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Preston Sturges, the writer and director who is being feted with a retrospective at New York City’s Film Forum, lived a life that could have prompted its own screwball comedy.
Talk about a set-up: Sturges (1898-1959) was born to a bohemian mother and a traveling salesman father, and subsequently adopted by a financier stepfather. A peripatetic childhood saw the young Sturges shepherded across Europe, all the while encountering world-class ballerinas, on-the-make satanists, and a bevy of Frenchmen.
After stints in the U.S. army and on Wall Street, Sturges wrote a Broadway play in response to the taunt of a paramour. That first play was a hit; the second was an even bigger sensation. Sturges became rich. Hollywood beckoned.
Sturges knocked around as a screenwriter, dipping his hand into a hogshead of projects, including “The Power and the Glory,” “Imitation of Life,” and “The Invisible Man.” (Was Sturges responsible for the florid turns of phrase assayed by the title character in the latter picture? One likes to think so.) After becoming increasingly frustrated with how the dialogue in his films was being handled, he finagled a deal with the higher-ups at Paramount that would allow him to direct his own screenplay. His asking fee? Ten dollars.
A story that good might have well been fabulated by any one of the colorful, not to say scurrilous, characters who regularly occupy the periphery of a Sturges film — the cantankerous William De Demarest, say, if not the supercilious Franklin Pangborn. New Yorkers can get their fill of snappy retorts, sly asides, cartoonish eccentrics, and, in the case of the “The Palm Beach Story,” hilariously contrived artifice in the series of 18 films that will be on view for two weeks, beginning January 20.
When considering the breadth and influence of Sturges’s accomplishment, it comes as a shock to realize that the films for which he is best known were rolled out during a mere four-year time span. Between 1940 and 1944 — that is to say, from “The Great McGinty” to “Hail the Conquering Hero” — Sturges was unstoppable. The director’s ability to turn a profit with films of obvious cinematic merit did not go unnoticed. A high-profile American business magnate, Howard Hughes, made an offer Sturges couldn’t refuse: creative control.
The deal with Hughes was, as you might expect, too good to be true. Sturges’s first and only effort for California Pictures, the company the director formed with the unpredictable millionaire, was “The Sin of Harold Diddlebock” (1947). The production was trying. Not only did it go over-budget and over-schedule, the project was, at its basis, inherently quixotic: an updating and continuation of Harold Lloyd’s “The Freshman.”
Lloyd had, for all intents and purposes, retired a decade earlier and, goodness knows, age isn’t conducive to the kind of physical comedy the silent comedian had specialized in. When the picture didn’t fly at the box office, Hughes took it off the market, did his own tinkering, and sent the movie off with a new title, “Mad Wednesday.” Still, audiences refused to gather. As for Lloyd: he never stepped in front of the camera again.
If “Diddlebock” doesn’t count as prime Sturges, it survives as considerably more than a curiosity and is enlivened by a game, sometimes moving, and surprisingly spry middle-aged Lloyd. All the same, the movie put paid to Sturges’s partnership with Hughes and the director found himself back at the studios, this time 20th Century Fox.
His next effort, “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), also performed poorly at the box office, as did “The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend” (1949). Sturges’s last film, “The French, They Are a Funny Race” (1955), did well in France, but proved of little interest to American audiences.
“Unfaithfully Yours” doesn’t have the rep of Sturges classics like “The Lady Eve” (1941) or “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” (1944), but it is, all the same, a comedic masterwork, a sly recounting of one man’s trepidations about just how well his wife is maintaining the fidelity of their marriage.
Rex Harrison is Sir Alfred de Carter, a symphony conductor who can’t stop his mind from wandering or his suspicions from snowballing. What begins as a comedy of manners turns into out-and-out slapstick, and Harrison acquits himself splendidly throughout, as does Linda Darnell as his much put-upon wife.
There are few things more joyous than a Preston Sturges film rata-tat-tatting on all cylinders — a feat movie-goers can enjoy many times over this month at Film Forum.
(c) 2023 Mario Naves
This article was originally published in the January 11, 2023 edition of The New York Sun.
Too Much Art 