COMMENTARY : Humor, Wit in Sturges Film Festival

By KENNETH TURAN

July 18, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES FILM CRITIC

Preston Sturges was a symphony of contradictions.

A lowbrow aristocrat, he grew up force-fed on high culture and spent the rest of his life fleeing from it. A man who hated to work, he was responsible for vintage Hollywood’s most impressive creative spurt, both writing and directing eight pictures between 1940 and 1944. One of the highest paid professionals in America, he was continually on the verge of bankruptcy. And while his comedies were among the most literate and sophisticated ever to come out of the studio system, they were great popular successes as well.

Though Sturges’ career has attracted more than its share of analytic attention, including a posthumous autobiography, an excellent documentary, a collection of screenplays and no fewer than three biographies (with a fourth due out later this year), none of them are a match for those marvelous films. And though they are available on video (mostly from MCA/Universal), there really is no substitute for seeing them in a theater and hearing the laughter build and build.

Now, in a series timed to coincide with the Pasadena Playhouse production of an early Sturges play, “A Cup of Coffee,” the pick of the man’s directing work, a pair of films he wrote but didn’t direct and the documentary about him can be seen at the Nuart in West Los Angeles and the Rialto in South Pasadena. To experience them, for the first or the 15th time, is to understand how right Sturges was when he said, “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?”

As detailed in Todd McCarthy and Kenneth Bowser’s thorough and absorbing “The Rise and Fall of the American Dreamer” (which opens the series Monday at the Nuart along with “Christmas in July,” the film version of “A Cup of Coffee”), Sturges came by his eccentricities honestly. He grew up almost exclusively with his mother in the capitals of Europe, where that world-class free spirit was, among other things, proprietor of a successful Parisian perfume house, promoter of “Le Secret du Harem,” mistress of satanist Aleister Crowley and confidante of dancer Isadora Duncan.

Like many another witty, off-center, potentially ambitious young men, Sturges not only made his way to Hollywood but found he had a knack for the writing end of the business. Perhaps the biggest treat of the current series is Wednesday night’s chance to see the extremely winning “Easy Living” and “Remember the Night,” both written by Sturges but directed by Mitchell Leisen, neither of which is available on video.

In Sturges’ day it was unheard of for writers to direct, and Sturges, in a ploy he described as being as carefully planned as “the seduction of a virgin saint,” sold the script of “The Great McGinty” to Paramount for a single dollar on condition that it allow him behind the camera. The stratagem worked, and the resulting tale of how a bum rose through the political ranks to become governor of a great state not only won Sturges the first Oscar ever given for best original screenplay but also established a pattern for much of what was to come.

First of all, Sturges’ films are verbal to the nth degree, completely intoxicated with words. His is the best rapid-fire repartee ever written, simultaneously fresh and cynical (at a time when cynicism was very far from the comic norm) and laced with sharp comments that might have been born yesterday.

And Sturges certainly felt he had a lot to be cynical about. His films took on every moralistic taboo he could think of, from patriotism to motherhood. With his Continental sensibility, Sturges saw through the flummery in the American psyche with a practiced thoroughness, yet his satire was always affectionate, his jabs never angry.

And Sturges leavened his tart social criticism with every audience-pleasing trick around, from pratfalls to plot contrivances to a fascination with romance because, as Claudette Colbert calmly explains to a flustered Joel McCrea in “Palm Beach Story,” “sex always has something to do with it.”

Made with the same sturdy stock company of supporting players, all of Sturges’ films deserve to be seen, but some simply cannot be missed.

Top of the list is the double bill of two of the thoroughly funniest of Sturges’ pictures, “Palm Beach Story” and “The Lady Eve.” The former, set among the idle rich that Sturges knew very well (his brief marriage to heiress Eleanor Hutton was Page 1 news when it happened), stars McCrea and Colbert as a battling husband and wife, but is just about stolen by Mary Astor and Rudy Vallee as the wealthiest, most unlikely brother and sister act around.

“The Lady Eve,” starring Henry Fonda as a wealthy but naive snake fancier who’s been up the Amazon for too long and Barbara Stanwyck as the con woman of the century, has the benefit of the most audacious of plot twists. If there exists a better-played American farce, its name does not come immediately to mind.

Also unforgettable, and surprisingly pointed, is “Sullivan’s Travels,” the story of a Hollywood director (McCrea again) who wants to make the socially conscious “Brother, Where Art Thou?” when all the studio wants him to do is the brain-dead “Ants in Their Pants of 1941.” Like all of Sturges films, its timeless verbal panache points up the truth of his belief that, “A talking picture is only as good as its dialogue. I believe good dialogue is the cheapest insurance a producer can buy.”

The schedule at the Nuart:

Monday: “Christmas in July” and “The Rise and Fall of the American Dreamer.”

Tuesday: “The Great McGinty” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.”

Wednesday: “Easy Living” and “Remember the Night.”

Thursday: “Palm Beach Story” and “The Lady Eve.”

Friday: “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Unfaithfully Yours.”

Next Saturday: “Sullivan’s Travels” and “Christmas in July.”

The schedule at the Rialto (screenings at noon only):

Next Saturday: “Palm Beach Story.”

July 26: “Unfaithfully Yours.”

Aug. 1: “The Lady Eve.”

Aug. 2: “Christmas in July.”