Sturges’ cheeky hit streak

IN a burst of creativity that’s had critics shaking their heads in awe and admiration ever since, writer-director Preston Sturges turned out seven consecutive hits between 1940 and 1944. Now, for the first time, six of those seven, including some of the funniest American comedies ever made, are available in one DVD collection, as well as the rarely seen film that stopped the streak.

The first Hollywood writer to segue to solo directing, winner of the first Oscar given for best original screenplay, Sturges combined slashing wordplay with chaotic slapstick and completely unhinged plots in a way no one has even come close to duplicating.

A successful writer determined to become “a prince of the blood” (his term for directors), Sturges charted an elaborate courtship of studio executives: “the seduction of a virgin saint,” he wrote, “would not have been better planned.” He sold his script for “The Great McGinty” to Paramount for $1 and the chance to direct. The 1940 film won Sturges his Oscar, and he never looked back.

“McGinty,” the story of a bum rising through the political ranks to become governor of a great state, is one of four Sturges films new to DVD. Two of the others are comedies: the Dick Powell-starring “Christmas in July” and “Hail the Conquering Hero,” a satire on patriotism starring Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, a young man who experiences difficulty living up to his name.

Rights problems (the film in question is owned by Paramount, not Universal) have prevented Sturges’ other hit comedy, “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” from claiming its place in the set. Instead we have that great curiosity “The Great Moment,” a fairly straight biopic starring Joel McCrea as Dr. William Morton, who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia.

The wonderful centerpieces of this set, as they would be of any collection, are Sturges’ trio of brilliant comedies: “The Lady Eve,” “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Palm Beach Story.”

All of Sturges’ films are notable for the strong and savvy roles they offered actresses, but Barbara Stanwyck made the most of her opportunities. In “The Lady Eve,” perhaps the most brilliant of Sturges’ films, she starts out as a coldblooded con woman looking to fleece Henry Fonda’s awkward snake fancier and brewery heir and ends up taking advantage of a plot twist too audacious for words. On the New York Times’ 10-best list for 1941, this film was first, “Citizen Kane” second.

In “Palm Beach Story,” which Sturges wrote for Claudette Colbert, the actress plays a woman who flees her penniless inventor husband (Joel McCrea) to hook up with the richest man in America (Rudy Vallee) and his party girl sister (Mary Astor). Added incentives include the director’s usual cast of irresistible peripheral characters (watch out for the Wienie King) and Sturges’ storytelling philosophy, neatly expressed by Colbert, that “sex always has something to do with it.”

“Sullivan’s Travels” is probably Sturges’ signature work, both a pointed satire of Hollywood and a poignant defense of screen comedy. McCrea plays a major studio director, fresh from the success of “Hey, Hey in the Hayloft” who’d rather do the socially conscious “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” than piffle like “Ants in Your Plants of 1939.” McCrea’s Sullivan sets out to find the real America and runs into sultry Veronica Lake along the way.

Sturges’ films were the out-and-out funniest movies of their day, and they still compel smiles. No one put it better than the man himself when he wrote, with typical brio, “there are few humorists in any given time and I must be one of them in my time. Or else why were all those people laughing?”

kenneth.turan@latimes.com