By Alex Hudson
October 6, 2003
Shortly after its entry into the Second World War, America became a machine of war. With the fate of the world uncertain, America's resident dream factory got in on the act. Hollywood transformed itself into a propaganda machine, churning out rousing war movies meant to uplift a beleaguered people. Quietly, an underdog funnyman, an inventor-turned-screenwriter-turned-moviemaker named Preston Sturges brought true salvation in the form of his screwball comedies that Howard Hawks wished he made.
Preston Sturges faded as dramatically as he burst onto the scene. His reign of laughs lasted a mere decade and a half but produced such comedic heavyweights as Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. These goodhearted diversions brought solace to a wounded public, but also, they inspired generations of moviemakers with their effortless charm. No moviemakers were as inspired as the brothers Coen, who, for the past two decades, have essentially been making Preston Sturges movies.
Spawn of Sturges
Minnesota-born Joel (he directs) and Ethan (he produces) Coen exploded into filmdom with as much fervor as their idol. Their indie-smash debut Blood Simple put them on the cinematic map faster than anyone not named Welles. Their madcap follow-up Raising Arizona cemented their reputation for unclassifiable eccentricity while further distinguishing the brothers as the de facto poster boys for indie auteurship.
And while the crash and burn fate of Sturges seems unlikely to befall the Coens, the brothers have reached the top of the mountain in record time, like Sturges, with no place to go but down. Yet, their body of work awes with its consistency, outshining the output of any working director today including the phenomenally steady Peter Weir.
Ants in Your Pants of 1939
What makes the cinema of Preston Sturges so worthy of emulation is encapsulated by one picture, Sullivan's Travels. Sturges’ crowning achievement, Sullivan's Travels involves a director, John "Sully" Sullivan, eager to make an "important film" and escape his lightweight comedies (gems like Ants in Your Pants of 1939). Sully's dream project -- called O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- will, as he puts it, "hold up a mirror to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity, a true canvas of the suffering of humanity." Sully's studio bosses, aghast at the idea of a message-film, try to dissuade him but only convince Sully of his need to live the material.
Sully (the underrated Joel McCrea) embarks on a journey amongst the downtrodden bringing a wannabe actress (Veronica Lake) along for the ride. Slumming through a series of misadventures, he comes to realize that people would rather be entertained than preached to. Sullivan's Travels, embodying the wit, taut visuals and tonal shifts inherent to Preston Sturges movies, jumps from satire to slapstick to drama to social commentary. These stark shifts in tone spiral the film in innumerable directions at once, giving it a sense of urgency and Sturges the opportunity to cover as much ground as possible.
Some 60 years after Sullivan's Travels, the Coens made the film Sully wanted to make. Their O Brother, Where Art Thou? details precisely what Sully articulated his film to be about: a true canvas of the suffering of humanity. Of course, with typical Coen irreverence, their fraud journey featuring three hapless escapees from a chain gang is the film Sullivan would have made after his travels, not before. Comically "based on Homer," O Brother prizes above all the Sturgesian tonal shift, leapfrogging in every which direction.
Everyman
Although Sully starts off a well-to-do movie director, his humbling travels make him an everyman. Indeed, the most common thread linking the works of Sturges and the Coens is their everyman protagonist. The high-concept gimmick behind almost every Sturges film and several Coen movies is the thrusting of an ordinary man into an extraordinary situation. More specifically, in the case of Sturges, the ordinary man is mistaken for someone extraordinary.
The Great McGinty, Sturges’ first film, has everyman Dan McGinty go from bum to politician. His second movie, Christmas in July, sees an office clerk wrongly anointed winner of a slogan writing contest. Hail the Conquering Hero has a discharged Marine mistaken for a returning war hero. And so on. In each film, the Sturges everyman-turned-hero attains, undeservingly, the spoils of the American dream: money, fame and the love of an otherwise unattainable vixen next door.
Hail the Conquering Hero, as close to movie comedy perfection as it gets, tautly refines Sturges’ plotline du jour. Small-town yokel Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) gets discharged from the Marines for chronic hay fever before stepping foot on the battlefield. He befriends a group of real Marines who, in an attempt to lift his sunken spirits, persuade him to return home with a white lie: that he’s a Marine and a heroic one at that. Begrudgingly, Woodrow agrees and his town welcomes him with a four-band parade, builds him a statue, writes songs about his heroism and, eventually, prepares to elect him mayor. Woodrow, unable to live the lie, finds only disillusionment with his newfound hero status before confessing his mistruth.
Incredulous but hilarious, the Sturgesian everyman-to-hero plotline would be liberally borrowed by the Coens for their overlooked Hudsucker Proxy. Devious corporate bosses hire helpless Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) to run their company (into the ground they hope) so they can rebuy their stock dirt cheap, take over the company and restore it. Rube Norville goes from mailroom to boardroom in what amounts to a Preston Sturges movie.
Anti-Capra
The Coens lampoon big-business shadiness in Hudsucker Proxy with the same zeal Sturges lampooned patriotism and small-town politics in Conquering Hero. More than anything, the Coens have gleaned the nonconformist essence of Sturges and with it the readiness to mock the mock-worthy. And while the pungent mockery of the Coens differentiates them from most of their peers, the satirical edge of Preston Sturges was positively novel in an age of Frank Capra wholesomeness.
Playing chicken with wartime censors for much of his career, Sturges kicked in the door for sardonic hyphenates like Billy Wilder. Lighthearted farce on the outside, self-aware inside, the cinema of Sturges was rife with slapstick pratfalls thinly masking exquisite commentaries on the foibles of Americana. No institution or pastime was sacred; obvious targets like politics and trickier ones like sex received equal drubbings.
Kinda Funny Lookin’
Of all his dartboards, small-town naïveté was Sturges’ favorite. The Coens share this bull's-eye; O Brother takes aim at Southern backwardness while their Oscar nominated Fargo goes after Midwestern banality. More aligned with their neo-noirs Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and the upcoming The Ladykillers than Sturgesian comedy, Fargo nonetheless shares Sturges’ taut visual sense. Whereas Sturges relied on the great John Seitz (he also shot Wilder’s best films) the Coens have employed the masterful Roger Deakins. Unshowy and efficient, Deakins is perhaps the only cinematographer alive capable of capturing the constantly shifting tones of the Coens. His austere visuals for Fargo capture the icy tundra with deadening precision. For O Brother, he soaks the image in yellow hues, infusing a visual lyricism that at once dates the Coen South and adds a pop-up book dimensionality that scorches outlandish imagery into mind’s eye.
The Players
These colorful vistas are filled to the brim with equally colorful characters. There’s John Turturro (four Coen movies), with his bottled-up intensity; Jon Polito (five movies), with his portly build and snake oil salesman scruples; John Goodman (five Coen movies), the most naturally gifted comedian of the bunch; and, of course, Steve Buscemi (also five), the funny looking purveyor of nervous energy.
The Coen stock company is blissfully reminiscent of the Sturges players, that ragtag group of character actors who populate nearly all his films: William Demarest (eight Sturges movies), the most constant force; Robert Greig (five Sturges movies), who made a career of playing butlers; and Franklin Pangborn (six movies), face contorting in every emotion.
These actors are fed witty dialogue full of crisp one-liners juxtaposed by moments of eloquence. By the twilight of the tragedies in Fargo, Chief Marge Gunderson (Joel’s wife Frances McDormand) wonders mournfully of the killer she has apprehended: "There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are. And it's a beautiful day." Midway through The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck, seducing the smitten Henry Fonda, plays with his hair for an amount of time which seems to go on forever, in easily the most visually eloquent scene in the Sturges oeuvre. Moments like these add emotional credence, contrasting with the laughs brilliantly.
Are You in Pictures?
Careening behind the screwballs was always something deeper. The work of Sturges and now the Coens is littered with surface layer humor (which makes these films amazingly rewatchable) but also instilled with underlying meaning. Primarily interested with reversal of fates, Sturges’ rags-to-riches-to-rags everyman, in the end, learns only the fraudulence of the American dream and the emptiness of its celebratory pursuit. And while Sturges had no time for ambiguity, the Coens deftly pepper their films with just enough artiness to stimulate enthusiasts.
Is Barton Fink, for instance, about a common man-obsessed Clifford Odets clone selling his soul in 1941 Hollywood? Or is it really about a people turning their back to the atrocities inflicted upon their homeland kin? Is it about both of these things? Or neither? This ambiguous yearning to say something important runs constant in their work, usually just beneath the veneer of laughter and genre iconography.
This resultant blend of humor and meaning has produced an uncanny string of successes. The Coens look to extend their unblemished filmography with their upcoming tenth feature, Intolerable Cruelty. The October 10th release, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, is a dark comedy about romance and revenge.
Death's Hotel
Preston Sturges died forgotten in New York's Algonquin Hotel. He was on his fourth wife, Sandy. After an unbreakable streak of seven masterpieces in four years, he never regained his momentum. Several fortunes were squandered along the way.
But his films, and with them his memory, live on. These films were funny without pandering and meaningful without preaching. Like Sully, Sturges realized the bottom-line importance of entertaining an audience hungry for entertainment. The Coens, with as keen an understanding of this mantra as anyone, have used Sturges as a guidebook; they've imbued their work with Sturges-like tonal shifts, biting mockery and visual clarity while forging a stable of quirky regulars who echo the familiar lovability of the Preston Sturges repertoire. The Coens, their generation's Preston Sturges, continue the legacy of Sturges, honoring him and pleasing us with each successive masterwork.
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