Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director by Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges

Sturges' reputation today is strangely, and unfairly, diminished.  He is known only to cineastes and film historians.  He has not established himself as a household name in the same way that Billy Wilder has, for example, or John Huston or John Ford.

That he did not always conquer his demons is not, perhaps surprising -- there were many of them and they took different forms, among them drink, jealousy, and arrogance.

Preston Sturges, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges, Intellect, The University of Chicago Press (2019)


This is a sad and dispiriting book about how little Preston Sturges was able to accomplish after he left Hollywood in 1948, following the financial failures of Unfaithfully Yours (a marvelous film) and The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (somewhat less marvelous).  He died in 1959, only able to make one more film, in 1955, the dreary The French They Are a Funny Race (rarely shown; I saw it at the Thalia in the 80's), spending most of that time in France, dodging creditors and away from his (fourth) wife and two young children, who he did not see at all in the last two years of his life.  He was constantly writing scripts and plays and then self-destructing by not being able to get along with collaborators.  On a couple of occasions he was able to get plays produced, only to have them crash and burn under withering criticism.

Sturges was his own worst enemy the last ten years of his life, which coincided with the end of the studio system and the support it gave directors like Sturges with producers, character actors and technicians.  Sturges felt he was not appreciated at Paramount, where he made eight brilliant films in four years, 1940-1944 (my favorites are The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), after having written a number of excellent scripts that he felt he could have directed better than Mitch Leisen did (Easy Living,1937 and Remember the Night,1940).  Sturges made the mistake of hooking up with Howard Hughes's California Pictures and then Daryll Zanuck at 20th C. Fox, neither of whom gave him the support he needed.

Aside from the demise of the studio system what happened to Sturges?  Comedy filmmakers tend to burn out unless they are superb at business, as Chaplin was, and can also do other kinds of films, as Billy Wilder could.  Chaplin and Wilder had a much wider knowledge of and interest in the world than Sturges did and therefore had more to say than Sturges did, who was mostly a satirist; satire, which Sturges did beautifully, has limitations which Sturges only occasionally transcended in his mostly successful comedies.