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Tuesday, May 9 | 5 Movies

In the 1930s and 1940s, Preston Sturges’ career as a writer-director made him one of the highest-paid people in the United States. Ten years later, his career was all but over, but he left behind some of the best comedies of the Golden Age of Hollywood, seven of which were made in only four years, from 1940-1944. 

Born in Chicago on August 29, 1898, to Edmund Biden and his wife Mary Dempsey, Sturges’ parents divorced when he was an infant. His mother, whose lovers included the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, remarried several times, including to a man named Solomon Sturges, who adopted her son, a fact that Preston Sturges would only learn when he was eight. He saw his biological father once as an adult, but he left after Edmund Biden insulted Sturges’ mother. At 32, in what could have been taken from a Sturges comedy, he received a letter from Biden demanding that he repay him for a doctor bill incurred when Sturges was a baby.

As a child, Sturges lived in Paris, where his mother struck up a friendship with famed dancer Isadora Duncan, with whose dance company Sturges and his mother traveled around Europe. Legend has it that the scarf that killed Duncan when it was caught in the wheels of her car came from Mary Sturges’ shop in Paris. Sturges would consider France his second home, and his mother had to send him back to the United States at the outbreak of World War I so he wouldn’t join the French military. Two years later, at eighteen, he joined the United States Army Service and graduated at the level of lieutenant. It was at this time that he began to write. 

After the war, his stepfather got him a job as a runner at the New York Stock Exchange, and later his mother, who had relocated to New York and opened the exclusive shop Desti Emporium, hired her son as a manager. While there, Sturges, an amateur inventor, reportedly created a “kiss proof” lipstick.

A chance remark steered Sturges towards playwriting in 1928. At the time, he was dating an actress who told him that not only did she find him boring, she was only dating him to get material for a play she was writing. Angered, Sturges replied that he, too, could write a play and that his would be more successful. The result was “The Guinea Pig.” After it was completed, Sturges learned that the actress had lied to him about writing a play, but his prediction of success proved correct. “The Guinea Pig” opened in Massachusetts and within a year was on Broadway. At 30, Sturges had found his calling. His second play, “Strictly Dishonorable,” was written in six days and was a smash on Broadway, running for 16 months. It also made him rich, with a payout of $300,000, or $5 million in today’s dollars. “Strictly Dishonorable” would be adapted for the screen in 1951 starring Janet Leigh and Ezio Pinza. 

Sturges went to Hollywood in 1932 and was briefly employed as a writer with several studios, including Warner Bros. and Universal (who paid him $3000 a week during the height of the Great Depression), before he sold his screenplay, The Power and the Glory (1933), to the Fox Film Corporation for their star, Spencer Tracy. Its plot supposedly inspired Herman Mankiewicz when he was writing Citizen Kane (1941), since The Power and the Glory examined the life of a wealthy man, told in a non-linear narrative. It is said that Sturges based the main character on financier C.W. Post, who was the grandfather of Sturges’ former wife, heiress Eleanor Hutton. Producer Jesse Lasky called the screenplay “perfect,” and required no changes. Lasky stunned Hollywood when he paid Sturges $17,500 and promised him 7% of the film’s profits after it made its first $1 million, something that was unheard of for a screenwriter at that time.

It was at Paramount where Preston Sturges would make the films for which he is best remembered. At first, he was strictly a screenwriter, but he grew increasingly unhappy with the way directors were handling his snappy dialog, particularly Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), and knew he could do a better job. He offered to sell Paramount a script called “The Vagrant” for only $10 if he could direct the film himself. “The Vagrant” had been written in 1933 as a film for Spencer Tracy, which Sturges attempted to sell to Universal in 1935. When they passed on it, he retooled it in 1938 and tried to sell it as a magazine story to The Saturday Evening Post, who also turned it down. Paramount agreed to let Sturges direct, and “The Vagrant” became The Great McGinty (1940), starring Brian Donlevy as a crooked governor whose political career is ruined when he becomes honest. With it, Sturges became one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood to direct their own scripts, and the first writer to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The success of The Great McGinty was the start of a four-year run that would be the height of Sturges’ career. During that time, he would write and direct Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Sullivan’s Travels (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). 

The Lady Eve, based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, was originally titled “Two Bad Hats,” with the studio considering Joel McCrea, Paulette Goddard and Madeleine Carroll for the leading roles that would go to Henry Fonda as wealthy herpetologist and heir to an ale fortune Charles Pike, and Barbara Stanwyck as female con artist Jean Harrington. In the film, Pike falls in love with Jean while on a cruise ship but breaks up with her when he discovers that she is out to scam him. Later, he meets and marries the “British” Lady Eve Sidwich, who looks exactly like Jean. The New York Times called The Lady Eve the best picture of the year, and it remains a classic screwball comedy.

Sturges had grown tired of what he considered “preachy” Hollywood films, and in response, wrote Sullivan’s Travels. In it, a Hollywood director goes undercover to do an exposé on poverty in the United States and ends up realizing that comedy can be as important as social drama. Joel McCrea starred as director “Sully” Sullivan, with Paramount’s rising star Veronica Lake as “The Girl” who loves him and Sturges himself can be seen playing a cameo role as a director on a film set. Sullivan’s Travels went into production on May 12,1941 and wrapped on July 22nd, with a budget of $689,665, going over by $86,665. The film was released on January 28, 1942, seven weeks after the United States entered World War II, and the government’s Office of Censorship wouldn’t allow Sullivan’s Travels to be exported overseas because of “the long sequence showing life in a prison chain gang which is most objectionable because of the brutality and inhumanity with which the prisoners are treated,” which they feared could be used by the enemy as anti-American propaganda. The Office of Censorship offered to export it if certain cuts were made, but Paramount refused. One person who was very pleased with the film was Walter White, the Secretary of the NAACP, who wrote Sturges to thank him “for the church sequence in Sullivan's Travels. This is one of the most moving scenes I have seen in a moving picture for a long time. But I am particularly grateful to you, as are a number of my friends, both white and colored, for the dignified and decent treatment of Negroes in this scene.” On its release, The New Yorker called Sullivan’s Travels “pretentious,” but The New York Times named it “the most brilliant picture yet this year.”

Sturges immediately followed this with another film with Joel McCrea, The Palm Beach Story, a screwball comedy in which Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert), wife of a poor architect leaves her husband, Tom (McCrea) because she believes she is holding him back in his career. Gerry plans to marry a Palm Beach millionaire so she can fund Tom’s projects, but finds herself in a jam when he turns up unexpectedly in Palm Beach. The film originally had the controversial title, “Is Marriage Necessary?”, which was rejected by the censors who also had issues with the screenplay. They felt that marriage and divorce were treated too lightly, and many parts were too sexually suggestive. The Palm Beach Story revitalized the career of singer Rudy Vallee, whose performance as millionaire John D. Hackensacker was so strong that it earned him a contract with Paramount. 

Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero starred Eddie Bracken as a man whose lifelong ambition to be a Marine like his late father is dashed when he is dismissed from the service because of chronic hay fever. Unable to bear the rejection, he writes his mother that he is overseas with the Marines, but when he returns home he finds, to his horror, that his entire town thinks he’s a hero and has turned out to celebrate his return. The cast included Sturges’ regular William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn and Raymond Walburn, with Ella Raines as Bracken’s girlfriend. The casting of Raines would cause Sturges a lot of problems with Paramount because the studio chiefs didn’t want her in the role and demanded that Sturges recast the part. Sturges, who had already begun production, refused. His relationship with the studio was already strained because of their censoring the two films he had completed, but had yet to be released, the risqué The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and the historical drama The Great Moment (1944), which would end up bombing at the box office. Sturges left the studio, and it is believed that producer B.G. DeSylva recut the film after a bad preview in New York. However, DeSylva’s cut did not fare any better, and Sturges returned to rewrite and reshoot the ending in April 1944. Ironically, Sturges was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 

At this point, Sturges’ luck seemed to have run out. He had a short-lived independent venture called California Pictures Corporation with billionaire Howard Hughes, but it only resulted in one failed film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), starring silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. The following year, he wrote and directed Unfaithfully Yours (1948) about a conductor (Rex Harrison) imagining ways to murder the wife he thinks is unfaithful to him, played by Linda Darnell, which would be re-made in 1984 starring Dudley Moore. Sturges’ last film of the 1940s was The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949) with Betty Grable, which was not a hit.

In the 1950s, things got worse. Katharine Hepburn was interested in making George Bernard Shaw’s “The Millionairess” with Sturges, but they could not get any studio to back a Sturges-directed film. Unable to get work in Hollywood, and having squandered his fortune on various business ventures, he returned to France where he directed his final film, The French, They Are a Funny Race (1955), which he adapted from Pierre Daninos’ book, “The Notebooks of Major Thompson.”

Preston Sturges returned to the United States and was writing his memoirs at New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel when he died of a heart attack on August 6, 1959.