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Preston Sturges, A True Independent
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19736 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
1,676 Words |
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David D'Arcy
David D'Arcy broadcasts on cultural matters on National Public
Radio. |
One of Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriters in the 1930s, Preston Sturges by the mid-1940s had become one of its most original directors. His best work represents a unique, quintessentially American period blend of satire laced with cynicism never to be repeated. A darling of film students, historians, and discerning critics, Sturges' oeuvre is at last receiving wide recognition.
The director's own witty memoirs were published last year for the first time, as well as a new biography, Donald Spoto's Madcap, which examined Sturges' family background, his early years, and lively love life. MCA-Universal Home Video, which owns the rights to all his films, has released seven of them so far. Retrospectives of Sturges' entire output are appearing in theaters: films he directed, films with screenplays, films on which he collaborated, and even those in which he appeared as an actor.
This surge of interest in Sturges shouldn't come as a surprise. His discontent with the structure of American society is fining responsive chords among today's film buffs and critics today. The Power and the Glory (1933), for which Sturges wrote the screenplay, is the saga of the rise and fall of an American tycoon, remarkable for its narrative innovation as much as for its dramatic power and its dark vision of the rewards of the entrepreneurial life. The Great McGinty (1940), which Sturges wrote and directed, ranks among Hollywood's best and funniest treatments of political corruption. So too, Sullivan's Travels (1942) remains one of Hollywood's sharpest satires of its own commercialism and hypocrisy. And the Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), a riotous fable of a small-town girl's unfortunate pregnancy by a soldier she can't remember--the result of a frenzied wartime send-off party--is a comic masterpiece of iconoclastic folk wisdom.
Sturges' career as a playwright, which culminated in the long-running Broadway hit Strictly Dishonorable (1929-1931), was followed by three flops and the breakup of his second marriage, giving him the impetus to start over on the West Coast. Sturges' first assignment was to adapt H.G. Wells' novel The Invisible Man for Universal. His script, intended for Boris Karloff, bore little resemblance to the book and was never used.
With no studio contract, Sturges then began a project that he hoped would change the writer's position in the film business. The Power and Glory, which starred the young Spencer Tracy in the tale of a streetfighter's rise to the top of the railroad industry, was inspired by the life of breakfast food
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