Riding on the Cockeyed Caravan
One of the most striking characteristics of Preston
Sturges' career is its brevity. He wrote and directed
eight films of consistent hilarity and humanity in
only four short years, from 1940 to 1944. For most of
the prior decade, he had been writing successful
screenplays, and he was already over 40 when he made
The Great McGinty in 1940, emerging as the
first noteworthy writer-director.
In the brief period that followed, he more than made
up for lost time by turning from one project to
another, virtually all of which were box-office
successes. One apparent reason for Sturges'
abbreviated career was the constant sniping between
the sometimes willful artist and the budget-conscious
Paramount Pictures front office. One gets the feeling
that he shot his creative wad early on, then exhausted
by fighting the suits' efforts to censor his work.
Still, the substance of that meteoric rise and fall is
confirmed by the release by Criterion of two of his
most successful films, The Lady Eve and
Sullivan's Travels. Both first released in
1941, these films refresh one's conviction that the
work of few directors is so flat-out funny on both
visual and verbal levels. One could turn off either
the image or dialogue and still enjoy his movies.
Considered by many to be one of, it not the, best
American sound comedy, The Lady Eve chronicles
the collision between that most susceptible of "sucker
sapiens," beer company heir Charles Pike (Henry
Fonda), and crafty con artist Jean Harrington (Barbara
Stanwyck). They meet on board a cruise ship as Charles
is returning from a snake-hunting expedition.
Initially, Jean regards the accident-prone scientist
as little more than another fool to be fleeced, but
she falls in love with him nonetheless (as she puts
it, "I need him like the axe needs the turkey").
Jean is certainly the aggressor in their partnership,
and treats Charles time and again in what might seem
like a humiliating manner. But her brusgue manner
never altogether covers over the fact that she's nuts
about this snake-loving introvert. Charles is himself
so smitten by this enticing and experienced temptress
that nothing about her full-court pursuit, even her
disguise as the British aristocrat Lady Eve Sedgewick,
comes across as either brutal or belligerent. Even
when Jean corrals him into marriage, and then, on
second thought, tries to scare him off by detailing
all her prior paramours, one is assumes that these two
are meant to be a couple. The world Sturges so deftly
constructs in The Lady Eve might seem fraught
with cynicism were it not for the fact that its
inhabitants thrive on courtship as much as chicanery.
For Sturges, landing a mate and lassoing a sucker call
upon very similar techniques.
Sturges' fourth feature, Sullivan's Travels,
chronicles the exploits of yet another wide-eyed
innocent, in this case the successful but
self-involved film director John L. Sullivan (Joel
McCrea). For some reason, this low-brow entertainer
has delusions of profundity and therefore cannot
comprehend how a broad comedy like his own Ants in
Your Pants of 1939 is just what the public
requires. Instead, he earnestly wishes to create a
more meaningful statement, O Brother, Where Art
Thou? (The Coen brothers borrowed this title for
their 2000 hit.)
Much as Charles must be knocked off his perch by Jean,
Sullivan needs to be pummeled by experience in order
to understand that he knows next to nothing about the
"real world." When he proposes to go on a quest for
"the common man," his solicitous staff backs him up,
so as to cushion him against any calamities. Mishaps
inevitably occur, for without them, Sullivan would not
meet a dazzling ingenue (Veronica Lake), lose his
memory, or land in jail. His incarceration is
ironically a liberating experience, for it convinces
him that humor serves greater utility in the lives of
the unfortunate than heavy-handed sloganeering. The
erstwhile prophet recovers his necessary position as
funnyman when he realizes that a balanced perspective
requires the sophomoric as much as the sophisticated.
A well-executed pratfall can teach us as much as some
profundity.
If this summary of Sullivan's Travels sounds
like Sturges' vindication of his own enterprise,
nothing could be farther from the case. In fact,
Sullivan recovers his memory (and his prominence) only
when he recognizes how similar he is to his audience.
At the same time, Sullivan's Travels requires
some effort on its own viewers' part, for belly laughs
are followed by affecting acknowledgements of the
travails of the downtrodden. One must either accede to
the shifts or suffer some manner of conceptual
whiplash. Not too many laugh-out-loud comedies include
death by locomotive and the threat of permanent
incarceration. Critics tend to refer to the
illegitimate sextuplets in The Miracle of Morgan's
Creek (1944) when they want to underscore Sturges'
pushing of the permissible "envelope," yet
Sullivan's Travels challenges our notions of
what can be funny, time and time again.
Although both Sullivan's Travels and The
Lady Eve have long been available on video and
appear frequently on television, these reissues by
Criterion permit access to some of the best of
Sturges' work along with the company's exemplary
attention to source material and special features.
The Lady Eve includes the Lux Radio Theater
adaptation of the picture, starring Stanwyck with Ray
Milland in place of Fonda, along with an introduction
by Peter Bogdanovich and commentary by scholar Marian
Keane. Bogdanovich is breezy but informative, while
Keane attends perceptively to matters of performance
but relies all too heavily on Stanley Cavell's
philosophical analysis of comedy. In the process, she
transforms the film, more than I would wish, into an
epistemological enterprise.
Criterion's Sullivan's Travels contains even
more bounty, ranging from the entertaining and
informative PBS "American Masters" documentary on the
director to interviews with Sturges and his widow,
Sandy, and rare archival recordings of his singing and
poetry readings. The commentary on this DVD comes from
a variety of quarters, including comedians Christopher
Guest and Michael McKean. While the former is too wry
for my taste, the latter makes one astute comment
after another.
The opportunity to re-watch these two delightful films
reminded me of three crucial qualities of Sturges'
work. First and foremost, his love of language.
Watching any of Sturges's films illustrates how
word-drunk he was, how few people have so nimbly
combined sophistication and tomfoolery in dialogue. It
is not only that his scripts bear quotation, but that
the discursive cleverness never detracts from the
action. Sturges doesn't just call attention to his
skills, but revels in the malleability of words and
how different individuals wield them in unique ways.
Second, Sturges can be a subtle visual stylist. True,
he is prone to overuse the master shot, but in doing
so, he reminds us how much pleasure can be had in
simply watching the actions of compelling individuals.
At a time when fast-cutting seems a habit Hollywood
cannot relinquish, the relaxed pace of Sturges' flow
of images and emphasis on observation over technical
bombast are a welcome relief. Nonetheless, it must be
said that he can also manipulate the camera with
irreverence and audacity. The mirror shot in The
Lady Eve, where Jean observes a stateroom full of
women virtually throwing themselves at Charles, is a
dazzling use of space. Or again, Sturges draws out the
Gothic dimension of the prison at the end of
Sullivan's Travels and then lightens the
oppressive atmosphere with the montage of memorable
faces as the convicts roar with laughter at a Disney
cartoon. The sequence shows that he was entirely
capable of thinking "visually."
Third and finally, Sturges has been aptly described by
Andrew Sarris as "the Breughal of American comedy
directors," not only for his range of character types,
but also the evident affection he has for all his
idiosyncratic individuals. This love comes across in
every frame, even for those who speak but a single
line. When Eugene Pallette's big baby of a beer tycoon
in The Lady Eve bellows for his breakfast, we
simultaneously observe corporate power demoted to
virtual infancy, and that social authority rarely
answers our most basic needs.
You also get the feeling, in Sturges' hiring of many
actors repeatedly, that he cherished watching them ply
their craft, whether the bluster of William Demarest,
the slow burn of Edgar Kennedy, or the affected
elitism of Eric Blore. As he shows in Sullivan's
Travels, Sturges thought of the movies as a
uniquely effective arena for the depiction of life's
cockeyed caravan. Before it, a spectator can only sit
back and succumb to laughter, admiring the audacious
mixture of sarcasm and sentiment that Sturges brings
to the process.
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