Preston Sturges (1898-1959)

       Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges has such an immense reputation that it's easy to forget that he was hot for only a few scant years as the wonder man of Paramount Pictures, during which time he turned out greats such as 'The Great McGinty' in 1940, 'Christmas in July' in 1940, 'The Lady Eve' in 1941, 'Sullivan's Travels' in 1941, 'The Palm Beach Story' in 1942, 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek' in 1944, 'Hail the Conquering Hero' in 1944, and 'The Great Moment'in 1944. And that was after ten years of screenwriting.

Selling 'The Great McGinty' to Paramount for next to nothing so he could sit in the director's chair, Sturges became one of the first great writer'directors. His Paramount movies were not always big money makers, but he was the studio's prestige flmmaker and the darling of the critics. His approach combined sophisticated comedy with slapstick, and his hard-edged cynicism, combined with a streak of morbidity, was often undercut by surprising evidences of sentimentality.

Sturges tended to favor long takes, often achieved with a moving camera, to integrate characters into their surroundings. His most personal movie and probably his best work,'Sullivan's Travels', combined his typical comedy and brilliant comedic dialogue with more serious themes, all the while lampooning his own desire for those themes.

When Paramount let him go, Sturges teamed with Howard Hughes in an ill-fated attempt to revive Harold Lloyd's career with 'The Sin of Harold Diddlebock' in 1947, but returned to form with the exceptional black comedy 'Unfaithfully Yours' in 1948 at Twentieth Century Fox. Its commercial failure, however, largely dnded his career, and only two negligible films followed. He died of a heart attack, living on the hotel's tab, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City in 1959.