Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges

Director and screenwriter Preston Sturges (1898–1959) is one of Hollywood’s underappreciated greats according to this fascinating study from the Nation film critic Klawans (Left in the Dark). He argues that while Sturges “changed film history, as the first person in Hollywood’s sound era to direct movies” from scripts he wrote, his work has been neglected in part due to his films’ status as commercial productions. In an effort to correct the record and show them as “meaningful” and “intellectually coherent,” Klawans offers close readings of 10 of Sturges’s films. The Great McGinty (1940) is “the product of an imagination so diagrammatic that each wisecrack seems to be connected by a straight line to its balancing retort,” while 1944’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek combines “pure farce—spiraling plot complications, acrobatic pratfalls—with characterizations that are deeper than they need to be, if the goal were just to incite laughter.” And when addressing who Sturges’s final film, 1948’s Unfaithfully Yours, “was for,” Klawans posits “later generations.” What emerges is a portrait of a director with a gift for character development and “head-spinning dialogue executed at high speed” by an author with a keen critical eye and plenty of flair in his own writing. Film buffs will relish this. (Jan.)