Tag Archives: preston sturges

May 16

Hail the conquering Bracken

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I missed the first half-hour of it because of “The Simpsons,” but I saw a Preston Sturges classic tonight for the first time, and I love Preston Sturges.

The movie was “Hail the Conquering Hero” (1944). It has something in common with another Sturges movie — in fact, one of the funniest movies ever made — “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.” In both movies, nerdy Eddie Bracken impersonates a service member, with the best of intentions, and then gets in big trouble for it. But that impersonation is only a part of “Morgan’s Creek.” It’s the central premise of “Conquering Hero.”

Bracken’s character, whose late father was a war hero and whose mother expects the same of him, is medically discharged from basic training due to hay fever. He goes into hiding for a while, unwilling to disappoint his mother, until some Marines (led by the always-funny William Demarest, a Sturges regular) take him under their wing and bring him back to his home town, passing him off as a war hero. Bracken resists the subterfuge and keeps trying to tell the truth, but no one will listen and soon he’s being drafted to run for mayor.

It’s funny, typical Sturges, and well worth seeing the next time TCM airs it.

Did I mention, however, that “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” is one of the funniest movies ever made?

Jun 10

Set your TiVos now. NOW!!

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One of my favorite movie directors, Preston Sturges, will be featured on Turner Classic Movies tonight. I just realized this or I’d have warned you earlier.

At 8 Eastern / 7 Central, be sure and catch “The Lady Eve,” with Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, a very funny movie about a con artist and her prey.

At 10 Eastern / 9 Central, it’s one of my all-time favorites, “Sullivan’s Travels,” with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. McCrea is a movie director, tired of fluffy musical comedies, who poses as a bum so that he can research his next project, a dreary, “Grapes of Wrath”-style message movie. (The title of that fictitious movie, Coen Brothers fans, is “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, and that’s where Joel and Ethan got the title for their real-life movie.)

At midnight Eastern / 11 Central, it’s “The Palm Beach Story,” with Claudette Colbert and McCrea, which I’ve never seen all the way through. The parts I’ve seen are quite funny.

At 2 a.m. Eastern / 1 a.m. Central is one of the funniest movies ever made by anyone, “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” with Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken. You must, must, must see this movie. Tape or TiVo it tonight and watch it later, with a big bowl of popcorn.

Mar 06

I been served

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Well, I’ve been tagged for a meme by my soon-to-be-Tarheel sister-in-law. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. turn to page 123.

3. find the 5th sentence.

4. post the next 3 sentences.

5. tag 5 people.

There were several books stacked up, so I cheated and picked the one I thought would be the most fun: “Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges.”

Does this mean you post starting with the fifth or the sixth sentence? I pick the sixth:

One of these flashed green to signal the lightning, the other flashed red for the thunder. My red and green signals were picked up by a stagehand sitting way up in the flies with one hand on a big iron thunder-sheet and the other on a knife switch that threw direct current into a sputtering arc for the lighting.

The first time Gus staggered on stage, the coagulated blood from his empty eye sockets waving below his chin, something went a little wrong.

I hate tagging people for memes. I never know who to tag, who doesn’t like being tagged, who will get offended if they aren’t tagged, and who will be offended because I didn’t notice that they already did that same meme two weeks ago. But, the rules are the rules: Art, Stacie, Jennifer, Kristi and Newscoma.

Jan 07

Confidence

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Well, I finished the Preston Sturges tonight. In the process, during a couple of breaks from reading, I tinkered with my own magnum opus, making some needed changes to the passage about an emotional meltdown the hero suffers just before the end of the book.

The Sturges book was fascinating, even if it does give short shrift to the very classic films one wants to hear the most about. (I imagine that Sturges, while directing, had a lot less time to journal.) One interesting thing about Sturges is his blithe self-confidence, and how he used it to establish himself as a playwright, and then a screenwriter, and then (after many setbacks) fulfilled what has now become a cliche: “But what I really want to do is direct.” Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a restaurant and an industrial concern to sell a diesel engine of his own invention! Sturges had plenty of financial setbacks in his life, going, if not from rags to riches, than at least from the prospect of rags to riches and back, several times. But he always believed in his own potential.

I think I may need to summon up a little of Sturges’ hubris to bring this book to completion and see it published.

Jan 06

Preston on Preston

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Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges

I got two autobiographical sorts of books for Christmas — one, about which I’ve already blogged, was Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.

The other, which I’m now reading, is Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words, which (despite its name) was actually culled, edited and compiled from his journals by his widow Sandy Sturges.

Sturges directed several of my favorite old movies, including Sullivan’s Travels, which I usually list as one of my three all-time favorite movies (along with “Casablanca” and the Kenneth Branagh version of “Henry V”). I also love The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.

The book is a delight. Usually, I get frustrated with biographies that spend too much time on the subject’s early life and not enough on the career or achievements for which the subject became famous. But Sturges turns out to have had a life as colorful as, and more unbelievable than, his wackiest comedies.

Continue reading →

Oct 10

The Lady Eve

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Those of you in and around Nashville really need to head to the Belcourt next weekend for one of my favorite movies, “The Lady Eve”, as part of its series “Family Weekend Classics.”

It’s directed by Preston Sturges — which ought to be enough, right there — and stars Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in a screwball comedy. (Because when you think “Henry Fonda,” you automatically think “screwball comedy.”) Fonda is the straight-arrow, nerdy, science-minded heir to a brewing fortune (“The ale that won for Yale”) and Stanwyck is a con artist trying to take him for as much as possible. Hollywood being Hollywood, romance ensues, but Sturges is never going to take you directly from point A to point B without a hilarious side trip through points C, D and E.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s not to be missed.

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