More DVDs We Need

Preston Sturges would have celebrated his 105th birthday on August 29th; I celebrated it by watching Sullivan's Travels for the 8th time, and then by reading Anthony Lane's often wonderful collection of reviews and essays, Nobody's Perfect. In it is a piece on Sturges which neatly encapsulates this enigmatic film director. Lane writes:

By trade, Sturges was a screenwriter who became a director. To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed "Written and directed by Preston Sturges," and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny. One cannot say that without his example there would have been no Billy Wilder or Woody Allen, but it was Sturges who made the breakthrough. The fact that all three men use movies to caution us against the perils of overestimating human nature is, needless to say, sheer coincidence. In the course of an eight-year spree, Sturges directed eleven features; in the first five years, he set off one of the most deafening fusillades that moviegoers have ever had to face. The Great McGinty and Christmas in July came out in 1940, The Lady Eve in 1941, Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story the year after that, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944.

Lane also concocted a useful list of the things that Sturges found amusing:

1. Money.
   
2. Alcohol.
   
3. What you do with No. 1 when No. 2 gets hold of you.
   
4. And vice versa.
   
5. Running.
   
6. Falling over.
   
7. Fat people.
   
8. People in fancy clothes.
   
9. People who talk funny.
   
10. Politicians who get away with it.
    
11. Politicians who don't.
    
12. Prigs.
    
13. Patsies.
    
14. Coffee.
    
15. Marriage.
    
16. Gambling. (Note: Try not to confuse this with No. 15.)
    
17. Misunderstandings. (Ditto.)
    
18. Mussolini.
    
19. Hitler.
    
20. A lion with its head in your lap.
    

Fired together, the prejudices of Preston Sturges constitute a broadside against the blandishments of an orderly life.

Obviously some of the items in the Sturges pantheon are on the dated side of the humor scale, but many more of them are not. And put together, as Lane says, his perspective overall is still wonderfully appropriate. And in today's chaotic and circus-like political atmosphere, a good dose of Sturges is what we really need. When The Palm Beach Story (which Lane calls his favorite Sturges), Hail the Conquering Hero, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (a hilarious WWII screwball satire in which Betty Hutton is married to a man she can't recall and does her patriotic duty with one of the war-bound soldiers, becoming pregnant with septuplets) come marching on to DVD, the world, or at least my little corner of it, will be a better place.