by ·Comments Off on The Great Moment (1944, Preston Sturges)

Released the same month as Hail the Conquering Hero, Sturges at the top of his game with his regular comedy collaborators: Joel McCrea as the straight-man dentist, with appearances by Franklin Pangborn and Georgia Caine and Porter Hall, and yet another Betty co-lead – not Hutton or Grable but Field (of Renoir’s The Southerner). Twisting the concept of WC Fields as a big-nosed patient-hating dentist, McCrea empathizes with his patients and fights the establishment to advocate for painkillers in the form of ether. If that doesn’t sound like a madcap comic premise, well… it’s not… I’m sorry, this is just a dull historical drama. William “Muggsy” Demarest does liven up the movie in the second half, first as the doctor’s biggest failure (he has a bad reaction to the treatment and experiences an office-destroying war flashback then jumps out a second-floor window) then as his biggest advocate, following the doctor around and humorously/tediously proselytizing for ether treatment.

Betty gets mad after McCrea chased her dog with a bottle of ether:

So, what happened here?

Alessandro Pirolini in The Cinema of Preston Sturges:

Triumph Over Pain, Sturges’s original script for a movie that was re-edited and released by Paramount as The Great Moment. In the script (and in the original cut), Sturges had created a complex non-chronological flashback structure that shifted back and forth between flashback and framing story, with Lizzie Morton and Eben Frost taking turns both as narrator and narratee

Pirolini compares the original script to Terence Davies: “with the ultimate goal of portraying the act of remembering, instead of the events remembered … the studio’s re-editing was mainly intended to ‘correct’ the non-chronological order of flashbacks, in order to normalize the narrative structure.”

A normal patient in the pre-ether days:

James Curtis in Between Flops says the studio-proposed title was Great Without Glory, and the movie was butchered by Buddy DeSylva, a songwriter turned producer, who’d written “Button Up Your Overcoat” and co-founded Capitol Records. Curtis quotes Sturges: “My next picture is coming out in its present form over my dead body. The decision to cut this picture for comedy and leave out the bitter side was the beginning of my rupture with Paramount. They did the same thing to Hail the Conquering Hero, but through a last-minute maneuver I was able to get the picture back into shape. I was unable to do so in the case of The Great Moment. The dignity, the mood, the important parts of the picture are in the ash can.”

Muggsy fainting in the operating theater:

How is this helpful?

Stuart Klawans in Crooked but Never Common:

In 1938, amid a small wave of enthusiasm in Hollywood for tales of crusading scientists — The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) — Paramount bought the rights to a history of surgical anesthesia, Triumph Over Pain, by René Fülöp-Miller, and hired [Samuel] Hoffenstein to work up a biopic … Sturges kept it alive … and asked to take over from Hoffenstein as screenwriter … By the time Sturges had [The Palm Beach Story] in the can, the script for Triumph Over Pain had lain in his drawer for more than two years. He might easily have left it to die of suffocation. Instead, he lobbied Paramount to green-light Triumph Over Pain and began revising the script again in February 1942.
…
By late April 1943 the [recut] picture, now retitled The Great Moment, was ready for release.
But it wasn’t released. Neither was The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Paramount held them both back while Sturges finished shooting Hail the Conquering Hero. Mixed responses to the previews of the latter film, in late 1943, prompted DeSylva to subject it to a fate similar to that of Triumph Over Pain … When Paramount at last released The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, in January 1944, it immediately vindicated Sturges, becoming his greatest box-office hit. The next month brought further vindication: Paramount previewed DeSylva’s reedited Hail the Conquering Hero to a dismal response. When Sturges offered to return to Paramount to fix the picture, without salary, the studio could only say yes. But when Sturges subsequently appealed to DeSylva’s boss, Y. Frank Freeman, to let him do the same for Triumph Over Pain, the answer was a flat no.

by ·Comments Off on The Good Fairy (1935, William Wyler)

Pretty-good movie with convoluted plot based on a Hungarian play with English dialogue rewritten by Preston Sturges. Wyler didn’t have a knack for this sort of thing. Comic timing is off from the start, and the Frank Morgan character crosses the line from annoying the protagonist to annoying the audience, but the second half seems to settle into a nice groove, thanks to the soothing influence of actor Herbert Marshall.

Margaret Sullavan (of The Shop Around The Corner, also set in Budapest) is quite good anyway. She’s an orphan recruited by Alan Hale (does he buy her? adopt her?) to work at his movie theater. Trying to avoid sexual harrassment in the street she latches onto sensitive, protective Detlaff (Reginald Owen, Scrooge a few years later), who works as a waiter at a restaurant where she meets wealthy, sexually aggressive annoyance Konrad (Frank Morgan, Sullavan’s costar again in Shop Around The Corner) who works for hilarious drunken gov’t minister Eric Blore.

Through a series of preposterous events, Margaret, who wants only to be a “good fairy” and help others, gets Konrad to enrichen randomly-selected destitute & honest (the movie isn’t necessarily saying he’s destitute because he’s honest) lawyer Max (Herbert Marshall, star of Trouble In Paradise). She then tries to carry on a relationship with Max while pretending to Konrad that they’re married, all under the watchful eyes of Detlaff.

Wikipedia: “In particular, Sturges added a movie-within-the-movie in which the actors communicate in one-syllable sentences.” Beulah Bondi of the Sturges-written Remember the Night plays the orphanarian, and the musical remake I’ll Be Yours a decade later featured Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn.

We also rewatched the Sturges-written Remember The Night for Christmas.

by ·Comments Off on Thirty Day Princess (1934, Marion Gering)

Cary Grant with too much lip liner (between I’m No Angel and Sylvia Scarlett) and Sylvia Sidney, who I can never remember who she is. Sidney plays a princess who comes to NYC on an important public relations mission but gets the mumps and can’t go on her intended tour. Some scam banker (Edward Arnold, Jimmy Stewart’s dad in You Can’t Take It With You) conducts a hurried search for a lookalike, turns up an actress (also played by Sidney) who goes to all the spots saying all the right things, drumming up princess fever in the U.S. press. So Sidney plays a New York actress, a princess with a fake accent, and the actress faking that fake accent, while the real princess’s betrothed Count Vince Barnett takes his own clownish approach to the accent. It’s a cute, forgettable flick which we watched because Preston Sturges cowrote the screenplay (based on someone else’s story, even though the whole out-of-work-actress-becomes-famous-princess plot sounds like one of his).

by ·Comments Off on The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)

A perfect comedy. Unfortunately Sturges was double-nominated for writing this and Hail The Conquering Hero, splitting his own vote and some damned Woodrow Wilson bio-pic got the oscar. Been too long since I saw The Great McGinty so I didn’t realize Governor McGinty (in the framing-device phone-call) and the other guy in his office were from that movie, just thought the name was being reused.

Betty and Eddie had played together in musical The Fleet’s In two years earlier, and she’d play the title role in sharpshootin’ musical Annie Get Your Gun, which we should probably watch. Trudy’s 14-year-old little sister is wonderfully played by 18-year-old Diana Lynn, later in Track of the Cat.

I was gonna write up a plot summary, but… THE SPOTS!

by ·Comments Off on I Married a Witch (1942, Rene Clair)

Fun movie, but I made the mistake of reading the Guy Maddin article before watching. The movie itself could never live up to that article! French expatriate Clair directs Veronica Lake (the year after Sullivan’s Travels but looking five years sexier, err, older) as a witch who spends centuries imprisoned in a tree with warlock Daniel (Cecil Kellaway, entertainingly overdoing it), overseeing their curse upon the family line of mayoral candidate Fredric March (PTSD’d husband of Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives). Lightning strikes the tree, the tricksters escape, and she falls for March, deciding to ditch the warlock and break up his engagement to cold Susan Hayward, daughter of the newspaperman (Robert Warwick, studio boss in Sullivan’s Travels and a big star back in 1915) helping March get elected. Comedian Robert Benchley plays March’s buddy and professional auntie/grandma Elizabeth Patterson his housekeeper. Kind of a naughty movie. Not surprising that Preston Sturges was involved with this – he quit and had his credit removed.

by ·Comments Off on The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949, Preston Sturges)

A late Sturges flop, co-written with Earl Felton (The Narrow Margin) and starring Betty Grable (How to Marry a Millionaire) at the height of her fame, declared the highest-paid star in America just two years earlier. And it’s not a bad movie, about as enjoyable as Lady of Burlesque, the best of Capra, even Unfaithfully Yours. The trouble comes when you compare it to earlier Sturges features – it lacks their humor, energy and perfect screenwriting.

As a little girl, grandpa taught young Betty Grable to shoot straight, then at some point en route to becoming a saloon singer she acquired a violent temper. Attempting to shoot her philandering man Blackie (Cesar Romero) she plugs a judge in the ass (twice), so grabs her friend Conchita (Olga San Juan), skips town, lands in a new place pretending to be a schoolteacher (named Hilda Swandumper, ha). She attracts the fond attention of upright local Rudy Vallee, helps tame the wild Basserman boys, and all is going well until Blackie tracks her down and apparently shoots and kills the Bassermans (somehow they’re fine at the end), leading their dad Richard Hale into a town-wide shooting spree, at the end of which he tries to hang Blackie and poor Rudy. Things settle down, Betty returns home and, despite Katy’s protests, the movie ends with her shooting the judge in the ass a third time.

Betty Grable is no Betty Hutton when it comes to comedy, but she always looks good in a dress, and acquits herself nicely in the lead. A few of the ol’ Sturges players show up (besides Rudy Vallee, of course), including Esther Howard (mayor’s wife in Hail the Conquering Hero) and Porter Hall (The Great Moment) as the bullet-magnet judge. I wouldn’t have guessed that Margaret Hamilton (also of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), the judge’s jealous wife, was the Wicked Witch of the West, but there you have it. I didn’t recognize Sheriff Al Bridge, though he’s been in more Sturges films than anybody. We especially liked Hugh Herbert (Hellzapoppin’) as a nearly blind doctor who attends to the judge, but best were the two brothers, bursting with energy and stupidity, played by Sterling Holloway (Remember the Night) and Dan Jackson, who looked so remarkably like his movie-brother, I’d figured they were actually related.

From the original Times review:

Apparently Mr. Sturges, devoted to the old-time slapstick school, tried to do as they did in the old days to the point of shooting his picture “off the cuff.” That is the kindest explanation for the feebleness of story in this film and the jerkiness of the continuity.

by ·Comments Off on Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)

This was the Sturges movie I’d watched long ago and was starting to forget. Our latest screening was accompanied by squeals of delight whenever we noticed a Sturges regular, or someone from Sullivan’s Travels anyway. The butlers and Snowflake were disappointingly absent, but we got Jimmy Conlin (little guy, glasses) as a judge, the vaguely-familiar Harry Hayden (I thought for a minute that he was Charles Coburn) as an upright politician, TWO women from Remember the Night playing best friends, and the vertically-stretched Franklin Pangborn as a fussy master of ceremonies. But best of all, this movie features St. Paul’s own William Muggsy Bildocker Ale-and-Quail Kockenlocker Demarest in his largest role yet, as the Marine sergeant who helps our hapless hero concoct his big lie.

foreground L-R: Sarge, Woodrow, Woodrow’s mother, a mother-obsessed marine:

And oh, just thinking of Franklin Pangborn’s attempt to control four different brass bands for Eddie Bracken’s homecoming ceremony reminds me, this is certainly Sturges’s loudest-ever film, as talky and noisy and shouty as they come. All the excitement gets poor Eddie so nervous – and he’s so good at acting nervous – I kept wanting to comment that he’s seeing THE SPOTS, but Katy doesn’t remember The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek well enough to get the reference. Even if we didn’t see the spots, the movie makes a more direct reference by outright showing us the poster for Morgan’s Creek as the Marines’ train pulls away during the final scene.

L-R: Mayor Noble, his wife, Libby, and Forrest (Bill Edwards):

The Mayor is Raymond Walburn – see also his Christmas In July screenshot standing alongside Franklin Pangborn, whose character in this movie wouldn’t settle down long enough for me to snap a picture of him – with wife Esther Howard (also wife to the Weenie King). Lead girl Ella Raines (no relation to Claude) seemed like a big nobody – but she starred in Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and appeared in Dassin’s Brute Force, so I guess she’s somebody. Edwards was cast because he’s a stiff, uninteresting fellow, something that didn’t help his film career elsewhere.

Eddie Bracken’s Woodrow has a family history in the Marines but was personally discharged for having hay fever (a less funny premise than THE SPOTS), so he’s sulking in a bar, too ashamed to come home, when he buys Sgt. Muggsy’s group some drinks and they coerce him into returning to his home town as a war hero. It all gets immediately out of hand, and a few days later Woodrow is about to be elected mayor – and about to be exposed as a fraud by his opponent – when he confesses all to the townsfolk… and… gets elected mayor anyway! I would elect Eddie Bracken mayor, no question. Also Woodrow’s girl before the war is now the fiancee of the new mayor’s son Forrest, but she delays telling Woodrow for so long that she finally just leaves Forrest.

The heroine’s aunt, Elizabeth Patterson below at right, appeared in Remember The Night, also as a kindly aunt. The hero’s mother, Georgia Caine below at left, also appeared in Remember the Night – but as Stanwyck’s bitter, terrible mother.

by ·Comments Off on Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges)

Rex “Henry Higgins” Harrison is a famed conductor. His brother-in-law (radio star and megaphone crooner Rudy Vallee, naive rich dude in The Palm Beach Story) hires a private detective to spy on Harrison’s wife (Linda Darnell, recently starred in My Darling Clementine), so Rex, against his own hatred of spying and his belief in trust, accidentally finds out that his wife may be cheating on him. While conducting that night’s three symphony movements, he has three fantasies in which he murders his wife (aided by a sound recorder gismo) and frames her illicit lover (Rex’s secretary) Tony, then he forgives her and writes her a giant check while making her feel small and unworthy, then he confronts the couple and kills himself in russian roulette. After the symphony Rex rushes home and bungles about in a painfully protracted slapstick sequence – he can’t make the recording gismo work, can’t find bullets for his gun, and spills ink all over his checkbook. Finally she casually explains away the circumstances that led detectives to suspect her of cheating, and we have our happy ending.

Recommended listening: Mad at a Girl by Robbie Fulks.

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In the shot below, on right is secretary Kurt Kreuger (this must’ve been a relieving change of pace for him, after playing nazi flunkies all during the war), middle is brother-in-law Rudy Vallee, and left is Lionel Stander (Katy was appalled at his accent).

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Caught some Sullivan’s Travels actors: valet Robert Grieg (here a butler, doing a different voice I think) and bus driver Frank Moran (here a fireman). There were more whom I didn’t recognize, but the standout scene was with a relative Sturges newcomer Edgar Kennedy (former Keystone Kop who starred in his own long-running shorts series) as the private detective who spied on the wife, confronted in his office by Rex. It’s one of my favorite scenes in any Sturges movie – beautifully written and acted, sharp dialogue becoming softer as the men bond over their love of music and hard truths they wish they hadn’t learned. William Demarest was around in ’48, acting in four films and voicing a cartoon character for Walter Lantz, so I don’t know why he couldn’t make it onto Sturges’s set.

Don’t think I ever realized that Sturges’s cinematographer is Victor Milner, who worked with Lubitsch in the 30’s and shot Trouble In Paradise. Both Paradise and this one have far more interesting camera work than your average comedy. This one is notable for the looooong zooms into Rex’s eye before each of the fantasy sequences.

Full of wordy dialogue like “August, what happy updraft wafts you hither?” and “You handle Handel like nobody handles Handel,” which enriches the movie to no end, but makes it wearying over its almost two hour runtime (and that’s after having a half hour cut by the producer).

Linda Darnell, unaware that Rex is behind her with a razor in his hand:
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Nice DVD extras – Terry Jones says it’s a satire of the masculine self-image and Sandy Sturges tells of a romantic scandal involving a girl killing herself over Rex Harrison which made this movie impossible to promote. Commentary points out that this came out the year after Monsieur Verdoux, obviously similar in a few ways.

Meaning of Harrison’s line “my family’s product has kept England on time since Waterloo” is that the real conductor on whom the character was based inherited a family fortune from laxative pills.

This was a script from the early 30’s that Sturges considered as his directorial debut, but the studio didn’t want it at the time. It’s the subject of Sturges’s only remake to date, a flop 1984 version with Dudley Moore, Nastassja Kinski and Albert Brooks, scripted by the writers of And Justice For All.

by ·Comments Off on Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen)

Only written by Preston Sturges, but I have no problem calling this a Sturges movie, full of his witty dialogue and manic energy. Sturges, who I’d just accused of ignoring women in Christmas In July, writes a fantasy chick-flick here. Girl works hard at menial job, then out of nowhere she gets fanciness thrown at her and a hot rich guy falls for her.

God’s own Jean Arthur is the girl, cuter here than in You Can’t Take It With You (in which this movie’s stuffy rich guy Edward Arnold played an even stuffier rich guy). He tosses a mink coat out the window and it lands on her, setting into motion a rags-to-the-appearance-of-riches story a la The Million Pound Note. A young Ray Milland (minus his X-Ray Eyes, some years before The Major and the Minor), earnest son of the Edward Arnold, falls for her and Louie, a chef turned hotel owner (played by Luis Alberni, who would go back to being a chef in The Lady Eve), thinking she’s having an affair with Edward Arnold, gives her a free suite to attract other trendy, wealthy socialites. Pretty sure she ends up with Ray Milland.

Katy liked it, too.