Crooked, but Never Common
The Films of Preston Sturges
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948—The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them—all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs.
In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads—discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight—and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers—and funnier than ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Director and screenwriter Preston Sturges (1898–1959) is one of Hollywood's underappreciated greats according to this fascinating study from the Nation film critic Klawans (Left in the Dark). He argues that while Sturges "changed film history, as the first person in Hollywood's sound era to direct movies" from scripts he wrote, his work has been neglected in part due to his films' status as commercial productions. In an effort to correct the record and show them as "meaningful" and "intellectually coherent," Klawans offers close readings of 10 of Sturges's films. The Great McGinty (1940) is "the product of an imagination so diagrammatic that each wisecrack seems to be connected by a straight line to its balancing retort," while 1944's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek combines "pure farce—spiraling plot complications, acrobatic pratfalls—with characterizations that are deeper than they need to be, if the goal were just to incite laughter." And when addressing who Sturges's final film, 1948's Unfaithfully Yours, "was for," Klawans posits "later generations." What emerges is a portrait of a director with a gift for character development and "head-spinning dialogue executed at high speed" by an author with a keen critical eye and plenty of flair in his own writing. Film buffs will relish this.
