True Wit

‘One of these days,” wised-up shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck says to prosecutor Fred MacMurray as he offers her a drink she assumes is meant to seduce, “one of you boys is going to start one of these scenes differently, and one of us girls is going to drop dead from surprise.”

Preston Sturges, who wrote that line in “Remember the Night” and hundreds of others in dozens of films, was preeminently the boy who started scenes differently. Words intoxicated him, and he knew just how to make them jump. The first Hollywood writer to segue to solo directing, winner of the first best original screenplay Oscar, Sturges made some of the best American comedies ever produced, combining slashing wordplay with chaotic slapstick and completely un-hinged plots in a way no one has even thought about duplicating.

Determined to become what he called “a prince of the blood,” Sturges offered to sell Paramount his script for “The Great McGinty” for $1 for the chance to direct. The 1940 film not only won Sturges his Oscar, it proved to be the first of seven hits in a four-year span, a burst of creativity that has had critics shaking their heads in awe ever since.

This year, the centenary of Sturges’ birth, is both the best of times and the worst of times for the man who was as gifted a writer-director of comedy as this country has produced. All manner of commemorative events and screenings are being held nationwide, but when the seriously flawed AFI list of 100 best American films was released, not one of his splendid comedies was on it. Though Sturges is a household name to knowledgeable film fans, there are apparently still a discouragingly large number of people who’ve resisted sampling his work.

Unwilling to accept that situation, Sturges partisans are using his centennial as an opportunity to promote him on several fronts. The University of California Press, which has already put out “Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges” and “Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges,” is coming out this month with, yes, “Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges,” making this master of witty dialogue one of the most published screenwriters ever.

Universal Home Video, also rising to the challenge, is producing a 12-cassette Preston Sturges Centennial Collection, including four new-to-video titles: “Easy Living,” “If I Were King,” “Never Say Die” and the 1934 “Imitation of Life,” to which Sturges made an uncredited contribution.

The best place to see Sturges movies, however, is on the big screen in a large, laugh-filled auditorium. Smartly filling that need is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art film department, which is putting on a 16-film Sturges retrospective from Thursday night through Sept. 5.

Before that series gets under way, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets its oar in, hosting a centennial tribute to Sturges at its Samuel Goldwyn Theater Wednesday at 8 p.m. The program will include a selection of clips and interviews with, among others, Sturges star Eddie Bracken and the director’s widow, Sandy Sturges.

Unwilling to be outdone, LACMA is also planning a special event for 3 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 29, Sturges’ birthday. A screening of the excellent documentary, “Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer,” will be followed by a panel discussion among current writers and directors about Sturges’ influence.

The LACMA series is especially welcome because it offers treats both for fans who know Sturges well and those who’ve never had the pleasure of sampling the works of this master of comic exasperation, a filmmaker who loved to match the rich against the conniving, the gullible against the grasping, just for the pleasure of seeing what would transpire.

For novices intending to get a sense of what Sturges was about, three films are essential: a pair from 1941, “The Lady Eve” and “Sullivan’s Travels,” and 1942’s “The Palm Beach Story.”

All of Sturges’ films are notable for the strong and savvy roles they offered to 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 “The Palm Beach Story,” which Sturges wrote for Claudette Colbert, the actress plays a woman in flight from her penniless inventor husband (Joel McCrea), only 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 on 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 Their Pants of 1939.” McCrea’s Sullivan sets out to find the real America and runs into the sultry Veronica Lake along the way.

Also great fun are the films Sturges wrote but didn’t direct, like the Stanwyck/MacMurray “Remember the Night,” directed by Mitchell Leisen, where the shoplifter and the D.A. discover they’re both from Indiana and decide to share a ride home for Christmas. “The picture,” Sturges later wrote, “had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz, and just enough schmutz to make it box office.”

Less frequently on screen and just as entrancing is “The Good Fairy,” which shows what happens when an orphan movie usherette named Ginglebusher tries to do a good deed and causes all sorts of havoc. Making the film special is the irresistible Margaret Sullavan (better known for “The Shop Around the Corner”), one of those luminous actresses for whom there is no equivalent today.

No LACMA series would be complete without rarities, and the Sturges tribute has at least two, including the Spencer Tracy-starring “The Power and the Glory,” a 1933 drama about a powerful business tycoon. The film’s elaborate non-chronological flashback structure would be famously echoed eight years later in “Citizen Kane.”

The best place to see Sturges in embryo is in 1931’s “Strictly Dishonorable,” an early stage-bound sound film that faithfully transcribes the 1929 Broadway hit play that was Sturges’ first writing success. Sturges had nothing to do with the film version, but when he saw it he wrote producer Carl Laemmle that he “found himself deeply interested and admiring my own play. Nothing could be lower than this.”

The key thing to remember about Preston Sturges and his work is that these are not worthy films we have an obligation to cinema to patronize. These were the out-and-out funniest movies of their day, and they still compel laughter. No one, typically, put it better than the man himself when he wrote “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?”