Review of Preston Sturges (Box Set)

Introduction

Who he? Box sets celebrating the lives of great Hollywood stars of the past are becoming commonplace. Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the Marx Brothers, Spencer Tracy, Basil Rathbone - the Studios, and especially Universal are treating us to affordable film collections of magnificent old movies starring some of the screen`s greatest legends. Most of the time the talents being celebrated are the people in front of the camera.

Today we`re used to the idea of a movie being "a Spielberg movie", "a Hitchcock movie" or "a Stephen King movie" - behind the camera talents are recognised as being as (if not more) important than the actors on the screen, and directors benefit greatly from the auteur theory of the French school of movie criticism.

Back in the golden days of Hollywood - the 1930s and 1940s when most people went out regularly to "the pictures" - the stars were the thing. Audiences flocked to movies just because they starred Clark Gable, Cary Grant or James Stewart. Few people knew or cared about the director of a movie. There were exceptions. The silent era had been revolutionised by David Ward Griffith. Orson Welles had a notoriety after triggering mass hysteria with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

Sturges, born Edmund P Biden in 1898, was the first writer-director to get screen credit as such. For a brief period in the early 1940s, his sophisticated satires delighted the wartime audience. Then his career nosedived when he fell out with Paramount over their treatment of The Great Moment. He made a handful more pictures for other studios, none with the style of his Paramount output, Retiring to France in 1950, he died embittered in 1958.

This set comprises seven of Sturges`s best movies - Sullivan`s Travels, The Lady Eve, Hail The Conquering Hero, The Great Moment, The Great McGinty, Christmas In July and The Palm Beach Story.

Sturges was a great satirist. His movies combine knockabout comedy with great sophistication, taking his characters from the dizzy heights to the absymal depths. From breathless comedy to tragedy. His scripts frequently got him in trouble with the censors, but his script for The Great McGinty won the first Academy Award® for Best Original Screenplay.

The movies are an acquired taste. The mixture of pathos and farce probably suits modern tastes more than the audiences of the time, but personally I found the frequent terrible injustices visited on characters rather wearing.

Sturges`s movies are populated by a repertory company of characters actors including William Demarest and Akim Tamiroff. Regular faces pop up frequently in different movies and different guises.

Cornerstone of the set is Sullivan`s Travels. Considered one of the best Hollywood satires ever, it is the story of comedy-producer John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) who, tired of making light-hearted movies wants to make a "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" a socially important piece about the lives of the great underclass. He realises that he can`t make such a movie from his position in the lap of Hollywood luxury and sets out disguised as a hobo to see how the other half lives. Before he can even get out of Hollywood, he encounters a wannabe starlet (never actually named, played by Veronica Lake) who causes him to modify his plans. Making a second attempt at his project together proves a great success, but his attempt to thank his erstwhile fellow hobos ends in him being mugged and winding up in a crooked prison on the chain gang.

Christmas In July stars Dick Powell and Ellen Drew as a couple who think they have won an enormous prize in a competition, but make the mistake of not waiting until they have the cheque in their hands.

The Great McGinty stars Brian Donlevy (eighteen years later to play Professor Quatermass in two of the Hammer stagings of the BBC thriller) as a down-and-out who makes a meteoric political rise to the governor`s mansion. A puppet in the control of The Boss (Akim Tamiroff), McGinty makes one attempt to do something that isn`t crooked and his whole world falls apart.

The Great Moment again stars Joel McCrea, this time playing WTG Morgan, a pioneer of dental anaesthesia. This movie is unusually for Sturges, a biopic, and Paramount`s treatment of the movie (it was re-edited by the studio and ultimately kept on the shelf for two years) led to Sturges`s acrimonious departure.

Joel McCrea is also the star of The Palm Beach Story opposite Claudette Colbert. Colbert plays the flighty wife of an impecunious engineer (McCrea) who sets off for Florida in search of a handy millionaire.

The Lady Eve is a screwball comedy which stars Henry Fonda as the naïve heir to a brewing fortune (and a snake enthusiast) who falls into the clutches of father and daughter con artists Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Coburn. They intend to relieve him of as much of his fortune as their card-shark talents will allow. Then she falls for our hero. The movie is an excellent example of a genre of comedy popular in the 1930s and 1940s where a distinctly pro-active female would just about destroy the life of some poor sap who would inevitably fall deeply in love with his nemesis. Stanwyck`s way of introducing herself to Fonda is to trip him ass over tip in the dining room of the liner he is trapped aboard with her. Fortunately he has a soft landing on one of the stewards.

Eddie Bracken (also the star of Miracle of Morgan`s Creek, unfortunately missing from the set) stars in Hail The Conquering Hero as a 4F reject from the Marines whose father was a great WW1 hero. Befriended by a group of Marines (the leader owed Eddie`s father his life), he finds himself at the centre of a plot for him to return to his home town a hero. The movie was Sturges`s last for Paramount.

Video

In spite of their age, all the movies are in strikingly good condition. All are, of course in black-and-white and their original 4:3 aspect ratio. Title sequences are slightly cropped top and bottom to something like 1.66:1, but the main bodies of the movies are in their original aspect ratio.

Audio

All the movies were shot mono, which is reproduced in Dolby 2.0

Features

There is a very interesting audio commentary on the Sullivan`s Travels disc by Python Terry Jones, otherwise the discs only have subtitles. The seven disc set comes in a fold-out digipak with a collectors` brochure.

Conclusion

Box sets aren`t a whim-purchase. You really need to know the movies in a box set are the sort of picture you`ll want to watch more than once. As great as the movies in this box set are, and for movie students these are must-buys, casual buyers should be aware these movies are challenging. They are magnificent pieces of satirical moviemaking and all-out comedy, and are a feast for lovers of vintage movies.