Preston Sturges: More Than Comedy

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“The most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in cinema history.” -Andrew Sarris
The first writer-director of Hollywood’s sound era, given unprecedented permission to translate onto celluloid a script entirely of his own devising, Preston Sturges went into production on his first feature, the uproariously cynical fable of big-city politics The Great McGinty, in December 1939. By the time he wrapped his last movie at Paramount, four and a half years later, he had made eight of film history’s most hilarious and utterly idiosyncratic pictures, won one Oscar, created the box-office smash of 1944, and single-handedly hog-tied the censors of the Production Code Authority.
Sturges’s ability to, as he put it, “spritz dialogue”-letting his characters shower the audience from every angle with giddy, startling, constantly inventive language-has won him a reputation as one of the wittiest of all filmmakers. His paradoxical narrative method-combining sophisticated attitudes and settings with raucous slapstick and a stock company of the humblest mugs on the Paramount lot-created a comedic style that is widely influential and (in another paradox) unrepeatable. But for all that, critics have often been grudging about accepting Sturges as one of the great filmmakers-on a par, for example, with Orson Welles, his fellow displaced Midwesterner and Broadway veteran, who almost beat him to the “first writer-director” credit.
Featuring three films written by Sturges and directed by others, along with works from the peak of his career at Paramount, this series invites you to look again, more closely, at the most astonishing films of this singular talent-to discover the cleverly concealed depths, near-obsessive rigor, and directorial flair that make them classic comedies, and something more than comedies.
-Stuart Klawans
We are delighted that film critic Stuart Klawans, author of the recent Crooked but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, will join us to discuss three of Sturges’s films. Guest curated by Klawans and coordinated at BAMPFA by Kathy Geritz. There will be a book signing on Sunday, July 30, at 6:30, prior to the screening of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.