Some Musings About Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges

I haven't written much about Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges -- two of my favorite directors -- perhaps because comedy is difficult to write about and humor is subjective; nobody likes to be told something is funny if they think otherwise.  Keaton and Sturges each made a dozen masterpieces in a decade --Keaton in the twenties, Sturges in the forties -- and each then more or less self-destructed.  Chaplin continued on because of his astute business sense -- he financed all his films himself and took as long as he felt he needed to make them -- while Keaton gave up his independence when sound came in and Sturges got caught up in Howard Hughes's orbit and then was cast aside as the studio system was ending.

Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. is a beautiful and elegant surrealistic film, as Keaton dreams he is in a film and that film becomes the film we are watching.  Keaton comments eloquently on editing, as he enters a film and is edited into scenes of traffic, jungles and mountains; later on he does a brilliant scene where he walks on top of a moving train, is washed off the train by a water-feed which then pours down on some workers driving a handcart on the tracks, all done in a single shot.  One gasps sometimes as much as laughs when Keaton rides on the front of a motorcycle without knowing the driver has fallen off, even crossing over a big hole in a bridge as two trucks pass under the hole in different directions to accidentally support the cycle.

Preston Sturges started as a writer of plays, then turned to writing scripts and started directing when he felt he could do a better job directing then the directors of his scripts, though both Mitch Leisen (Easy Living, 1937; Remember the Night, 1940) and William Wyler (The Good Fairy, 1935) did creditable jobs with his scripts.  Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) was the third film that Sturges directed and one of the few films made by anyone that used the combined comedic talents of Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck.  When my wife, son, daughter and I watched the film recently (age rage eight to seventy-two) we all enjoyed it in different ways and at different levels, from the beautifully executed physical comedy (a major influence on Blake Edwards and others) to the witty dialogue ("let us be crooked but never common") to the satire of the rich and the sadness and pain of rejected lovers.