wild blend of impersonation, witty dialogue, and genuine heartbreak.

Presto(n) con Spirito: Comedies with Music, Sturges-style

This chapter probes music in eight comedies directed by Sturges: seven Paramount productions (1940-44) and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). The Paramount features departed from generic norms for studio romantic comedies by having more music than was customary. But how much credit does Sturges deserve for being a musical “auteur”? The question remains open, but the essay’s analyses show how well Paramount’s staff composers served his purposes. Through apt themes and clever thematic developments, jarring mixtures of “high” and “low” styles, disjunctive couplings of diegetic and non-diegetic cues, ironic allusions to pre-existent repertoires, and (in select cases) through the use of unconventional “musical montages,” each of these scores enhanced the director’s paradoxical narratives. Unfaithfully Yours brought these paradoxes to the fore in a novel manner, and addressed fundamental questions of music’s own meanings, both in film and on its own.

Introduction: An Agile Mind—The Many Stands of Preston Sturges

This chapter challenges the reining views of Sturges as an ambivalent figure torn between art and commerce, especially as promulgated in popular writings by James Agee; instead, the chapter proposes new descriptive clusters or patterns that cut across every aspect of the filmmaker’s life: creator, businessman, wordsmith, skeptic, and optimist. These terms provide a good sense of the personality, vitality, and talents that made Sturges such a compelling figure, with the first three speaking to his aptitudes and endeavours, and the latter two characterizing his attitudes and worldview. Rather than set these terms in opposition, the chapter puts them in conversation to illustrate the complexities of Sturges’s remarkable life and to shed light on why he was, and continues to be, such a pivotal figure in Hollywood cinema and American culture.