← New Books Network
New Books Network
Stuart Klawans, "Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (Columbia UP, 2023)
00:52:08
An interview with Stuart Klawans
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:01]
Stuart Klawans
Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch fix online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want, no subscription required. And he sends just for me, pieces, plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitchfix.com Spotify. That's stitchfix.com Spotify.
- [00:29]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Andy Boyd
Hello and welcome to the New Books in Performing Arts podcast, part of the New Books Network. My name is Andy Boyd. Today I'm talking with Stuart Klawans about his new book, Crooked But Never the Films of Preston Sturgis. Stuart, welcome to the program.
- [01:51]
Stuart Klawans
Thank you for having me. Really happy to be here.
- [01:53]
Andy Boyd
So I had an experience that's probably going to be familiar to a lot of Preston Sturges fans, which is, I showed my spouse the Lady Eve a couple of weeks ago as I was preparing for the interview, and they thought it was hilarious. Much more so than most other movies that came out in the 1940s. And I'm a. I'm a big old Hollywood fan. But I think it's fair to say that Preston Sturgis movies hold up comedically much better than most, even great Comedies of that era. Do you have any idea why that is?
- [02:33]
Stuart Klawans
Now, now you. Now you've asked the big question. Yes, yes.
- [02:37]
Andy Boyd
I thought I'd start with an easy one, kind of warm you up.
- [02:39]
Stuart Klawans
Let's start with the Gestalt, shall we?
- [02:42]
Andy Boyd
Yes.
- [02:44]
Stuart Klawans
Right. Sturgis is generally thought of as having written the best dialogue ever in Hollywood. And many people just concentrate on that aspect of his films. His dialogue across the board. For all characters, minor, major, whatever their backgrounds, whatever their status in life, the dialogue is always amazingly funny, amazingly clever. He himself said his great talent was an ability to spritz dialogue. My proposition in my new book is that he did a lot more than that. And if you look at his work as a director, which is what he longed to be and eventually was, it's the work. His work as a director and how he directed these screenplays is equally important as the dialogue, if not more important, actually. And it's a combination of this amazing, brilliant dialogue and. And not always obvious, but always very clever visual direction, direction of actors that makes the films hold up so brilliantly. That plus the final ingredient, which is his extraordinary cynicism, which I think continues to play well to people today, and a dark side that is half concealed in the films. So it's not all just fun and games. You really feel that there's something at stake.
- [04:24]
Andy Boyd
Yeah, yeah. You get a sense.
- [04:27]
Stuart Klawans
Is that too long winded an answer for you, Andy?
- [04:30]
Andy Boyd
No, not at all. That's fantastic. I think you've laid out a lot of the kind of stakes of the book just in that answer.
- [04:39]
Stuart Klawans
So where do we go from here?
- [04:41]
Andy Boyd
Where do we go from here? So let's. Your book is not a biography, but it might help to just give our audience a brief biographical sketch. You mentioned that he started. Well, maybe didn't start out as a screenwriter. Could you just give us a sense of who he was, where he came from, and how he became the first writer director of really great sound films in Hollywood? How did he get to that point?
- [05:07]
Stuart Klawans
Sure, he did not begin as a director. He did not begin as a writer. He began as a kind of international bum, or would be international playboy. Sturgis was born around the turn of the 20th century. His mother, Mary Dempsey, was a young Irish woman who had grown up poor in Chicago. She and her family lived on the kindness of an uncle who had a saloon back of the yards. Mary managed to work her way up in the world, remarkably, and I'll get to that in a moment. Sturgis's father was a guy named Biden, of all things. He wasn't around for very long. His main attraction seems to have been that he was a charming fellow who played the banjo and drank too much. By the time Sturgis young Preston, I should say was about 2 years old, Mary Dempsey was. She had just about had it. She had took off with him to Paris. She had decided she wanted to be a singer and she thought she would just study in Paris. When looking for a place to stay, she wound up being referred to the home of a Mrs. Duncan who was taking in people. Mrs. Duncan was the mother of Isadora Duncan. Before you knew it, Isadora Duncan and Mary Dempsey were best friends. Mary Dempsey changed her name to Marie. Dusty sounded better. And Preston spent his early years bouncing around Europe in the wake of his mother and his Adora Duncan. So as he put it, he was dragged through every museum in Europe, went to every opera performance. Of course, he was living in the midst of this wild new atmosphere of experimental dance in which Isadora Duncan was the priestess and goddess. Sturgis mother, meanwhile, managed to marry a. She married a stockbroker in Chicago, an older man named Solomon Sturgis, who became the adoptive father. Young Preston adored the man. So Preston Sturgis grew up in his own account, very uncomfortable with the crazy artsiness of his mother's crowd and very much emotionally tied to his adoptive father, Solomon Sturgis, who was a very solid, manly, business like guy. This framework of looking at Sturgis's life became very popular when he became a famous filmmaker because people interpreted the films as being dialogues or conflicts of these two sides of him. I would propose that this is way too simplistic a way of looking at it. The point being that he didn't do much with his life for many years except marry well, hang out on an estate in Connecticut. He was for many years his mother's business agent. This is back when he was a teenager in New York City. His mother had a cosmetics business that she had invented, the Maison d', esti, and Sturgis was running it for her when he was a teenager living on his own. But eventually, in the wake of romantic misfortune, he decided he had to do something with his life and he decided he'd be a playwright. It took him about a year, but in the early 19, late 1920s, I should say late 1920s, he had a smash hit on Broadway, a comedy called Strictly Dishonorable. Suddenly he was famous. He was rich. He married an even wealthier heiress than he had married before. He married Eleanor Hutton, who was the daughter of Marjorie Meriwether Post and her adoptive father was EF Hut. Which is how Sturgis wound up being a house guest at Mar a Lago when it was the Marjorie Meriwether Post estate. But that marriage didn't last either. The Broadway career nose dived. Eventually Sturgis found himself, more or less reluctantly, in Hollywood as a screenwriter for hire and worked his way up in the studio system until in late 1930s, he won the right to direct his own film films. He was, as you mentioned, really the first person in the studio system to write and direct films. It used to be that studio movies were written by relay teams of writers. It was highly unusual for a single person to have written an entire script. And Sturges had already been doing that at the studios. He became very highly regarded and well paid at Paramount. Eventually he managed to sell one of his scripts for the grand sum of $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it. That became his first writer director credit for the great McGinty. And that brings us up to when he gets into a string, really an unparalleled string of films written and directed amazing films. Something like 10 within eight years. At which point he crashed and burned his Hollywood career, more or less as the Broadway career had crashed and burned. We don't need to get into that sad story. But meanwhile, there were the glory years writing and directing his films. It would not be very significant if he were the first writer director in Hollywood history, if the films weren't very interesting. But the films are amazing. They're the crown jewels of American film comedy. So that in a few lines is the biography of Preston Sturges.
- [11:48]
Andy Boyd
Great. I think one thing that really comes through from that brief biographical sketch is just how wide his experience of humanity was. I mean, he knew. Sounds like he knew everybody from banjo playing bums to high society heiresses to Broadway show people. And that really comes through in the movies, that kind of intimate knowledge of people from a wide variety of walks of life.
- [12:12]
Stuart Klawans
Absolutely. When he does a high society scene, he does it as somebody who actually lived in high society. When he made the Lady Eve, he lent Paramount his own silver service so that the big dinner party scene in the mansion in Connecticut would be properly furnished. At the same time, he had lived among all sorts of raffish artists. He grew up bilingual. He was bilingual, not quite bilingual, very close to bilingual in French and English. When his mother used to drop him off places because she was tritzing around with Isadora Duncan and always coming back with A different man who had to be introduced to young Preston. There was one point when he was something like 4 or 5 years old when his mother left him with a farm family in France. And he was so young that by the time his mother showed up six months later, he thought that this farm family was his real family. So that's the way he grew up sometimes. Sometimes with, you know, in great luxury, sometimes with. With all sorts of arty people around him. And I don't think that he was as dismissive of them as he later told newspaper reporters when he was spinning his own legend for them. Because when you look at the films, they are full of all sorts of high art references, sometimes disguised. Because it was not considered a proper thing to do back in those days in Hollywood, maybe even in today's Hollywood, to. To parade your erudition about anything. But if you look at the way the films actually work, he's. He knows a lot about a lot of different things. So, yes, he had great, great knowledge of humanity. And was in many ways a much less biased filmmaker than you found in general in Hollywood. I'm thinking in particular of the really unparalleled climax of his film, Sullivan's Travels. It's a scene in a black church service which is so. So respectful of the black characters, so sensitive to them, so concerned with their dignity, that the scene almost can't be assimilated into classic Hollywood. There's really almost nothing like it.
- [15:11]
Andy Boyd
And didn't Walter White of the NAACP write a letter to Preston Sturgis thanking him for that scene?
- [15:17]
Stuart Klawans
Exactly. The executive director of the NAACP thanked him for it. I'm sure that today people can take exception to this or that aspect of it. And I don't want to exaggerate Sturgis as some kind of progressive, because he certainly was not. If anything, he was a rock ribbed conservative politically. But he really did not seem to accord at all with the general American, white, American bigotry against black people. He seemed to regard it with something of horror. That doesn't mean that he didn't work in menial black characters in his movies and sometimes mock them in ways that really make audiences uncomfortable today. And ought to have made them uncomfortable in the 1940s. But it's the exception to that that makes Sturges so fascinating. And I should point out that even with the menial black characters, he gives them terrific lines too. They have to have brilliant dialogue. Because just because they're black servants or Pullman porters doesn't mean they can't say Clever things.
- [16:47]
Andy Boyd
And they often seem more insightful about their kind of upper class. I don't know, employers or clients or customers than those people themselves. They often have that kind of. Kind of subaltern wit about them. Right. That they see things that other characters don't.
- [17:08]
Stuart Klawans
Absolutely. I'm thinking of Charles R. Moore and the role of the Pullman porter in the Palm beach story. When the husband comes looking for his absconded wife, who has been on a train with the richest man in the world, as it happens, on their way to Palm Beach. And when the husband asked whether his wife had gotten off the train alone, the Pullman porter says he give me 10 cents for New York to Jacksonville. She's alone, all right. She just doesn't know it yet.
- [17:45]
Andy Boyd
Pretty great line.
- [17:46]
Stuart Klawans
Yes, exactly. It's a pretty great line. Or when Ellen drew as the love interest in Christmas in July, toward the end of the film, asks a janitor whether a black janitor, whether it's having a black cat cross your path is a sign of bad luck. And the man just says, that all depends on what happens later.
- [18:20]
Andy Boyd
Pretty good. Pretty good stuff. It almost reminds me of Shakespeare in a way that, you know, I don't think Shakespeare was any kind of a feminist or anything like that, but just his desire to make all of his characters seem well rounded and lived in makes. Makes those interpretations of his plays feel somewhat credible. Like he has these strong female characters. He has, you know, in Merchant of Venice, Shylock is. Is obviously a villain, but is a well rounded, well motivated villain.
- [18:55]
Stuart Klawans
Do you.
- [18:55]
Andy Boyd
Do you feel like something. Something similar is going that, you know, despite his somewhat noxious politics, from my point of view, his best urges as an artist kind of save him from falling into those tribes of stereotype. Less for ethical reasons and more just for reasons of craft.
- [19:13]
Stuart Klawans
Yes, I agree with you completely. I think you've got it exactly. There are two levels to this. One of which is that Shakespeare was what we would call a whole language writer. He didn't isolate a particular diction for his plays. He was writing with the whole language available to him. High diction, low diction, everything in between. Same with Sturgis. He took delight in every level of language. And in the same way he took delight in giving every one of his characters something interesting to say. There was definitely a democratic impulse of sorts in the way he just gave. Made everybody funny, everybody clever. And that even extended to the characters who didn't have anything to say. Some of Sturges best gags come from characters who talk and talk and talk without really saying anything. And they don't realize that they're not saying anything, but they're hilarious while not saying it.
- [20:23]
Andy Boyd
One of the things you've talked a lot about Sturgis dialogue, which is obviously one of his finest qualities, but one thing that always strikes me about the films is how much kind of silly slapstick comedy there is in the films. He's sort of half Oscar Wilde, half Charlie Chaplin. Did he enjoy both styles of comedy equally, do you think?
- [20:46]
Marshall Poe
Or.
- [20:47]
Andy Boyd
Or did he feel like he kind of had to throw in the slapstick because that was the style of the day.
- [20:53]
Stuart Klawans
The slapstick that he did actually was not the style of the day. He revived some of that. The most notable way he revived that was when he made the film the Sin of Harold Dittelbach, where he got Harold Lloyd out of retirement to play the lead character and based the lead character on Harold Lloyd's 1920s character silent comedy, the Freshman. No, Sturges loved the slapstick. And you're right, one of the characteristics of his filmmaking is this very odd but very effective marriage of high style, elegance, worldliness, urbanity, with knockdown comedy. Now, while he enjoyed that, not all of his actors did. In the Lady. In the Lady Eve, you can see that Henry Fonda really doesn't appreciate what he's being made to do. But Henry Fonda was a great actor, and so he actually converts his discomfort, in fact his resentment, into the resentment and discomfort of the character. So Henry Fonda actually makes it work, but it's visible this is not something that he likes. You know, with other actors that he worked with, they were perfectly comfortable doing it. In the Palm beach story, he had Joel McCrae take it, tumble down a spiral staircase in a duplex apartment. And not only was Joel McCrae willing to do it for Sturgis, but Sturgis felt it was only fair that he should demonstrate to Joel McCrae how to do it. So before McCrae did it, Sturgis did it.
- [22:49]
Andy Boyd
So there's no effects there. They're just doing what it seems like they're doing.
- [22:54]
Stuart Klawans
No, no. I mean, it's sliding down a spiral staircase on a blanket. Yeah.
- [22:58]
Andy Boyd
Yeah. That's wonderful. Let's talk a little bit about his ensemble. There are a few lead actors that show up. A couple of times you've mentioned Joel McCrae from Palm Bead Story, who's also the lead in Sullivan's Travels, but there are also a who whole host of secondary characters, character actors that he returns to again and again. What do you think he was looking for in those actors, and how was he able to kind of use them to put flesh and blood on his scripts?
- [23:31]
Stuart Klawans
Great question, Andy. It's one of the most characteristic and delightful aspects of his films. Sturgis went around Paramount collecting actors who, for reasons of physiognomy and personality, were never destined to be stars.
- [23:54]
Andy Boyd
Pronounced Eastern European accents, et cetera.
- [23:58]
Stuart Klawans
Well, the one with the most notable Eastern European accent was Julius Tannen, who then played an arrogant Boston physician in Sturgis film Triumph Over Pain. Julius. Julius Tannen put on the Yiddish accent for him, but, yeah, he could do that perfectly. Sturgis collected more than a dozen of these bit players. Most of them, when they were already considered over the hill. He went. He went for the older ones and he used them again and again in his films. He saw that even though none of them was destined to be a star, each was capable of. Of contributing something marvelous to a film that each of them had had great things to give. And he saw that together they were more than a cast. They became a kind of human landscape for him or a social landscape, which was as important in the settings of his films as what the production designer gave him. So when you keep encountering these people over and over again in his films, part of the pleasure of watching his films is that you keep meeting these people over and over. Sometimes they give you the impression that life is just nothing but an endless round of the same old mugs again and again coming back in different ways. But they really do. They really do amount to a human landscape. And there was even a star among them because the principal member of what became known as his stock company was William Demarest. And though Demarest was never a star in any sense, Demarest did become a kind of star in Sturgis's films, taking two major roles, one in the Miracle of Morgan's Creek and the other in Hail the Conquering Hero. To the degree that anybody could have done it, Sturgis made William Demarest a star.
- [26:13]
Andy Boyd
And he's great in both films, it.
- [26:15]
Stuart Klawans
Should be said, everything he did for Sturgis.
- [26:20]
Andy Boyd
It's interesting how some of these. Some of the actors who form such an important part of his company afterwards go on to do movies that are, you know, much less distinctive and interesting than what they did for sturgis. Like Joel McCray just does Westerns for the last, like, 30 years of his career. You know, I mean, I kind of wonder, like, did they. Did they seek out being or did he? Did Sturgis Kind of seek them out or did. Were people kind of clamoring to be in his films or how did that process work?
- [26:51]
Stuart Klawans
Sturges went to Joel McCrae at Paramount and said, I'm going to write a role for you. I'm going to write a movie for you. And Joel McCrae commented later, when asked about that, that he hadn't believed it, that his response was, people write movies for Gary Cooper, not for me. But in fact, Sturgis wrote Sullivan's Travels and the Palm Beach Story and then Triumph Over Pain, all for Joel McCrae. Now, I have to say that toward the end of his life, Joel McCrae played the lead in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High country, which is, to me, clearly Joel McCray's greatest role, and he's fantastic in it. But yes, the Sturgis films, except for that, are absolutely the high point of Joel McCray's career.
- [27:45]
Andy Boyd
I want to ask you a little bit about Sullivan's Travels, which I get the sense that you maybe don't think quite as highly of film as some of the others, but for me, that's my. That's. That's the top. I think that's my. My favorite of his movies. Some people have interpreted as. As an allegory or a sort of autobiographical film, you know, kind of about. About him embracing comedy and embracing slapstick and. And kind of not trying to be as much of a, you know, capital A artist. But you kind of. You kind of dispute the autobiographical interpretation. Why is that?
- [28:22]
Stuart Klawans
There's definitely an autobiographical interpretation, but I don't think it's necessarily the easier, obvious one. That's the thing. And I'm very cautious about Sturgis, his own statements about that movie, as I'm cautious about his statements about all his movies. Every time he said something about his movies, he said something interesting and worth following up, but not necessarily something true. So when he. When he talked to me, he was a slippery guy. The reason this book is called Crooked But Never Common is because his films are crooked. They're not common in any way, but they're all crooked somehow. He was devious when he talked about Sullivan's Travels. For those listeners who may not know about it, this is a film about a very successful Hollywood director of musical and musicals and comedies who wants to do a social conscience movie, a tragic social conscience movie. And his producers really don't want him to do it, but he sort of has them over a barrel. The only way that they can discourage him is to tell them that he's he grew up too wealthy and has been too privileged to really know about human misery of the sort that he wants to depict. And therefore, so he can make such a film, he has to go out and learn something about humanity. That's what he learns eventually is that it's really good for him to make comedies and make people laugh.
- [29:59]
Andy Boyd
The producers are proven pretty much 100% right at the end.
- [30:02]
Stuart Klawans
Right, right. But then you have to start getting into the details and the nuances and where this doesn't work. Number one. Sturges said that he had made this film because he wanted to send a message to his fellow comedy directors who had gotten too serious, too self important, or as he put it in the jargon of the time, too deep dish. He wanted to tell them to stick to their business of making comedies. Now, if that's the purpose of making the film, then he is already completely undercut his message that directors should appeal to the audience and make them laugh because he's saying he's making a film to send a message to maybe half a dozen other Hollywood filmmakers. All right, that doesn't make much sense when you start thinking about which Hollywood filmmakers he's talking about. You don't have many. You have Capra, who was name checked in the film. But Capra's most egregious, self important political film went into production after Sturgis had begun making, had begun writing Sullivan's Travels. The only other person that you could talk about in these terms who might have applied would be Charlie Chaplin, who had made the Great Dictator. And I don't know that Sturgis really wanted to be saying that he needed to teach Charlie Chaplin lessons about anything. That's number one. He also wanted to see said ch when he wrote about this was to tell these film directors to leave the preaching to the preachers. Which is a very odd thing to say when, as we've mentioned, the climax of Sullivan's travels is a remarkable scene which centers on a sermon given by a black preacher in Southern church.
- [31:59]
Andy Boyd
Literal preaching in the climactic scene.
- [32:02]
Stuart Klawans
Yes. A literal preacher delivers the climax of the film. Yeah. And I note that the head of production at Paramount told Sturgis, cut the black preacher. And Sturgis disregarded his boss and left him in. So there's something more going on here than just Sturgis justifying his own life as a comedy director. There's something more to that and there's certainly something more than belittling directors who make serious social justice films. The film that the character wants to make the film director John L. Sullivan, played by Joel McCrae, he wants to film a novel by a guy named Beck Stein. If you turn around Bechstein's name, it's Steinbeck. And I don't think, think anybody who saw Sullivan's Travels when it came out could have ignored that. This was exactly the sort of film that John Ford had made. When he made the Grapes of Wrath, it was evidently possible to make a film about suffering humanity and win Academy Awards and have success at the box office. I think the point in the movie is that it wasn't possible for John L. Sullivan to do it. He's so good at musicals and comedies. He would be so bad at directing the Grapes of Wrath. That's the point as far as I'm concerned. And it's not that he's giving a defense across the board to making comedies. Actually, if you watch the film and you think about Sturges own career in the studios, there is this undertone of regret and even embarrassment at all the crap he'd had to do. Sturges. We remember Sturgess for the wonderful, sparkling comedies that he wrote before he became a director as well. Films like the Good Fairy, which he was directed by William Wyler. Fantastic film. But for every one of those, he was the screenwriter for five other films that were either completely worthless or that never got made at all, that they were canceled. For example, he was the screenwriter for a Jack Benny vehicle that somehow lost Jack Benny and then was never made. That was. That was his life as a writer in the studios. And I think that some of the discomfort and regret of that actually comes out in Sullivan's Travels and makes it a more affecting film and also helps to explain how some of these strange plays on genre in Sullivan's Travels, a film that's full of different genres of filmmaking, how some of these films within the film are really pretty crappy. Yeah, you know, they're really not quite defensible. So it's a film that has got brilliant, brilliant stuff in it. And then he's got. It's got sections that are kind of like the films that Sturges had to write and really didn't enjoy. And I think that a lot of this film is about his feelings about what if I'd been stuck forever doing that stuff? What if I hadn't escaped into being able to write and direct my own material?
- [35:49]
Andy Boyd
Yeah. Yeah. So it's. It's actually one of the things that. About the movie that always strikes me as paradoxical is that it's on its face, it. It is a movie endorsing, you know, the kind of lowest kind of common denominator, just going for laughs, comedy. But it is itself actually a very sophisticated. You're going to have Mult voiced satire and you're sort of suggesting. I guess I'm hearing you write that we should pay more attention to that subtext of it's actually somewhat the type of movie that it's advocating, rather than that it's advocating a type of movie. It itself is not. Right.
- [36:29]
Stuart Klawans
Right. I wouldn't say that we ought to be doing anything. I try not to give directions to people, but I think that we can enjoy Sullivan's Travels more, appreciate it more if we do pay attention to the various textures in the film and the complexities that are underlying it. One scene that I'd like to point out is a fairly early scene where Sullivan is carrying out an imposture with a young woman that he's picked up at a diner, or she thinks she's pick. Picked him up. It's not clear who picked up whom, but Joel McCray is driving around with Veronica Lake. Veronica Lake is an aspiring Hollywood actress. She has been introduced to Joel McCrae. He says that he used to do things in Hollywood and he knows people. And she's very eager to ask him about all these people. And she asked him, for example, about Ernst Lubricant Lubitsch, and wants to know about if it would be possible to get an introduction to Ernst Lubitsch. She's full of these questions. When he asks about one of the films that he's made called hey, hey, in the Hayloft, she laughs and laughs and carries on. He's ashamed of this film. Hey, hey, in the Hayloft. She loves it. She talks about it. She talks about her favorite scene in it. The only thing is she doesn't know the name of the person who directed it. So she knows. She knows Lubitsch. She knows the prince of the. Of the Hollywood comedy directors. But this guy, she doesn't know him. Yeah, yeah, there's a sting there.
- [38:19]
Andy Boyd
And that's. And that maybe reflects more Sturgis's feelings about being a kind of anonymous gun for hire screenwriter than his feelings about. Of being a director who by that point was pretty well known as a name director. Right?
- [38:31]
Stuart Klawans
Exactly. By the time he made Sullivan's Travels, he was famous. He was so famous that he could. And this in defense of Sullivan's Travels, it was an almost impossible project because it's not a film with a genre. You Know, Hollywood had to be able to tell people what kind of movie are they going to see? Is it a western, Is it a musical? Is it a comedy? Is it a melodrama? Is it something ripped from today's headlines? Sullivan's Travels is none of those things and all of those things. And to get away with making such a mixed up movie, that was amazing. He was able to do that because he had become famous. But you're right in what you say. I think there's a sting from back in the days when he was just an anonymous writer in the Bungalows.
- [39:29]
Andy Boyd
One criticism I've read from other writers on Sturgis is that even though he made a lot of great films, he never made a single film that can be sort of considered a perfect film where every moment works exactly how it's meant to. Do you agree with that or do you think that he has one or two films that you would put in that category?
- [39:50]
Stuart Klawans
He said that the favorite of his, his own favorite among his films was Hail the Conquering Hero. And his reason for that was. He said there was less wrong with it than any of the others. You know, he saw, he's. He saw the faults magnified, I'm sure.
- [40:09]
Andy Boyd
Yeah.
- [40:10]
Stuart Klawans
I don't think that there are any of his films that. That are perfect all the way through, but I don't know too many films that I would call perfect all the way through. It's a very hard thing to do to make a perfect movie. It has been done, but it's really hard. I would say that Sturgess films are brilliantly constructed. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was. Was get beyond the sparkle of the dialogue, get under the hood of these movies and look at how they're put together. Because the construction is. Is absolutely amazing. He was a master at how to handle screen time. He was a master at making contrasts and making links, among things. So there. For most of these films there's a consistency, there's a coherence. And it's not just structural, it's also. It's also thematic. It's thematic and it's characterological because he thought through all of the characters so carefully and so deeply. He wanted to be sure that every character had his or her reasons and that the audience could understand what those reasons were. And in that sense, I would put him right up there with Jean Renoir with his statement in Rules of the Game that the terrible thing is that everybody has his reasons. The difference with Sturgis, it's the wonderfully Funny thing is that everybody has his reasons.
- [41:52]
Marshall Poe
Yeah.
- [41:52]
Andy Boyd
Yeah. You mentioned a few of his kind of themes that appear in film after film. And I think you do a really great job in the book of showing, demonstrating film by film, how Sturgis's movies really do have that kind of inner core of meaning, that kind of consistent worldview that somebody like Andrew Sarris so valued in directors of this time. Could you kind of give us some. I know I don't expect you to give us a kind of schematic, you know, philosophy, but what are some of the elements of his kind of inner core of meaning that. That stay pretty consistent throughout the films?
- [42:32]
Stuart Klawans
I think I'll give you one big one. And it was important to me to be able to develop this in writing the book because the book consists of an introduction that's not quite an introduction, a conclusion that's not quite a conclusion. And in the middle, there are 10 chapters, one for each of the major films. And frankly, I was concerned whether people would want to read a chapter on this film, then a chapter on that film, then a chapter on the next film, and so forth. So it was crucial to me that I could find connections among them. And one of the biggest connections that I found and one of the greatest emotional underpinnings was this underlying, not just fear, but horror of being stuck in the same thing forever. That you just get stuck in the same thing. Now, you see this in a lot of the structures of the films. A lot of the films are circular in structure. They are flashback films. They return you to where you began. They return the characters to the condition of where they began. There are really explicit expressions of dread about being stuck in the same thing. In Sullivan's Travels, when the director, John L. Sullivan, goes out on the road to try to learn about humanity so that he can direct a great film. Every time he goes out on the road, somehow he winds up being dumped back in Beverly Hills. And he complains about it. And he says out loud, it's like there's this underlying law where you began, that's where you shall remain. He the honor that he has. What makes him an honorable character is he wants to escape, but he can't get away. But you find this in other characters as well in all the films that they get stuck. One of the reasons that I love the Lady Eve best of all is because it's the film where the characters wind up exactly where they began. And somehow, magically, they break out at the last moment. That's the only one where that happens. But Other than that, it's very typical for them to wind up right back where they started.
- [45:09]
Andy Boyd
Do you see the influence of his mother in that? I mean, she was somebody who was certainly never satisfied with where she started or any of the places along the journey, it seems. It seemed like she kind of had that.
- [45:21]
Stuart Klawans
That.
- [45:22]
Andy Boyd
That inner drive to constantly be searching for some new way to make a life. Do you think that in some ways his films are. Are kind of a tribute to that aspect of her?
- [45:33]
Stuart Klawans
I. I think one film in particular, but more generally, Sturgis wrote films with not all of them, but a number of them, with wonderful character, with wonderful parts for women. Very strong women who really take things on themselves. There's the character of first the secretary, then the wife in the great McGinty. There is Eve Jean in the Lady Eve. And then there's especially Jerry Geraldine in the Palm Beach Story, who wants to be an adventurous and goes out to do it. She goes to Palm beach to divorce her stolid, no fun husband and make a life and a career for herself before it's too late. And I really feel this film is a tribute to his mother, who, as you say, is somebody who just went running for her freedom and running for her happiness. And toward the end of her life. She even spoke to Sturgis about that when she was dying. She said that she knew it had been hard for him when he was a kid, but she hoped that he understood she was just trying to be happy. That's exactly what the character of Geraldine, played by Claudette Colbert, is doing in the Palm beach story. She's just running for her happiness.
- [47:08]
Andy Boyd
And in that way, I think this is maybe a departure from a lot of films and novels of that day, where this idea of the American dream of setting out and making a life for yourself in your own image was really coming under a lot of criticism. But he seems to think actually that's a pretty good idea. Well, by hook or by cross, right?
- [47:35]
Stuart Klawans
I don't think that it's an exclusively American idea, I have to say. I think that there's been a lot of writing about Sturgis that talks about the American lust for success being his great theme. Certainly people in his films are running for success, but people in other cultures do that too. Yes, He loved characters who wanted to make something of themselves, but he also loved characters who just found themselves without any justification, having great streaks of luck. One of the last films that he did, just as a screenwriter, the film was directed by Marshall Nealon, was Easy Living, which is a Film about a young secretary played by Jean Arthur, who's just taking the bus on her way to work one day. A double decker bus. So she's on the upper level in the open air and a very, very, very valuable sable coat just falls on her from the sky. Literally, just fortune falling from the sky. It turns out that a very rich man in the penthouse apartment above has had a dispute with his wife and in anger he's thrown her sable coat over the parapet so it lands on the young woman. But he's. Sturgis has any number of films where good luck fortune just arrives by chance and people deal with it and it's not because of any great virtue on their part. So is he endorsing the idea that you work hard and get ahead and succeed? Not really. He's endorsing the idea that people want to get ahead and succeed. But you could be like the character of Jimmy in Christmas in July, who spends all this time entering contests thinking that he's going to make a fortune by entering contests. And he thinks he's won one of these contests when he comes up with a slogan for a coffee company. But his slogan is completely incomprehensible or almost incomprehensible. The trouble with the slogan is it keeps teasing you. It almost makes sense.
- [50:09]
Andy Boyd
Yeah.
- [50:10]
Stuart Klawans
And he's tricked into thinking he's actually won the contest.
- [50:14]
Andy Boyd
And it's premised on the idea that caffeine doesn't actually keep you up at night. Right. That's part of the. That's like part of the assumption of the. Yeah, the.
- [50:22]
Stuart Klawans
The slogan which becomes an earworm by the third or fourth time you've heard it is if you can't sleep at night, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk. You can see it in light so many different ways. And. And it's also mangled in so many different ways in the film. It's. It's his great brain wave. But as his girlfriend says late in the film, trying to justify him, he thinks he has ideas.
- [50:55]
Andy Boyd
Yeah. So it's maybe not this sort of Horatio Alger story, though it should be said he does actually win the contest. You know, terrible slogan and awe, a.
- [51:09]
Stuart Klawans
Terrible slogan and all. But it's the dumbest character in the film who hands him the victory. So what are you gonna do?
- [51:17]
Andy Boyd
Yeah, sure. Great. Well, Stuart, thank you so much for talking with me about your book. I really learned a lot about Preston Sturgis and I feel like you've given me kind of new goggles to look at the films with. So thank you so much for that. And I hope people run out and get the book, and I hope it leads them back to some of the most delightful films in Hollywood history.
- [51:39]
Stuart Klawans
Thank you so much, Andy. I really appreciate it.