Event – Detail Past

There has been a sudden and deserved rekindling of interest in the great American film maker Preston Sturges. Reflected in articles in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker, plus a recent book by  Stuart Klawans, former film critic for The Nation: Crooked, but Never Common; The Films of Preston Sturges.  Local film collector and share-holder George Strimel will present a selection of Sturges’ creations this summer in matinee presentations.

Preston Sturges wrote and directed the 1941 “tragicomedy” Sullivan’s Travels,  a trick of a film balanced between a feather-light spoof of Hollywood movie making and a sardonic depiction of privilege vs. poverty.  Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a Hollywood director of comedies who, stymied from doing something meaningful, dons rags, puts ten cents in his pocket, and flees Tinseltown in search of real life.  In this he is joined by “the girl” (Veronica Lake).  Why?  No good reason, really, but “There’s always a girl in the picture.”  Sturges takes us on a run from witty dialogue and bottoms-up, legs-in-the-air slapstick to the brutality of a chain gang. There he pauses and lets us consider which layer of society is immune to such a fate.  In the end, though, laughter wins.  Critic James Agee called the film “a brilliant fantasy in two keys – a  slapstick farce and the tragedy of human misery.”