PRESTON STURGES has made six satirical movies famous for their ability to make you laugh out loud and at length, with comedy that is a modernized sophistication of Mack Sennett—but no daintier. Sturges trips his characters just as hard, sticks as big pins in them, throws as much food at them as Sennett ever did, but unlike him, Sturges uses the slapstick technique to point up their personalities; it is not so completely a matter of getting to the nearest cliff to fall off. In his continuous invention, and especially his somersaulting pace, he recalls Sennett, and also in his unconcern for the niceties of screen art (in contrast to the delicacies of Chaplin or Clair). Sturges’ potential position as a screen creator becomes really important, I think, on a lesser known movie, “Christmas in July,” and his poorest one, “Sullivan’s Travels.” The former didn’t have a cinematic moment in it but it was a startling movie. Camouflaged by a Cinderella story, it had as hard and clear thinking in social criticism as has come out of Hollywood, when, at intervals throughout, representative victims of industry delivered sincere, warmly human monologues on what success meant to them, their chances of getting it, their bewilderment and their fear. “Sullivan’s Travels,” unlike his other movies, was immature in its philosophy, formless, and without a single discerning characterization; but it had an astonishing display of film technique. Taking the best qualities of all his movies, it is apparent that Sturges is the most progressively experimental worker in Hollywood (aside from the cartoon-makers) since the early days.
He is essentially a satirist without any stable point of view from which to aim his satire. He is apt to turn his back on what he has been sniping at to demolish what he has just been defending. He is invariably mean, with few of the human overtones that give poignancy to Chaplin and Clair, contemptuous of everybody except the opportunist (“The Great McGinty”) and the unscrupulous little woman who, at some point in every picture, labels the hero a poor sap.
This explains a lot of the freedom that Sturges has fortunately been allowed. He champions nothing, and he gives his employers enough of what they want in the way of box office—his pictures always have their full share of leg art, strip tease and Hays-office morality to pad his own idea of life. That the invariable fairy godfather of each picture is not only expressive of his own cold-blooded cynicism but of typical Hollywood fantasy is an example of how this works. Another phase of his attack is shrouding in slapstick the fact that the godfather pays off not for perseverance or honesty or ability but merely from capriciousness.
His latest comedy, “The Palm Beach Story,” has scenes as wholeheartedly funny as anything can be, most of them coming in the first third of the picture. It is a freshening up of some old movie characters, a worn-out plot, and a number of ancient laugh-getters like the burp, all of which Sturges manages to carry just a step past their usual treatment. For instance, his deaf man either hears nothing or the wrong thing, and asks “What’s that you say?” as all deaf men do in the movies; but Sturges gives him the quality of a disembodied spirit, believably a pixie—or “The Wienie King.” When the heroine tries to climb into an upper berth, she does step on Lower Berth’s face. The difference Sturges gets is that the injured party only asks that she pick the pieces of broken spectacles out of his eyes. The puppets for Sturges’ satire range from John D. Hackensacker III (“tipping is un-American”) to Rudy Vallee (“you have a nice little voice”). Vallee plays the Rockefeller role (so deftly under Sturges’ direction that he will probably be the most talked-of movie birth for sixty days), but it is indicative of Sturges’ frivolity as well as invention that part of the time the satire of this character is aimed at Rudy Vallee, not Rockefeller.
The moth-eaten story for this movie causes the comedy to drop after the first third; after that Sturges’ smartness only partially relieves it. Very irritating is a latter-day failing of his, an unbounded delight in his ability to write witty dialogue, not one line of which he will forgo. It is important to see “The Palm Beach Story” from the beginning: as an experiment Sturges does a miniature movie while the credits are being shown. This brief business, it seems to me, is as funny as anything that comes afterward up until the last shot.
December 21, 1942