Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges

"For a brief period of about five years in the early 1940s, Preston Sturges sat on the top of Hollywood. At the time, he was one of the few people, along with Orson Welles and Frank Capra, who both wrote and directed his films. Sturges's films including The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan Creek (1942), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) have become classics of American comedy and took the genre of screwball comedy in new directions. Beyond their comedic elements and brilliant dialogue, Sturges's films remain timely in their critical view of social and political arrangements, yearning for and disillusionment with romantic love, and defiance of prudery. His work's influence continues to influence contemporary directors such as the Coen brothers. In Crooked, but Never Common, longtime film critic for The Nation, Stuart Klawans examines what made Sturges's film so distinctive, fun, and incisive in their critique of the hypocrisies of American society. The book ties the films into the director's own life and his struggles navigating the Hollywood studio system, and presents Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and critique, American and European traditions, and a cynicism andaffection for his characters"--
In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Preston Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies.
In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948—The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them—all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs.In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads—discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight—and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers—and funnier than ever.