“Do you need a laugh — or two or three? A just-in-time, soul-lifting, smile-inducing 10-title retrospective dedicated to some of the funniest cinematic chapters in this human comedy of ours. Consider taking up temporary residence at Film Forum.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Click here to read entire review

As a child, he cavorted in toga and sandals with Isadora Duncan and her troupe. Later, he invented kissproof lipstick and introduced the club sandwich to Germany. He was the toast of Broadway and his elopement with a famous heiress made the front page of The New York Times. But Preston Sturges (1898-1959) will forever be remembered for a dizzying, golden run of comedies which he wrote and directed at Paramount in the early 1940s, in what Andrew Sarris has called “the most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in the history of cinema.” These seven Sturges-directed Paramounts, plus one at Fox and two perfect screenplays for another director, are all "Essential Sturges." 

PROGRAMMED BY BRUCE GOLDSTEIN

DECEMBER 24/25 WED/THU (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY

(1940) Where’s Ed McMahon when you need him? Dick Powell thinks he “already has won” $25,000 in a radio slogan contest (his entry: “If you can’t sleep, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk”) and acts accordingly—until he realizes… Perhaps Sturges’ most unsung gem, featuring sterling performances from his stock company of character actors, including Ernest Truex, Al Bridge, and William Demarest. Approx. 67 minutes
2:45, 6:00, 9:15

“A vertiginous rags-to-riches story... A sweet little fable with a Depression-era mentality lurking beneath the humor.”
– David Denby, The New Yorker

“Just about as cunning and carefree a comedy as any one could possibly preordain - the perfect restorative, in fact for battered humors and jangled nerves.”
– The New York Times

"Delightfully unpredictable." – Eric Kohn, New York Press

“The most underrated of Sturges’ movies—a riotous comedy-satire about capitalism that bites so deep it hurts. This captures the mood of the Depression more completely than most 30s pictures, and the brilliantly polyphonic script repeats the hero's dim-witted slogan so many times that it eventually becomes a kind of crazed tribal incantation. As usual, Sturges's supporting cast is luminous, and he uses it like instruments in a madcap concerto.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“Sturges’ most whimsical movie, ironically haunted by the Depression, is also his most socially aware satire.”
– Armond White, NY Press

“One of the emotionally richest and sweetest Sturges films.” – Andrew Sarris

REMEMBER THE NIGHT

(1940, Mitchell Leisen) Assistant NYC D.A. Fred MacMurray brings his maiden aunts in Indiana a Christmas present: convicted shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck. Classic Sturges comedy-romance, his last screenplay for another director. Approx. 94 minutes
4:10, 7:25

LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE RADIO ADAPTATION OF REMEMBER THE NIGHT, STARRING JEAN ARTHUR (IN THE STANWYCK ROLE)

“The loose, graceful script is by Sturges and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films.”
– Dave Kehr

"An overlooked screwball masterpiece. As smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate. This idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy, and Sturges’ fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film.”
– Michael Atkinson

"There is quite simply no other Christmas movie as moving as this one--none so grown-up, and yet so compassionate
and uncynical. When darkness falls over the prosecutor and the criminal, it doesn't feel at all like a plot contrivance.
Instead, it feels like a familiar component of this real--and yes, wonderful--life."
– Benjamin Strong, The Village Voice

“A ludicrously underrated romantic comedy. Why It’s A Wonderful Life continues to receive maximum Xmas airtime and yet this holiday gem gets neglected is beyond us.”
– Time Out New York

“Begins in the screwball comedy vein and then goes into different territory. What's so good about the picture is the characters' shifting perceptions of one another as they spend time together and as they notice the way others see them. It's extremely delicate and, in the end, very moving. It's a picture that should be better known. One of the best pictures based on a Sturges screenplay. Director Leisen’s films have a fluid, almost airstreamed look and a lightness of touch that's hard to achieve”
– Martin Scorsese

DECEMBER 26/27 FRI/SAT (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)

SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS

(1941) “To all the funny men and clowns who have made people laugh.” Art vs. Commerce, as idealistic movie director Sullivan (Joel McCrea) wants to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?, while studio bosses hold out for another Ants in Your Pants of 1939. So he sets out to explore Human Misery for himself, with a luxurious studio van in tow and peekaboo-hairdoed Veronica Lake (disguised as a wild boy of the road) along for the ride. Sturges’ testament to the art of Hollywood moviemaking. Approx. 90 minutes
2:40, 6:05, 9:30

“A brilliant fantasy in two keys - slapstick farce and the tragedy of human misery.”
– James Agee

"[Sullivan's Travels raises] the perennial question in Hollywood of escapism versus engagement.
There are plenty of movies that do one or the other, that make us laugh away our troubles,
or that make us face our troubles, but there aren't very many that do both,
and that's the thing that's really great about Sullivan's Travels -
one of the reasons it's really one of my favorite movies of all time."
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times. Click here to hear more from A.O. Scott on Sullivan's Travels

“Rich in surprise and parody. It has a bit of Chaplin, a bit of Lubitsch and a great deal of Preston Sturges.”
– William Whitebait

"The most witty and knowing spoof of Hollywood movie-making of all time."
– Film Society Review

“Still as brilliant and funny today as it was back in the early '40s… Comedy doesn't come much more classic.
If you haven't seen it, it's about time you did.”
– EMPIRE Magazine

“Irresistible! A gem, an almost serious comedy not taken entirely seriously, with wonderful dialogue, eccentric characterizations, and superlative performances throughout.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

"A movie about wanting to make a movie. People later on would see a parallel to Fellini's 8½ but it is in some ways even more
daring...What makes Sullivan's Travels so interesting, so oddly and finally effective, are its convolutions and contradictions...
The final claim that Sturges makes is breathtaking…There is nothing else quite like it, not even in Sturges' work."
– James Harvey, Romantic Comedy

“Sturges’ great Hollywood satire. Among the best scenes Sturges ever did, with a level of wit that is close to Oscar Wilde.”
– David Thomson

“In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Sturges created a strange hybrid: a film that movingly searches the grim depths
of poverty, prisons, and chain gangs; and a film that is, in the end, a hilarious exposé of its own well-established concern.
Prefigures Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers, but remains unique in American cinema.”
– Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive

THE GREAT McGINTY

(1940) “If you don’t have graft you’d have a low type of person in politics. Men with no ambition.” Boss Akim Tamiroff helps crooked bum Brian Donlevy become an even crookeder governor, until honesty rears its ugly head. Written seven years before, Sturges sold the script for $10 (upped from $5) for the chance to direct. Result: his only Oscar (the first-ever Original Screenplay award) and the first of seven smash hits. “Capra with the gloves off.” – Raymond Durgnat. Approx. 81 minutes
4:30, 7:55

“Still the funniest American movie about politics.” – Andrew Sarris

“A gentle, perfectly crafted satire on American political corruption. The perfect fusion of Sturges' wit and frenzy.”
– The Chicago Reader

“Recommended! The master’s first film as a director finds him hitting the ground running.”
– Time Out New York

“Sturges’ first directing job and where has he been all our lives?
He has that sense of the incongruous which makes some of the best gaiety.”
– Otis Ferguson

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DECEMBER 28/29 SUN/MON (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK

(1944) When Betty Hutton’s Trudy Kockenlocker comes home from a soldier’s farewell dance in the family way, Eddie Bracken’s perennially hapless Norville Jones is dragged to the rescue, in Sturges’ small-town version of the Immaculate Conception. With Diana Lynn as Trudy’s wiser-than-her-years kid sister. Approx. 99 minutes
2:40, 6:30*, 10:20
*Dolly Hall, daughter of actress Diana Lynn, will introduce the 6:30 show on Sunday

“Like taking a nun on a roller coaster.” – James Agee

“Affably blasphemous. The real miracle is that Sturges got all of this past the production-code.
Caustic and chaotic in the arch Sturges manner, it's probably his funniest and most smilingly malicious film.”
– Dave Kehr

“I simply couldn’t believe my eyes the first time I saw this outrageous, subversive slapstick romantic comedy. What got me was the (still) amazingly fresh combination of utterly sophisticated plot and viewpoint with flat-out falling-down American farce.”
– Peter Bogdanovich

“This film moves in a fantastic and irreverent whirl of slapstick, nonsense, farce, sentiment, satire, romance, melodrama - is there any ingredient of dramatic entertainment except maybe tragedy and grand opera that hasn't been tossed into it?”
– National Board of Review

HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO

(1944) Eddie Bracken’s 4-F Woodrow Truesmith is railroaded into returning to his small town as a war hero — and unwillingly thrust into a nightmare of cheering throngs, political campaigns and guilt-ridden mother love. Approx. 101 minutes
4:35, 8:25

“The dialogue keeps popping off like a string of firecrackers.
You may not quite know what hit you.”
– Pauline Kael

“Takes on wartime patriotism with a brio and vengeance that may take your breath away. A scathing delight.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

" A masterpiece of slantwise Americana; 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero punctures wartime support-the-team sanctimony without tilting into self-righteousness, thanks largely to Demarest's cantankerous charm as a soldier whose pity
on 4-F milquetoast Eddie Bracken triggers an avalanche of well-meaning fraud."
– Jim Ridley, The Village Voice

“Wonderful satire. No Middle American sacred cow is spared in this hilarious blend of satire, slapstick and comedy of manners, with marvelous dialogue full of dizzy non-sequiturs and an amazing gallery of grotesque characters.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

“Tells a story so touching, so chock-full of human frailties and so rich in homely detail
that it achieves a reality transcending the limitations of its familiar slapstick.”
– James Agee

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DECEMBER 30 TUE (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)

EASY LIVING

(1937, Mitchell Leisen) In Sturges’ most famed pre-directorial screwball comedy, working girl Jean Arthur is bonked on the head with a mink coat while riding on an open-air Fifth Ave. double-decker bus, mistaken for the mistress of Wall St. lion Edward Arnold, given the Manhattan penthouse suite to end all luxurious Manhattan penthouse suites, and finds love in the Automat with fresh-faced Ray Milland. With Pangborn, Demarest, et al. Approx. 86 minutes
2:40, 6:20, 10:00

“A blithe romantic comedy. You can already hear the beginnings of the trademark 90mph banter and dizzying dialogue exchanges that Sturges would later perfect, along with his knack for turning battle-of-the-sexes frisson into comic fold.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York

“One of the most pleasurable of the romantic slapstick comedies of the 30s, and full of surprises.”
– Pauline Kael

“Not only is it funny and gracious and generous in the best Sturges tradition; it is also velvety smooth
and comfortably movie-ish...Jean Arthur gives Easy Living much of its spunky-elegant resilience."
– Andrew Sarris

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS

(1948) “He can handle Handel like no one can handle Handel.” Murder to the tune of Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. A Sturgian classic of style and slapstick, as insanely jealous conductor Rex Harrison (modeled on Sir Thomas Beecham) fantasizes killing wife Linda Darnell in three different musical modes. With ace support from tightwad Rudy Vallee and musically-minded gumshoe Edgar Kennedy. Approx. 105 minutes
4:20, 8:00

“No director ever matched Sturges's way of blending low slapstick and literate dialogue comedy; this film finds him moving toward a more Lubitschian elegance.”
– Dave Kehr

“There are so many great lines and situations in this movie that writers and directors have been stealing from it for years,
just as they've been stealing from Sturges's other work, but no one has ever come close to the wild-man devilry.”
– Pauline Kael

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DECEMBER 31/JANUARY 1 WED/THU (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)

THE LADY EVE

(1941) Con-artist Barbara Stanwyck, aided by “dad” Charles Coburn, preys on owlish herpetologist Henry Fonda of Pike’s Ale (“The Ale that Won for Yale”) fame. For wedding night entertainment, “Lady Eve” recounts to a slack-jawed husband a seemingly endless list of former lovers. A Sturges masterpiece, it made The Times’ 10 Best. Citizen Kane came in second. Approx. 94 minutes
2:40, 6:15, 10:00

“Still in that New Year’s mood… May be Sturges’ best. Exhilaratingly fast-paced and surprisingly complicated.”
– Peter Bogdanovich

“Sturges's greatest film... has nothing to recommend it but perfection.” – Richard Corliss

“The most soulful and possibly the greatest of Sturges comedies.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Perhaps the greatest screwball comedy ever made, Sturges’ masterpiece plays like a hilarious dry run for Vertigo.”
– Time Out New York

"One of the most liberatingly funny films ever made." – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

THE PALM BEACH STORY

(1942) “That’s one of the tragedies of this life: that the men most in need of a beating are always enormous.” Sturges’ most complicated variation on what he called “Topic A” (s-e-x). Under the credits, a maid faints thrice, one Claudette Colbert kicks her way out of a closet, while a second, in a bridal gown, hails a cab. Colbert, on the run from husband Joel McCrea, is pursued by a discreetly amorous zillionaire Rudy Vallee—whose man-crazy sister Mary Astor chases McCrea. Then Sturges picks up the pace. “Surprises and delights as though nothing of the kind had been known before.” – William Whitebait. Approx. 87 minutes
4:30, 8:10

“The sex comedy reached its most exquisite fulfillment in Hollywood with The Palm Beach Story …
Sturges unscrambles this comedy of errors with Shakespearian audacity.”
– Andrew Sarris

“Perhaps Sturges’ full-out wackiest comedy and his sunniest.
A terrific Sturges trademark: the triumph of happiness against all odds and all credulity.”
– Peter Bogdanovich

“This classic romp set new standards for madcap hilarity.
Colbert’s encounter with the ‘Wienie King’ is itself funnier than Hollywood’s entire 2008 comedic output.”
– Time Out New York

“Brilliant, simultaneously tender and scalding screwball—one of the real gems in Sturges's hyperproductive period at Paramount.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

"One of the giddiest and most chaotic of Preston Sturges satiric orgies." – Pauline Kael

“Shows Sturges as the master of verbal screwball.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice

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Special thanks to Paul Ginsburg, Bob O’Neil, Dave Oakden (NBC Universal);
Schawn Belston, Caitlin Robertson (20th Century Fox);
Melanie Valera (Paramount Pictures); John Kochman; and Tom Sturges.