Sick of the second-hand treatment given to his dialogue, Sturges would—in 1939—sell the script for his caustic satire on our look-for-loopholes politicians, The Great McGinty, to Paramount Pictures for $1 (upped to $10 for legal purposes) in exchange for directing rights.  Bagging the first-ever Oscar for Original Screenplay, The Great McGinty marked the beginning of the fabled five-year run that even the quota-strict Soviets would envy—a creative outpouring that (like Bob Dylan and his amphetamine-addled burst in the mid-Sixties) produced several candidates for G.O.A.T. consideration in the comedy genre: Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero.  In each, Sturges, like a latter-day Pharaoh, stacks miscommunication and mistaken identities into an Egyptian monument of beautifully orchestrated excess.  Whether Sturges satirizes the American Dream, marriage, underage/unplanned pregnancy, patriotism, or his raison d’être for filmmaking, each reel exhibits the same rich, frenzied blend of 100 wpm back-and-forths, perfectly-executed pratfalls, narrative surprises both clever and ridiculous (i.e. a mooing cow), and a smattering of social comment.  Of course, Sturges’ rhapsodic dialogue is his claim to for-all-time fame—a heady, high-low lexicon stocked with malaprops, witty quips, slangy mouthfuls, sweet nothings, and absurd declarations.  A Sturges conman is eloquent enough to spout, “let us be crooked, but never common.”

Of all the director’s AFI-certified smash-hits, Film Forum opens “Essential Sturges”—a series dedicated to his late 4th wife Sandy—with his most underrated classic, Christmas in July.  The equivalent of a Sturges’ B-side, it condenses—into 67 sweet, satiric minutes—the Hatfield-and-McCoy conflict between idealism and dollar-sign cynicism that looms over his oeuvre.  Musical-habitué Dick Powell stars as the office clerk who, thanks a few larky coworkers, believes that his catchphrase for a coffee company—“If you can’t sleep, it isn’t the coffee…it’s the bunk!”—has won the $25,000 prize.  Sturges’ typically ambivalent treatment of the love-trumps-money tale echoes in the series’ concluding two-for: The Palm Beach Story, a brisk, battle-of-the-sexes farce about love, marriage, and bottom-lines with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, and the consummate screwball comedy, The Lady Eve. The latter features Henry Fonda as the well-heeled, bookish herpetologist who goes gaga for Barbara Stanwyck’s charming, cunning ingénue—an improbable romance that famously climaxes with Stanwyck’s risible recount of past amours, each bogus name crosscut with a suggestive, tunnel-entering train. In Sturges’ equal-opportunity world, Colbert and Stanwyck’s dishonesty becomes a character benefit rather than a detriment: it’s not what you’ve done, but what you say you’ve done.