Around his eightieth birthday, I wrote a little book about him. He was by then many years into his unannounced retirement. He was happily married and he had, at last, an adored child—his daughter, Jennifer. He liked to go to baseball games and putter about. He read my modest book and liked it well enough. He occasionally, for no apparent reason, called me up and we would chat pleasantly, nothing world-shaking. He was likable and leisurely. We talked much of the time about his peers, some of whom I also knew slightly. These chats were modest ornaments to my days, and I hope for his.
By this time he had taken to doing little shows for charity—film clips, anecdotes, that sort of thing. In the summer of 1986, I was planning to move from New York to Los Angeles, and I judged that we were good enough phone friends that I might call him up and meet him face-to-face when I settled in L.A. That was not to be—he died of a stroke in November, in Davenport, Iowa, of all places, as he was preparing for one of these appearances.
The obituaries were all about his “charm,” of course. And why not? It was, for the casual reader, his most salient quality. What did they care about—if they even noticed—his darker side?
Movie stars—a rare few—enter our lives unbidden. For some reason we take a shine to some of them, and our belief in them remains unshaken, no matter what the fates deal out to them. So it was for me with Cary Grant. I liked and admired him. He rarely disappointed me on-screen, and I know nothing of his life away from the camera that would give me pause. He must, of course, have had a dark side, else he would not have been the actor he was. But on that we will not dwell. The image is what we have. And we are—in this instance anyway—right to cherish it.
15
“Up This Hero Goes”
And to complete the phrase, “down this zero goes.” We speak now of Preston Sturges, and his strange, enchanted, foreshortened career. For a very few years (1940–1944) his was among the great Hollywood rides. But yet, there were so few films—perhaps a baker’s half dozen of them—between The Great McGinty, which started his merry run, and Hail the Conquering Hero, which was his last great comedy. Rarely in film history has a career blazed so brightly and ended in such sudden disarray. But for those few years, he was the comic master of all he surveyed. With him, I believe, screwball comedy reached its apotheosis.
Except that the comedy was not really and truly screwball. It was rather too literate—verbally very playful—for that characterization to fully apply, and too rich, as well, in eccentric characterizations and ideas. You will not find too many comedies in our movie history that revolve around a virgin birth, as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek does. It seems to me that the most potent impact on his style derived from the weird force of Americans talking and squawking when he encountered them on his more or less permanent return from Europe in the late 1920s. Put simply, he had never heard anything quite like that slightly mad babble. No one among his competitors had the ear for it, or the slightly odd personal history that alerted him to its comic possibilities.
He was, I suppose, something of a mama’s boy. His mother was an intimate of Isadora Duncan’s, which meant, among other things, that the oddities of human behavior held no terrors for him. He had a hit play, Strictly Dishonorable, soon after he returned to the United States, which was made into a movie a couple of years later. Thereafter, he wrote (and, of course, later directed) about two movies a year until near the end of World War II. He quickly had the itch to direct, but it was not satisfied until McGinty, in 1940. That said, the majority of his films were successful, and in some instances they attracted more than the usual buzz in Hollywood—none more so than The Power and the Glory (1933), which starred Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore in a story that people would eventually come to realize prefigured Citizen Kane, as it told the story of the rise and fall of a powerful business magnate (in this instance, C. W. Post, of cereal fame). It was eccentrically structured and rather gloomy, and many in its audience could not “follow” its story. But for its time, it was not quite like anything else coming out of Hollywood. It was, to be sure, a flop, but it did Sturges no harm. Rather, it marked him out as talent to watch.
He fulfilled his promise at least twice in the years ahead—with Easy Living, in 1937, and Remember the Night, two years later. The former was a comedy starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold and Ray Milland. It’s about the romantic adventures of a young woman after a fur coat thrown out of an apartment house window falls on her head. It’s kind of a screwball farce, full of pizzazz and romantic energy—about as enjoyable as any picture of its time and genre. Remember the Night was more ambitious and, I think, more successful. In it, Fred MacMurray is a Manhattan district attorney who for some reason has to take Barbara Stanwyck, who is being held on shoplifting charges, home to the Midwest with him for the Christmas holidays. It’s a long trip by car, and it achieves predictable romantic results, which are worked out in surprising ways. It is a very original conceit. And one of the best films directed by Mitchell Leisen.
Therein, however, lay the rub for Sturges, who didn’t much like the man. He thought his directorial “improvements” were spoiling the rhythm of his work. It’s hard to say, really. Leisen, a former art director, was perhaps something of a fusspot. Or, putting it another way, he liked his movies to be smooth and graceful, while Sturges liked them to be rough and ready. But his greatest sin was that he was a director, and Sturges was not. Sturges made it very clear that he would become one or he would leave Paramount. In 1940 he attained his ambition with The Great McGinty, which was a success and for which he won the writing Oscar.
Sturges followed this film later that same year with Christmas in July, probably the mildest in his string of hits, but still quite a winning little film. It features Dick Powell as an insanely optimistic jingle writer and Ellen Drew as his very realistic girlfriend. He loses the jingle contests he keeps entering, which, perversely, only enhances his belief that he is drawing closer to a victory. He achieves that with this punning lulu: “If you can’t sleep, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.”
The picture was a success, and fully established Sturges as a genius, Hollywood style. It prepared the way for what many regard as his greatest film, The Lady Eve (1941). He had truly major stars for this one, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Stanwyck, with her enthusiastic professionalism, was a particular delight for him, but Fonda stole the show as Charles “Hopsie” Pike, one of the great dimwit performances in movie history. He is the heir to a great brewing fortune (“The Ale That Won for Yale”), which is of no importance to him. His passion is herpetology. It armors him against her designs on him, in what is surely one of the great romantic comedies ever.
Fonda’s is a great performance. It takes courage for an immoderately handsome man, best known up to that time as a romantic, occasionally heroic lead, to play a dope so convincingly. But he did it with quiet relish. And Sturges kept the film on a tight rein; it could so easily have deteriorated into farcicality. It is played soberly, and it is all the funnier for that. It was a great success. At this point the director could do no wrong. He was ready for Sullivan’s Travels (1941).
And for the beau ideal among his leading men, Joel McCrea. He was good-looking, rather than overpoweringly handsome, and an agreeably relaxed presence on-screen. You were always glad to see him turn up there. He represented for Sturges an essentially rational figure who was moved, at times, to slightly irrational impulses from which he had to be rescued, which he always was. We meet him in Sullivan’s Travels as a successful comedy movie director who wants to do a serious movie entitled (perfectly) O Brother, Where Art Thou? He has a vision for it (“death gargling at you from every street corner”), but he concedes that he really doesn’t know much about life as most Americans live it, so he embarks on a journey to discover the true spirit of the country. Along the way he meets a girl (Veronica Lake) who instinctively understands what he doesn’t. (“There’s nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive you out in the open.”)
But he has a
long road to travel, including a stay in a prison work camp, where he at last learns (watching a Mickey Mouse movie) that the world wants (and needs) laughter more than it wants tragic drama. Until that point, I think Sullivan’s Travels is something of a masterpiece, a brilliant blend of the sober and the hilarious. But the ending doesn’t work. It’s too pat, too easy, too comfortable and comforting. Which somehow doesn’t reduce my affection for it. It’s not Sturges’s best movie, but it has great heart and high ambition.
And some other virtues. Sturges was beginning to put together his stock company and here, for example, we find the splendidly choleric William Demarest working for him for only the second time. There was also Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Eric Blore and Jimmy Conlon—a group that is one of the glories of Sturges’s career.
So far Sturges had enjoyed only one solid hit, The Lady Eve, but otherwise everything was coming up roses for him. He was the critics’ darling, the most talked-about director of the moment and, in this period, a well-rewarded one—one year drawing the third-highest salary in the United States. He had a restaurant, The Players, which was a money pit but also, for a couple of years, the place in Hollywood everyone wanted to see and be seen in. His relationship with the studio was quarrelsome at times, but what could they do? Virtually every other studio would have signed him the minute he showed signs of restiveness. Best of all, there is nothing in the record to show that he was denied any project he proposed.
He followed Sullivan’s Travels with The Palm Beach Story, in 1942. It is a cheerful and frenzied movie, in which a delightful Claudette Colbert takes off from New York for the title city in search of a husband, although, in fact, she already has one of those in the form of McCrea, an inventor in desperate need of capital for a visionary airport he wants to build. Much merriment is supplied by Rudy Vallee, as a prissy millionaire, by the Ale and Quail Club (don’t ask) and by the vagaries of a deliciously surprising farcical plot. It’s not, finally, top-of-the-line Sturges, but it’ll do. Its largest pleasures take place alongside the plotline, not directly in it.
Take, for instance, the Wienie King, gloriously played by Robert Dudley. He’s an accidental millionaire, inventor of a variant on the hot dog, a product he refuses to eat. Mostly, he is sort of a freelance philosopher-poet, immortally reciting this poem (of Sturges’s devising) to Colbert, who cannot restrain herself from genuine, unscripted giggles as he intones:
Cruel are the hands of time—
that creep along relentlessly
Destroying slowly,
But without pity
That which yesterday was young.
Alone our memories
resist this disintegration—
And grow more lovely
with the passing years.
Of the hundreds of funny, poignant lines Sturges wrote, none are funnier, I think, yet more oddly touching, than these. The sequence always gets a big laugh in the theater. But there is something authentically sad and sobering about it as well. It bespeaks the seriousness of purpose that underlays much of Sturges’s work, which he was quick to get out of with a joke or a diversion of some sort.
Except when he didn’t. That is more or less what happened when he forged ahead with a seriously intended enterprise called The Great Moment, which became the first disappointment of his directorial career, though one that, at the time, did not particularly waylay it. If people thought about it at all, its lessons seemed more salutary than discouraging.
It is based on a book called Triumph Over Pain, by René Fülöp-Miller, a biography of W. T. G. Morton, the discoverer of ether as a pain killer. One is somewhat at a loss as to why Sturges was drawn to this material, but he began sketching out scripts for it as early as 1939. It’s said by some that an accident requiring fourteen stitches, administered without anesthetic, had focused him on the boon of pain relief. There is also the possibility that Morton had not particularly prospered, a situation that Sturges could relate to. Controversy clouded Morton’s claims about the material benefits of his work. The possibility that the great comic genius wanted to be taken seriously for a change cannot be entirely dismissed.
The studio didn’t much like the project but was reluctant to deny its leading director his heart’s desire—especially since Sturges was willing to insert into his script some comic riffs. So the mess proceeded, to some kind of dubious glory. Sturges insisted on Joel McCrea for the Morton role—the studio wanted a weightier presence—and he played the role essentially as a doofus, or possibly as a very lucky stiff. Conventional heroism was beyond this actor. His portrayal of Morton is sloppy. He basically stumbles to glory in his dimwit way. But he did start mankind on the road to one of its greatest boons.
Everyone was puzzled by the result, when The Great Moment was finally released, after a long delay, in late 1944. Where had their funny Preston gone? He was only occasionally on view here. And when he was, his comic passages fit uneasily with the more sober ones. The critics and the public—such of it as saw the film—were kind as they could be. But it was unquestionably a flop.
Yet I think we come close in this movie to the essence of Sturges. He thought, I believe, that the human race was stupid—good-natured, but really kind of dumb. His leading characters proved it time after time by sacrificing the better angels of their nature for some high-blown passion from which they were rescued, before the final fade-out, by the assertion of common sense, more or less uncommonly arrived at.
He has considerable compassion for his ordinary Joes and Janes. There’s not a mean or grasping bone in their bodies. They are likable lunkheads, doing their best to navigate life not only as it is, but as they think it might be in their most idealistic dreams. Life, of course, is armed with a huge supply of banana peels, which it scatters heedlessly in their paths.
This thought is not a critical commonplace in Sturges studies. At his best, he builds his comic worlds very reasonably and peoples them with seemingly sensible folks who act like lunatics but never once indicate that they are anything but completely normal. Other filmmakers dabble in this kind of thing, of course. But Sturges was unique in his total commitment to this—er—worldview. Maybe that’s why his career as a certifiable—another er—genius was so short, his fall from grace so sudden.
But not quite yet—not with two masterpieces, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero, on his agenda. The former is, of course, his comedy about virgin birth (and could anybody but Sturges get away with that premise in Hollywood’s prissy early-forties climate?). The latter is about a fraudulent war hero who just the same proves to have the highest virtues—the ones we were supposedly fighting for—in the small-town context that was already beginning to disappear when the film was made, in 1943.
Miracle is something of a literal miracle. When it finally went into release, James Agee thought the Production Code office had been “raped in its sleep.” For, yes, Betty Hutton, playing its heroine, Trudy Kockenlocker, has somehow gotten pregnant by a soldier named Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki, in circumstances she can only dimly recall. Eddie Bracken, playing Morgan Creek’s hapless 4-F, Norval Jones, is recruited to marry Trudy, which he eventually does after much farcical milling around. What he—and we—don’t know until the end is that Trudy is going to deliver sextuplets.
That’s about it for plot. Or maybe it isn’t a plot at all—just an endlessly complicated situation, a very frenzied and funny situation that ultimately very satisfactorily resolves itself. For all its fast-paced comings and goings, Morgan’s Creek seems to me a neat and trim farce, worked out, when you come to think of it, with no loose ends.
The picture’s release was delayed for something like a year while censorship hassles were worked out. But one of the minor miracles of Miracle was that Sturges delivered the picture he had set out to make, essentially without compromise. It has many felicities: Bracken is a great bumbler—he should have had more of a career—and Hutton is superb as Trudy. She, too, deserved more than she had in the movies.
She was, to be sure, a troubled, rebellious person (she ended up in a Catholic rectory, apparently content at last), but at least this once there is a freedom and freshness in her playing that is a revelation—not that she was all that bad in, say, Annie Get Your Gun or The Greatest Show on Earth. Her career lasted only about a decade. Yet she might console herself with this: According to David Thomson, she was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favorite actress.
I do not know what to make of that.
Miracle turned out to be, of all things, a smash hit. The reviews were only all right, but the public took it to heart. It was Paramount’s biggest hit of the year and the biggest hit of Sturges’s career, grossing some $9 million and earning a few Academy Award nominations as well. Sturges’s relationship with the studio was by this time deteriorating, but he owed them one more picture on his contract, and he pressed ahead with it.
Hail the Conquering Hero is really quite a simple film. Eddie Bracken is Woodrow Truesmith, 4-F but not telling anyone, working a modest job and getting servicemen to send letters home attesting to his valor in foreign fields. One night he meets a group of marines (led by William Demarest) and confesses his hoax. The marines present him as a hero to his hometown, and he gets away with his impersonation for a while. Eventually he is found out and temporarily disgraced, but he recovers his standing by the simple expedient of telling the truth. It is a sweet, lovely and quite modest little film that everyone liked. It was not a great hit, but it did all right. Sturges received simultaneous Oscar nominations (for writing) in 1944, losing to Lamar Trotti for Wilson.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 10