DVD of the Week
#6 - Written and Directed by Preston Sturges (Preston Sturges, 1940-44)After penning some of the best movies of the 1930s and early '40s -
Diamond Jim,
Easy Living and
Remember the Night - screenwriter Preston Sturges sold the script for
The Great McGinty to Paramount for $1. The catch? They let him direct.
So began a series of riotous comedies that tickled every sacred cow in sight, and took its flamboyant writer-director to the top of the pile. This collection contains seven of his first eight films, with the notable exception of
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, which is a pity. That one somehow sneaked past the censors despite getting its unmarried protagonist pregnant by an unknown soldier.
Drawing on Sturges'
elongated mantra, the films in this collection remain not only remarkably fresh, but also remarkably funny, mixing satire, slapstick and social awareness to confront political corruption, artistic pretension and blind patriotism.
Sullivan's Travels you might know. Starring Joel McCrea as a fledging movie director who wants to make a grand statement, it gave a title to one of the most popular films of recent years:
O Brother Where Art Thou?, the name of Sullivan's vanity project.
More importantly, it's one of the best movies of the '40s, striking a perfect balance between comedy and comment, and throwing in a scene in a church that makes grown men weep, then howl with happiness.
Other goodies inside this box are the political gem
The Great McGinty;
Christmas in July - in which Dick Powell thinks he's won a fortune and starts spending - and the second-tier screwball comedy,
The Palm Beach Story.
My favourite of the set, though, is
Hail the Conquering Hero, in which Sturges coached one of the finest performances in cinema from owl-faced newcomer Eddie Bracken. Based on the classic Sturges premise of unpleasant, unfathomably ridiculous things happening to nice people, this masterpiece sees Bracken - rejected by the army due to an ear infection - greeted as a war hero. It's moving, memorable and chest-hurtingly funny.
The other two films on here are the romantic comedy,
The Lady Eve, which is simply sensational, and the much-underrated
The Great Moment. That one was taken out of the director's hands and re-cut, but it's still fantastic.
Written and Directed by Preston Sturges is available for a bargainous £17.DVD of the Week archive#1 - Let's Get Lost (Bruce Weber, 1988)
#2 - Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)#3 - The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
#4 - The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)#5 - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
