PRESTON STURGES: WRITER-DIRECTOR
Following up our Fall 2012 series of delightful features written by the great American satirist Preston Sturges during the 1930s, we now present five movies from Sturges’ brilliant but mercurial run as a writer-director under contract at Paramount Pictures in the 1940s. The series begins with Sturges debut as director (a job for which he was paid $1), the political send-up The Great McGinty, and includes the beloved comedies Christmas in July, Sullivan’s Travels, Hail the Conquering Hero, and The Lady Eve.
- Sat., Feb. 2 | 7:00 PM4070 Vilas Hall
“In this town, I’m all the parties.” After proving himself a natural born racketeer, Chicago hobo Dan McGinty (Donlevy) finds himself climbing the crooked political ladder, with graftmeister The Boss (a hilarious Tamiroff) supplying the rungs, but it’s a long way down to the banana republic cabana from where the story is relayed. Preston Sturges famously sold his Academy Award-winning script to Paramount for $1 on the condition that it be his directorial debut - look out for Demarest, Arthur Hoyt, Harry Rosenthal, Esther Howard, and other members of his burgeoning stock company. Skewering the Right and Left with equal zeal, incorporating voter fraud and puppet regimes, this savage satire of election politics has proven distressingly prescient time and again. (MK)
- Sat., Feb. 2 | 8:30 PM4070 Vilas Hall
“If you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee - it’s the bunk!” Thinking he’s won $25,000 in a slogan writing contest with that doozy, an office clerk (Powell) goes on a spending spree and proposes to his best girl. When he learns the truth, our hero is not quite prepared for the consequences in this fast-paced screwball comedy classic. One of our great satirists, Sturges takes aim at American consumerism and the world of advertising and hits a bullseye.
- Sat., Feb. 9 | 7:00 PM4070 Vilas Hall
A successful comedy director (auteur of such mindless entertainments as Ants in Your Pants of 1940) sets out to make his Big Artistic Statement (entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou), and tours the country to connect with the downtrodden. Sturges’s signature film fearlessly mocks the very idea of heavy-handed artistic ambition, while serving as its own example for the social value of comedy. (MK)
- Sat., Feb. 16 | 7:00 PM4070 Vilas Hall
Capping off Sturges’s sidesplitting streak at Paramount, this ruthless sendup of mindless patriotism may be the most enjoyable anti-war film ever made. A perfectly cast Bracken (fresh from Miracle of Morgan’s Creek) stars as a runty discharged marine who is mistaken for a war hero when he returns home. The military milieu provides an ideal showcase for Sturges’s troupe of hysterical blowhards. “Sturges’s stock company of wonderful bit actors is orchestrated and conducted like a pop symphony… a scathing delight.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader) (MK)
- Sat., Feb. 23 | 7:00 PM4070 Vilas Hall
A brassy con artist (Stanwyck) and her timid mark (Fonda) fall in, out, and back in love on board a luxury ocean liner in this irresistible romantic comedy. Typecast to perfection, Stanwyck and Fonda elevate the opposites-attract conceit to intimate poetry, lovingly photographed in extra-long takes. Unusually elegant for Sturges, this suggests a path not taken for the typically madcap writer/director, who never treated human emotions (or anything really) with such genuine sensitivity and grace again - he also never had such natural romantic leads to work with. This being prime vintage Sturges, it’s also flat-out hilarious, endlessly quotable and overrun with his trademark blustering coots (Coburn, Eugene Palette, William Demarest). (MK)