FILM
Holiday with Preston Sturges
/ Jason Jude Chan
12.23.08
While too often wartime Hollywood put out plots that were as predictable and shelf-ready as the Dewey Decimal System, Preston Sturges was penning sparkling, matchless dialogue and conjuring wild-goose scenarios that ducked easy classification. From 1939-43, Sturges was cinema’s modern-day Midas, mining comedic gold from a mind full of Hays-Code-affronting what-ifs. What if teenage Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) carouses with a band of single-minded marines, drives drunk, has a one-night stand, and discovers that she’s pregnant with a long-gone private whose name might or might not be Ratzkywatzky (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek)? Or how about a rollicking takedown of patriotism during World War II in which a hay-fevered hero named Woodrow… Lafayette…Pershing… Truesmith (Michael Cera’s excitable forerunner, Eddie Bracken) returns to his gung-ho hometown with a few only-in-movies war stories and the backup of six sympathetic marines (Hail the Conquering Hero)? These bold-print premises from the Shakespeare of screwball comedy return to Film Forum on Christmas Eve as fresh, witty, and allergic to the ordinary, yes-sir narrative as the day of their unleashing 60-odd years ago.
Sturges’ ascent to the studio system’s Capra-pocked heights began while bedridden with a ruptured appendix; surely he was looking ceiling-ward when he proclaimed himself a forthcoming playwright. From most, such said-and-done moxie would resound in the Oh-Psh range—between overprotected and preposterous. But after a childhood spent pingponging between America and Europe and hobnobbing with mom’s chums (occultist Aleister Crowley, Isadora “Modern Dance” Duncan), Sturges was groomed, as he would later quote at the end of Morgan’s Creek, to “achieve greatness” rather than “have greatness thrust upon” him. Starting with the aptly titled The Guinea Pig, he achieved that sketched-out greatness along the Great White Way. He would then refine his famous rat-a-tat-tat repartee by writing screenplays, including screwballs for the underrated Mitchell Leisen, and The Power and the Glory, a flashback-filtered climb to the top floor with Spencer Tracy that Citizen Kane would later cite as a blueprint. Sturges’ final credit beside “written by,” however, was in Leisen’s Remember the Night, which, along with his Cinderella-in-the-city romcom Easy Living, comprises the series’ two Sturges-as-screenwriter entries.
Sturges’ ascent to the studio system’s Capra-pocked heights began while bedridden with a ruptured appendix; surely he was looking ceiling-ward when he proclaimed himself a forthcoming playwright. From most, such said-and-done moxie would resound in the Oh-Psh range—between overprotected and preposterous. But after a childhood spent pingponging between America and Europe and hobnobbing with mom’s chums (occultist Aleister Crowley, Isadora “Modern Dance” Duncan), Sturges was groomed, as he would later quote at the end of Morgan’s Creek, to “achieve greatness” rather than “have greatness thrust upon” him. Starting with the aptly titled The Guinea Pig, he achieved that sketched-out greatness along the Great White Way. He would then refine his famous rat-a-tat-tat repartee by writing screenplays, including screwballs for the underrated Mitchell Leisen, and The Power and the Glory, a flashback-filtered climb to the top floor with Spencer Tracy that Citizen Kane would later cite as a blueprint. Sturges’ final credit beside “written by,” however, was in Leisen’s Remember the Night, which, along with his Cinderella-in-the-city romcom Easy Living, comprises the series’ two Sturges-as-screenwriter entries.
