By David Raether
I felt like Erasmus Jacobs.
Who?
Erasmus Jacobs was a 15-year-old kid who was playing on a river bank in South Africa in 1867 and noticed a transparent rock and picked it up. It turned out to be the Eureka Diamond, one of the largest and most valuable gems in the world. And it had just been lying there, waiting for someone to notice it.
Well, that was me in 1977 when I was dateless, again, on a Friday night in college and walked down to see a movie at the arthouse theatre not far from my apartment in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis. Arthouses were theaters that played different classic or foreign movies every night. On this particular evening, it was a Preston Sturges double bill: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) and The Lady Eve (1941): two of the finest works in American film comedy. And they had just been sitting there, waiting for me to show up and watch them.
Whoa! I thought to myself when I walked out several hours later. That guy’s a genius!
That was my Eureka Diamond moment. I’d discovered one of the biggest gems in American cinema. And the only people who seemed to be aware of it were the other eight people sitting in the movie theater with me!
I am an enormous admirer of Preston Sturges. First of all, he writes dialogue like nobody’s business. It’s incredibly fast-paced but still sounds like the way people talk. There is nothing brittle or arch about his dialogue. It’s quick, clever, and natural, the way smart, funny people talk when they have a lot to say and not much time to get it all in.
Take this sequence from Sullivan’s Travels. Here, a famous director of comedies tries to convince the studio to let him make a serious movie he wants to call “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (I’ve always assumed that when Ethan and Joel Coen made the 2000 comedy “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” that it was their sly salute to Preston Sturges.) Anyway, Sturges’ dialogue here just crackles…
“What do people know in Pittsburgh?”
“They know what they like.”
“If they knew what they like, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh.”
Sturges had a crazy childhood. Born in 1898, his mother left the family when he was just three to pursue a singing career in Paris, even though she wasn’t a particularly good singer. Three years later, she returned and took for her third husband a wealthy stockbroker, who adopted Preston and gave him a new last name, Sturges. Mom was a bit of a nomad and hauled young Preston around with her, including a period of time in which she was living with the oddball, notorious, British occultist Alastair Crowley. Sturges and his mother bounced between Europe and America while he was growing up, and he became fluent in French. Clearly, all of this made for a childhood destined to produce brilliant comedies.
The gift his mother seems to have given him—beyond a sense of the absurd—is the idea that female characters can be the strong, smart, funny ones. Every female lead in Sturges’ movies is pretty unforgettable. They know what they want and they go for it. They’re cynical, witty, ambitious, and often more than a little sneaky. They are all fully drawn characters, fully capable of handling themselves in whatever situation Sturges puts them in.
The Great McGinty is a hilarious political satire about a man who scales the political heights by becoming the henchman of a political boss. It all starts when McGinty, a tramp, is paid to vote under a fake name in a mayoral election. Which he then does 37 times. You know, to make more money. McGinty’s mentor is an unelected political boss who sees real potential in him and convinces him to run for Mayor. One problem: he’s unmarried. Solution: a sham marriage to the boss’s secretary. McGinty’s career as mayor goes great and he is primed to run for Governor. And wins! One problem: he and his sham wife have fallen in love and she believes that power should be used honestly. Hah! Things cartwheel out of control and both of them end up in jail.
Political satires are rare in American film and this may be the best one ever made. Sturges had been a highly successful screenwriter up to this point, but he wanted to direct. Paramount was resisting these advances until he convinced them by selling them the script for $10. Hah!
It turns out that Christmas in July is a real thing. It started at a girls summer camp in the mid 1930s as a way of bringing the happy and munificent spirit of Christmas to the middle of the summer. Sturges’ movie isn’t really about anything that sweet, however. Here, Dick Powell is a good-natured office worker who has entered the Maxwell House Coffee new slogan contest. First prize is $25,000. Powell’s character is convinced his slogan is the best: “If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee, it’s your bunk.” He’s sure it’s a winner that will save him financially and allow him to marry his sweetheart, played by Ellen Drew.
A trio of his co-workers put a fake telegram on his desk telling him he’s won and he goes to Maxwell House to collect his check. He mistakenly receives a check and goes on a buying spree to celebrate his good fortune. Misunderstandings magnify, but in the end everything works out, because, well, let’s just celebrate Christmas in July. This is a joyful and happy comedy and one the whole family can enjoy… even though his slogan for Maxwell House Coffee is just really terrible.
A screwball comedy starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Wait. What? Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck don’t jump to mind when you think of madcap comedy. But they are just perfect in this movie. How good is this movie? The esteemed director Peter Bogdanovich considers it one of the greatest American films of all time. The New York Times rated it better than Citizen Kane, which also came out the same year. Stanwyck plays a con artist who convinces a distracted heir to a brewery fortune to marry her. And just as he is figuring out that she is a scammer, she falls in love with him.
The dialogue in this movie is breathtaking, literally. There are some speeches by Stanwyck where I can’t quite figure out how she said them without taking a breath. You really owe it to yourself to see the movie. Beyond the brilliance of the comedy, both Fonda and Stanwyck are two of the most beautiful creatures ever to appear in a film. Don’t miss this movie.
Joel McCrea stars as John L. Sullivan, a wildly successful comedy director who has made such trifling comedy films as “Hey, Hey In the Hay Loft” or “Ants in the Pants.” (Please note: these two movies are not real movies so it’s no use trying to find them.) Now, however, he wants to make a “meaningful” movie, something that he says, “holds up a mirror to life… a picture of dignity... a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.” Well, you can rest assured that the studio executives want nothing to do with that. One of their arguments is that Sullivan has led a privileged life and doesn’t have a clue about any of the topics he is talking about. So Sullivan decides to travel anonymously across America to learn how people really live.
He ends up being accompanied, of course, by the gloriously beautiful Veronica Lake (the “it girl” of her era), who plays a down-on-her-luck actress, fed up with the movie business and leaving town for good. The whole journey is a disaster and Sullivan ends up on a chain gang in the South by claiming to have murdered himself (hah!). One evening, the chain gang is taken to a black church where the grim, beaten down, haunted men watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon and everyone is laughing and happy for a moment. Hmmm… thinks Sullivan, maybe making lighter-than-air comedies actually is a good thing. It’s what people really want. This is a wonderful movie.
This is a dizzying farce. The premise couldn’t be more absurd. The marriage of Geraldine and Tom Jeffers (Joe McCrea, again) just isn’t working out and his architecture practice is failing. So Gerry (Claudette Colbert) hatches a scheme to go to Palm Beach, divorce Tom, marry a rich man instead, and use his money to help Tom with his career. Tom follows, and is presented as Gerry’s brother, Captain McGlue. None of this, of course, works, and both of them end up with too many suitors. As I said, dizzying.
Rudy Vallee plays the eccentric billionaire John D. Hackensacker III, who pursues Gerry, and Mary Astor plays his oft-married sister Princess Centimilla who is hot on the trail of Tom, a.k.a. Captain McGlue. This movie features one of the worst ideas for a business since most of the San Francisco high-tech startups I’ve worked for in the past eight years: Tom wants to build an airport that is suspended by wires over the city. It is just silly from start to finish and ends with Tom and Gerry back together and everyone lives happily ever after. Or will they?
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.