![]() One of his films, The Power and the Glory, had a structure and subject that were reproduced a few years later by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. By the time he came to Hollywood, in the 30s, he had a good sense of himself and was quickly under contract as a writer at Universal, making a thousand dollars a week. (“Kissproof” also sounds like a Sturges title.) He’d written a Broadway hit, Strictly Dishonorable, followed by three flops. ![]() According to his biographer Diane Jacobs, he’d been a stage manager, a flier in the air service, a songwriter, and the manager of his mother’s cosmetics concern, where he invented a highly successful kissproof lipstick. He did not come to Hollywood the way people come to Hollywood today, fresh out of film school, eager to crib shots they like from other movies. It also aptly calls up the conflicting elements at work in his films: the effervescent and the feverish. ![]() “Champagne and Pneumonia”-it could be the title of a Sturges movie. Isadora Duncan’s mother arrived with a bottle of champagne, from which she fed him lifesaving spoonfuls until he was restored. Almost as soon as they arrived in Paris, Sturges, always susceptible to respiratory trouble, came down with a pneumonia that no doctor could tame. Though Sturges would at times resent his mother’s fast friendship with Duncan, he owed the Duncan family an enormous debt. On her first day there she met the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan. His mother, Mary, divorced Preston’s father when Preston was not quite three and moved with her son to Paris. He was born in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. This collision of tones perhaps took its cue from his life. (Sturges used to dictate his scripts aloud to a secretary as he wrote them, and when he did, he convincingly played all the parts.) I can think of no other artist who keeps the delicate and the explosive so close together. But the Sturges world seems the product of a multiple-personality disorder. A hallmark of most artists is the consistency of their world-one thinks of the delicacy in René Clair’s work, the droll, intoxicating understatement of Lubitsch, the painful clamor of Jerry Lewis. The characters in a Sturges film are slickers and hicks, frantic, contemplative, melancholy, literate, sub-intelligent, vain, self-doubting, sentimental, cynical, hushed, and shouting. ![]() Though the events in his films often border on the unreal, ironically his world resembles ours more than most movies do, because the Sturges universe is so ungentrified. But if anyone deserves this credit, it would have to be someone who has created a world in which the speech and actions and people, in which the tone and tenor of events, are as obviously the creation of one artist as a passage of Twain’s is obviously a passage of Twain’s and not of Charlotte Brontë’s, as a Renoir is never confused with a Picasso. The possessory credit is silly for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s redundant: we’ll see whom the film is by when we get to the other credits. (Try to imagine the original choice of Shirley Temple instead of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz or Mae West rather than Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to understand how dependent a film’s tone is on the contributions of all its elements.) Let’s not get into how many other people-starting with the writer and continuing in essential ways through the cast, cinematographer, editor, and composer-influence the quality of a film. That credit is the one that appears at the top of a film saying, “A film by _,” the blank then implausibly being filled by the name of a single person, the director. Of all the stupid vanities in a business that specializes in stupid vanities, the possessory credit takes the cake.
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