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Preston Sturges

 
Biography: Preston Sturges
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Preston Sturges (1898-1959) was the first writer-turned-director in the history of talking movies, and one of the greatest film directors of any variety. He is best known for the comedies he made in the early 1940s. His films are distinguished by a zany wit and brilliant, madcap dialogue.

Preston Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden on August 29, 1898 in Chicago, Illinois. His was not a traditional upbringing. His mother, Mary, had several husbands and lovers. She was also a close friend of the dancer Isadora Duncan, sharing with her a lifestyle that might be described as "loose." In the autobiography, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, the director describes his mother as having a "vivid fantasy life … anything she said three times she believed fervently." In turn, his father, Edmund Biden, was an alcoholic.

By 1900, two years after Edmund Preston was born, his parents had divorced. Mary had earlier begun a relationship with Solomon Sturges, a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, whom she married in October 1901. In January 1902, Solomon formally adopted her son, who was thereafter known as Preston Sturges.

Sturges's mother soon found life as the wife of a Chicago stockbroker too restrictive. The couple agreed that Mary would spend half her time in Europe, half in Chicago. With her friend Isadora, she cavorted around the Continent, leaving Preston parked with various acquaintances, and, later, at various boarding schools. In 1911, Solomon Sturges filed for divorce. Even though he was not Preston's birth father, he still treated him as a son and the two remained extremely close-in contrast to Preston's relationship with his real dad, who only reappeared much later in his life to ask for money.

The Young Continental

There were advantages to Sturges's bohemian childhood. As Donald Spoto wrote in Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges, "[As a teenager], he had an easy poise and engaging charm, for his innate intelligence and quickness of wit had been naturally augmented by an exposure to the widest variety of cosmopolitan influences … he had become, in fact, a young Continental, with a keen appreciation of good food and wine, of wit, sensuality and sociability."

In his later teens, Sturges lived in New York, attending school on and off, and working in his mother's cosmetics business. In 1918, he reported as a cadet in the aviation section of the U.S. Signal Corps. He served for 14 months and received his commission as a second lieutenant. After completing his military service, he returned to New York and the cosmetics business. Sturges became interested in science and enjoyed playing with gadgets. For the next few years, he spent much of his time working for his mother and trying his hand at inventing.

Sturges was tall and handsome, and eventually stole 19-year-old Estelle Godfrey away from her rich husband. Godfrey, who was well-off financially, married Sturges in 1923. The two purchased a house in Westchester, New York. Between 1924 and 1926, they alternated between country life in the suburbs and an avid social life in the city; however, the marriage ended in 1927.

A Late Bloomer

It was not until Sturges was about 30 that he began his writing career. An aspiring actress had ended an affair with Sturges, telling him that she had only dated him to find material for a play she wanted to write. Sturges told her that he could write a better play than she could. In three weeks, he produced a comedy based on the affair called The Guinea Pig.

While getting a play produced in the United States has never been easy, New York in the late 1920s offered many opportunities for a young playwright. Between Broadway and small theaters, about 250 plays were produced each year. Hoping to meet a prospective producer, Sturges entered the theater world as an assistant stage manager. Soon he met a lawyer, Charles Abramson, who told him that a playwright could produce a play himself for as little as $2,500, plus theater rental. A wealthy friend of his mother's lent him the money, and Sturges opened his play in early January 1929. Most of the New York papers gave it good reviews, and, for a small production, the show made a nice profit.

First Big Success

Within a few months, Sturges had written his next play, Strictly Dishonorable. The plot revolved around an Italian opera star and ladies' man who seduces the innocent fiancee of an uptight prig. However, what begins as sexual conquest becomes love, and the play ends with the two set to travel the world and have 11 children. As Spoto writes in Madcap, the play "… had all the characteristics of Preston Sturges's best achievements of the stage and screen: the witty, pointed conversation; the acute sense of social satire; the deftly developed characters; and action as well as dialogue that typically derives from those characters-never from an imposed theme or labored thesis." The play was a big hit with audiences and made Sturges a wealthy man-at least temporarily.

With a successful show, Sturges was soon sought out by film studios to polish scripts. He was paid $10,000 to provide a few lines for the The Big Pond, which took him just a couple of days to complete. He also quickly wrote another play, Rapture, which opened in January 1930. The reviews were poor, and it closed after 24 performances. In November, his fourth play, The Well of Romance, lasted just eight days. After his fifth play, Child of Manhattan, was released, a The New York Times review stated, "The more young Mr. Preston Sturges continues to write follow-ups to Strictly Dishonorable, the more we wonder who wrote Strictly Dishonorable."

Perhaps Sturges was distracted by his affair with Eleanor Post Hutton, a wealthy socialite. Her family was fiercely critical of the alliance, and the two eloped in April 1930. This marriage did not last either, and the couple parted in 1932.

Go West, Young Writer

In December 1932, with a string of failed plays and in debt, Sturges headed West. He signed on for three months as a contract writer at Universal Studios for $1,000 a week. He was put to work on the film The Invisible Man, but the proposed director was unhappy with his work, and his option was dropped.

On his own, Sturges wrote The Power and the Glory. The film received mostly good reviews, but it did not do well at the box office. The unusual and powerful screenplay did, however, enhance Sturges's reputation significantly. In fact, it did much more. Not only did the film introduce Spencer Tracy to filmgoers, it was also sold on a royalty basis with the provision that it not be changed by the director-a first for Hollywood. Sturges was on the set throughout filming and had a major hand in the final product, acting much more like a playwright than screenwriter. Additionally, the experience made Sturges realize that it really was the director who held sway on the set, and it confirmed his ambition to direct his own films someday.

Over the next several years-while living with a fiery beauty, Bianca Gilchrist-Sturges worked as a screenwriter, spending a few months at one studio, then moving on to another. Columbia, Universal, and others all paid him handsomely to work on their pictures. Paramount was especially hospitable to writers, and it was there that Sturges perfected his skills as a writer of screwball comedies in films like Easy Living. By 1938, he was making $2,750 a week; he was one of the highest paid writers in Hollywood. That year, he married his third wife, Louise Sargent Tevis, who would give Sturges his first son in 1941, Solomon Sturges IV. The marriage was a relatively long one for Sturges, ending almost nine years later in 1947.

Other Endeavors

With his improved financial situation, Sturges indulged his love for mechanical contraptions and established the Sturges Engineering Company in 1935. It sold an improved design of the internal combustion engine. Sturges was not a passive investor; he would stop by the factory to talk with the foreman and maintained a keen interest in technical developments. The company survived during World War II, but was liquidated soon afterwards.

Sturges also became involved in the restaurant business, financing Snyder's Restaurant in 1936. In 1940, he opened another, much bigger restaurant, The Players. It became a hangout for Hollywood celebrities, like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch. Both restaurants were money-losers. Snyder's closed in 1938; The Players lasted until 1953, but only with Sturges making up significant deficits.

The Great Director

As the 1930s drew to a close, Sturges finally realized his dream of directing. He sold The Great McGinty to Paramount for $1 (eventually upped to $10 by the studio's legal department), with the condition that he would be allowed to direct it. While writer/directors, like Billy Wilder and John Huston, were to become common, in Sturges's day they were unheard-of. A political satire, McGinty was about, as Diane Jacobs wrote in Christmas in July: The Life and Times of Preston Sturges, "the American dream rebuked by American reality. About the inexorableness of character, the dire consequences of romantic love, the inadequacy of justice, and the quarrel between free will and destiny." Despite a bout with pneumonia, Sturges brought the film in ahead of schedule and under budget. McGinty was a resounding critical and financial success when it opened in 1940.

Over the next five years, Sturges would direct the string of comedy hits that movie watchers continue to adore: 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 films, as David Everitt wrote in The New York Times, "were peopled with such characters as the man-crazy bobby-soxer Trudy Kockenblocker, the bemused millionaire John D. Hackensacker 3d, and a would-be war hero saddled with the moniker Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith." The movies are replete with brilliant, hilarious dialogue, like the repartee between galon-the-make Barbara Stanwyck and millionaire ophiologist (snake scientist) Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. Geoffrey O'Brien wrote of Sturges in The New York Review of Books, "He breaks every rule of movies by putting language at the center and making the whole film swirl around it."

Decline and Fall

Hail the Conquering Hero, released in 1944, marked the high point of Sturges's career. Soon afterwards, his The Great Moment, opened to mixed reviews and was a commercial failure. The following year, he joined with the ty-coon Howard Hughes to form the California Pictures Corporation. Sturges was to make films; Hughes would make airplanes and supply the money for both. The venture soon went sour and Hughes ended the partnership.

The film that probably ended Sturges's career was Unfaithfully Yours, made for movie mogul Daryl Zanuck at Fox in 1948. It opened to only mildly positive reviews and was a commercial flop. Not only was the film expensive to make, but it was the victim of poor luck. Its plot includes a scene where the lead character, played by Rex Harrison, kills his wife. Just before the film was set for release, actress Carole Landis, apparently grief-stricken over a doomed, much-publicized affair with Harrison, committed suicide. There was no way Fox could show the picture under the circumstances, and its release was postponed for several months. Shortly afterward, another Sturges film, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, also proved disappointing.

In 1951, Sturges married his fourth wife, Anne Margaret Nagle, known as "Sandy." They had two sons, Preston and Thomas Preston. Professionally, the 1950s were punctuated by failure. Sturges did manage to write and direct one movie for a French production company, which was released in America under the title The French They Are a Funny Race. The film did well in Europe and made a modest profit in the United States, but it did little to rehabilitate Sturges's reputation.

In February 1959, Sturges began work on his autobiography, commissioned by the publishers Henry Holt. In his New York Review article, Geoffrey O'Brien writes, "It was somehow in keeping with Sturges's destiny to have the rare privilege of scripting his own death scene." While working on his autobiography, Sturges wrote "[I have] a bad case of indigestion … I am well-versed in the remedy: ingest a little Maalox, lie down, stretch out, and hope to God I don't croak." As O'Brien reports, he died twenty minutes later, on August 6, 1959 in New York City.

Further Reading

Jacobs, Diane, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges, University of California Press, 1992.

Spoto, Donald, Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges, Little, Brown 1990.

Sturges, Preston, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, Simon &Schuster, 1990.

Atlantic Monthly, February 1996.

New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990.

New York Times, July 19, 1998.

"Preston Sturges Index," http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/7321/sturgesindex.html (March 9, 1999).

"The Official Preston Sturges Site," http://www.prestonsturges.com/biography.html (March 9, 1999).

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Preston Sturges
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(born Aug. 29, 1898, Chicago, Ill., U.S. — died Aug. 6, 1959, New York, N.Y.) U.S. film director. Initially a playwright, he wrote the Broadway hits Strictly Dishonorable (1929) and Child of Manhattan (1931). After moving to Hollywood, he became a noted screenwriter and won an Academy Award for The Great McGinty (1940), the first film he directed. He went on to write and direct distinctive satirical comedies such as The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1941), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948), characterized by their witty dialogue, rapid pace, and memorable minor characters.

For more information on Preston Sturges, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Preston Sturges
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Sturges, Preston (stûr'jĭs), 1898-1959, American film director, screenwriter, and producer, b. Chicago as Edmond Preston Biden. Educated in the United States and Europe, he turned to playwriting during the 1920s, penning works that included the hit Broadway comedy Strictly Dishonorable (1929, film 1931). Sturges moved (1932) to Hollywood and began to turn out screenplays, both for dramas and sparkling comedies. He debuted as a director with the screwball comedy The Great McGinty (1940), which he also wrote, and for which he won the best original screenplay Oscar. Sturges satirized many sacred cows in the witty, unsentimental, and stylish movies he wrote and directed during the 1940s. Among them are Sullivan's Travels (1941), widely considered his masterpiece; The Lady Eve (1941); I Married a Witch (1942); The Palm Beach Story (1942); Hail the Conquering Hero (1944); and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). After the successful Unfaithfully Yours (1948), his career faltered, and his subsequent films were few and undistinguished. After falling into relative obscurity, his romantic comedies were rediscovered in the 1970s, and he is now hailed as one of Hollywood's finest and most influential comic talents.

Bibliography

See his memoirs, ed. by his wife, Sandy Sturges (1990); biographies by J. Curtis (1982), D. Spoto (1990), and D. Jacobs (1992).

Works: Works by Preston Sturges
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(1898-1959)

1929Strictly Dishonorable. The future Hollywood writer and director has his only Broadway success in this witty comedy about a Southern belle abandoned by her escort in a New York speakeasy.

Writer: Preston Sturges
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  • Born: Aug 29, 1898 in Chicago, Illinois
  • Died: Aug 06, 1959 in New York City, New York
  • Occupation: Writer, Director
  • Active: '30s-'40s
  • Major Genres: Comedy, Drama
  • Career Highlights: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Big Pond (1930)

Biography

One of Hollywood's genuinely legendary directors, Preston Sturges redefined the boundaries and meaning of screen comedy as a filmmaker during part of the early '40s. The full range of his influence on movies, however, extended far beyond the director's chair or the success of the pictures that he helmed. Sturges first made his mark in Hollywood as a screenwriter through a series of acclaimed (and still-admired) scripts across the 1930s whose qualities still resonate seven decades later.

The son of a socially prominent couple, he was born Edmund Preston Biden in Chicago in 1898. He had a cosmopolitan upbringing throughout Europe and America, and served in the Air Corps during World War I. He worked for a time in his mother's cosmetics company before moving into other fields, including inventing. Sturges began writing plays in the late '20s, creating one major hit, Strictly Dishonorable, which was subsequently filmed twice, the first time in 1931 by John M. Stahl (in a form surprisingly close to the source, in terms of sexually charged repartee) at Universal, and in 1950, as a musical, by Melvin Frank at MGM.

Sturges then got some experience writing screen dialogue and became a scriptwriter in 1933. His early notable work in this field included the screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933), starring Spencer Tracy and directed by William K. Howard, which is frequently cited as the structural antecedent to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. Another, Thirty-Day Princess (1934), was a comedic romantic reversal of The Prisoner of Zenda, set in Depression-era America, which also wove some fascinating topical social commentary into its story. Sturges' eye for social observation, as a writer and then as a director, would manifest itself ever more strongly as his career approached its peak in the first half of the 1940s; but his commentary and "messages" were presented so briskly and smoothly that audiences frequently absorbed them without feeling as though they were being lectured or imposed upon, which only enhanced their effectiveness.

By the middle of the 1930s, he had developed a reputation for his witty, sophisticated, but unpretentious writing, most notably in The Good Fairy (1935), directed by William Wyler at Universal and Easy Living (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen at Paramount. His stories freely mixed witty repartee and piercing social observations with finely etched characters and briskly unfolding narratives; the dialogue in his comedies, in particular, was also surprisingly up front in its sexual subtexts, even amid the stricter enforcement of the Production Code from 1934 onward. He also authored some screenplays, less well remembered today, that were distinctly more of a dramatic bent, especially on historical subjects. We Live Again (1934) was a romance between a nobleman and a peasant, set in Imperial Russia, while Diamond Jim (1935) dealt (in highly fictionalized, but effective terms) with a celebrated and colorful millionaire out of America's not-too-distant past. His comedies have endured the longest in the memory, although Sturges was one of the writers who most easily crossed between (and bent) the various genres; in his own movies, the mixture of comedy, drama, and pathos would be one of the hallmarks of his most ambitious scripts. In that regard, a serious contender for his most finely written script is Remember the Night (1940), a comedy-drama directed by Leisen and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. The latter movie melded elements of light comedy, topical humor, and serious drama, all hooked around an improbable but ultimately highly credible romance, and carried its audience from an urban setting to small-town America (in its best and worst incarnations). The picture was a marvel of brilliant script construction and character study, all finely realized by director Leisen and a first-rate cast. But Remember the Night also marked the virtual end of Sturges' stay in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

During the second half of the 1930s, Sturges absorbed all that he deemed necessary to know about filmmaking, short of actually making a movie. The most successful of his scripts had been directed by Wyler and Leisen, two of Hollywood's most reliable hit-makers and formidable talents in their own right. But by 1939, Sturges felt that he could do the best job of bringing his scripts to the screen. He was already as busy as anyone in Hollywood, and the studios were notoriously reticent about letting people move out of their respective niches into new fields. Such mobility seemed to be tampering with established success and made department heads and moguls alike nervous, lest they break up winning formulas and lose control of valuable personnel. But in exchange for selling them his latest script at a cut-rate, he was able to persuade Paramount management to give him the director's chair with The Great McGinty (1940). And the result was a hit that turned Sturges into the wunderkind of the filmmaking community, as well as transforming its leading man, Brian Donlevy (previously confined to villain roles) into a star. Even more remarkable was the fact that The Great McGinty was a political satire, a sub-genre that Hollywood had always regarded as extremely risky at the box office. Instead, the public took to it in droves, and its appeal -- spurred by Sturges' breakneck pacing of the dialogue and action -- cut across cultural lines, to rural and urban filmgoers alike. The durability of that debut would be proved four years later in a subsequent Sturges written-and-directed movie, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, when he included small but key roles for Donlevy and co-star Akim Tamiroff as the same characters they played in McGinty, and audiences were not confused but delighted.

He succeeded a second time with Christmas in July (1940), a somewhat more modestly produced offbeat satire (based on his own play, A Cup of Coffee) of radio, advertising, and Depression-era industry. The latter movie was also laced -- amid its rapid-fire humor -- with elements of poignancy and sympathy for the working poor that seemed honest and heartfelt rather than cloying. After that second success, there was no stopping Sturges for the next four years. What followed was the string of masterpieces upon which his reputation came to rest: The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), all of which were solid commercial and critical successes, and seem even more extraordinary today considering their subject matter. Starting with The Lady Eve (1941), Sturges had proved an expert at sneaking dialogue filled with piercing and obvious sexual innuendo past the Production Code Office. How he did is anyone's guess. B-picture writers and producers of the period, such as Val Lewton, succeeded in this task because they were making lower budgeted, seemingly bottom-of-the-bill fare, but Sturges' movies were all high-profile A-pictures, which the Production Code Office usually paid close attention to; yet there is amoral confidence artist Barbara Stanwyck visibly seducing innocent "mark" Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, with dialogue that is unmistakable in its reference to sexual arousal. And The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is even more amazing, as it seems to parody middle-class sensibilities about marriage, as well as trading on the key plot element of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in which the woman is not punished in any lasting way. He also made Sullivan's Travels (1941) -- another picture that, like everything else he made between 1941 and 1944, is regarded as a contender for his best movie -- and got it passed the studio management despite its being a savage and piercing satire of Hollywood, and one that, viewed today, cut dangerously close to insulting such serious, high-profile, big-budget Paramount productions of the period as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Along with him for this extraordinary ride -- and, in fact, a key element behind the success of these pictures -- was the renowned Sturges stock company, made up of players he had seen at work during his time as a writer: William Demarest, Raymond Walburn, Alan Bridge, Harry Rosenthal, Harry Hayden, Elizabeth Patterson, sther Howard, Dewey Robinson, Franklin Pangborn, Julius Tannen, Jimmy Conlin, Edgar Kennedy, Frank Moran, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig, Robert Warwick, and Victor Potel were among the most familiar of them. Other directors and performers, from John Ford to Abbott & Costello, had stock companies, formal or informal, assembled around them, but Sturges seemed to get more than most of them from his players in terms of comedy and drama, in shorter, more precisely etched on-screen moments, and for many of these players, their work for Sturges constituted the highlights of long and varied careers. Their presence gave his movies an unusual unity, despite wildly varying subject matter and settings.

At his best -- and he was at or near his best almost without exception from 1939 until 1948 -- Sturges handled the making of movies in the manner of a prodigiously talented composer/conductor, authoring his scripts in very precise terms and, utilizing a stock company of players he could depend on, getting the finely nuanced performances out of his cast to bring those lines to life exactly the way he heard and wanted them. Watching most of the movies that he made across those eight years is, indeed, like watching a conductor push and lead and coax an orchestra (or an opera company) in a note-perfect performance. In fact, in Unfaithfully Yours he almost seems to be revealing a key aspect of his art in the work of the Rex Harrison character, a meticulously precise and demanding conductor (based, in fact, on Thomas Beecham) who consistently gets his orchestras to rise above their ordinary standard of playing.

In the process, he also pushed a lot of buttons -- some of them very personal, for audiences -- with his films. He got the movie business to laugh at itself without resenting his efforts and Americans to laugh at their own sentimentality and cultural sacred cows, exploding and debunking some of the more dubious assumptions Americans had about themselves without ever making audiences feel threatened or insulted. Although The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was regarded as his most daring achievement in terms of getting a subject past the censors, Hail the Conquering Hero may have been the more astonishing achievement as a successful release. Issued in the midst of the Second World War, at a time when patriotism and heroism were regarded at a premium in public and private life, or so we were told, it called the conventional notions and accepted wisdom of either into question, along with people's willingness to accept them at face value, exposed serious fault lines in all of these matters as they were understood in middle America, and yet left audiences feeling good. It was, of course, all in the writing as well as the directing, not just merging but fusing the roles of each. And Sturges was so successful in combining those roles that many screenwriters began to move into directing. Others had gone that route before, from writing to directing, but not so directly or prominently, and with such startling results or yielding seemingly overnight directorial stardom. Without Sturges' success to blaze the trail, it's doubtful whether John Huston or Billy Wilder, to name just two notable writers-turned-filmmakers, would have moved up to directing movies in the early '40s.

Sturges' own career faltered, however, after a dispute with studio management and the failure of an ill-advised "serious" historical drama, The Great Moment (1944). He left Paramount in 1944 and tried to restart his career in collaboration with screen legend Harold Lloyd in Mad Wednesday (aka, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock) (1947). After that failure, Sturges moved over to 20th Century Fox and made the successful, sophisticated black comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which, again, pushed the envelope of audience sensibilities, this time about comedy, as well as satirizing some elements of film noir that were then in fashion. Additionally, the movie parallelled some of the experiments being done on the other side of the Atlantic by the writer-producer-director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (two other filmmakers who had fused the roles of screenwriter and director into one) using music as a determining structural element in key sections of the action. But his moment had passed, and he faded out of Hollywood after making The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949), a Western satire that was a shadow of his former work. A difficult partnership with Howard Hughes ended disastrously, and Sturges retreated to Europe, where he directed one more movie, The French, They Are a Funny Race, four years before his death in 1959.

A superb writer and dazzling stylist in his prime, Sturges' reputation loomed ever-larger as the decades passed, as his movies -- and even those that he'd merely written, such as Easy Living -- retained their old audiences and found new admirers through extensive television showings. His Paramount films still easily sold out in theatrical revival showings into the 1990s, long after they'd been made available on home video. His dedicated following is even more remarkable when one considers that it rests on a handful of feature films, all made within a five-year period. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Preston Sturges
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Preston Sturges
Born Edmund Preston Biden
August 29, 1898(1898-08-29)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died August 6, 1959 (aged 60)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation writer/director
Years active 1928–1956
Spouse(s) Estelle de Wolf Mudge
(1923–1928, divorce)
Eleanor Close Hutton
(1930–1932, annulled)
Louise Sargent Tevis
(1938–1947, divorce)
Anne Margaret "Sandy" Nagle
(1951–1959, his death)
Official website

Preston Sturges (29 August 1898 – 6 August 1959), originally Edmund Preston Biden, was a celebrated screenwriter and film director born in Chicago.

Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic, mature, and ahead of its time, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene. A love scene between Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve was enlivened by a horse, which repeatedly poked its nose into Fonda's head.

Sturges is often credited as the first writer to direct his own script, but this is not true: Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was already writing and directing feature-length films by 1921. A few other major directors such as Frank Capra and Howard Hawks also preceded Sturges in making the leap from writing to directing, as did less celebrated figures. However, Sturges may have been the first celebrated Hollywood screenwriter to be promoted as having made the "leap" to directing for publicity purposes. Famously, he sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $1, in return for being allowed to direct the film. (The sum was quietly raised to $10 by the studio for legal reasons.)

Contents

Biography

Early life

Sturges' parents were Mary Estelle Dempsey and travelling salesman Edmund C. Biden; his maternal grandparents, Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick d’Este Dempsey, were immigrants from Ireland.[1]

When Sturges was three years old, his eccentric mother left America to pursue a singing career in Paris, where she annulled her marriage with Preston's father. Returning to America, Dempsey met her third husband, the wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges, who adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism." His mother, ultimately known as "Mary Desti" through her fourth marriage, was famous for her friendship with Isadora Duncan, even giving her the scarf that led to Duncan's freakish death. The young Sturges would sometimes travel from country to country with Duncan's dance company. Mary Desti also carried on a romantic affair with Aleister Crowley and collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick (Book 4). In his memoirs Crowley described the young Sturges as "a most god-forsaken lout", and Sturges returned the favor with a vituperative mention of Crowley in his own memoirs.

As a young man, Preston Sturges bounced back and forth between Europe and the States.[2] In 1916 he worked as a runner for New York stock brokers, a position he obtained through Solomon Sturges. The next year Preston enlisted in the United States Army Air Service, and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas without seeing action. While at camp Sturges wrote an essay titled Three Hundred Words of Humor which was printed in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work. Returning from camp, Sturges picked up a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband. He spent eight years (1919-1927) there, until he married the first of his four wives, Estelle De Wolfe.

From Broadway to Hollywood

In 1928, Sturges performed on Broadway in Hotbed, a short-lived play by Paul Osborn,[3] and Sturges' first produced play, The Guinea Pig, opened in Massachusetts. A success, Sturges moved it to Broadway the following year, a turning point in his career.[4] That same year also saw the opening of Sturges' second play, the hit Strictly Dishonorable.[5] Written in just six days, the play ran for sixteen months and earned Sturges over $300,000, a staggering amount at the time. It attracted interest from Hollywood, and Sturges was writing for Paramount by the end of the year.

Three other Sturges stage plays were produced from 1930 to 1932, one of them a musical, but none of them were hits.[6] By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating on short contracts, for studios Universal, MGM, and Columbia. He also sold his original screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933) to Fox, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The film told the story of a self-involved financier via a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, and was an acknowledged source of inspiration for the screenwriters of Citizen Kane. Fox producer Jesse Lasky paid Sturges $17,500 plus a percentage of the profits, a then-unprecedented deal for a screenwriter, which instantly elevated Sturges' reputation in Hollywood – although the lucrative deal irritated as many as it impressed. Sturges later recalled, "The film made a lot of enemies. Writers at that time worked in teams, like piano movers. And my first solo script was considered a distinct menace to the profession."

Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941)

For the remainder of the 1930s, Sturges operated under the strict auspices of the studio system, working on a string of scripts, some of which were shelved, sometimes with screen credit and sometimes not. While he was highly paid, earning $2,500 a week, he was unhappy with the way directors were handling his dialogue. This experience built his resolve to take control of his own projects, which he finally accomplished in 1939 by offering to sell his screenplay for The Great McGinty (written six years earlier) to Paramount for a dollar in exchange for the chance to direct it. Paramount's legal department subsequently upped the fee to $10.[7] Sturges' success quickly paved the way for similar deals for such writer-directors as Billy Wilder and John Huston. Sturges said, "It's taken me eight years to reach what I wanted. But now, if I don't run out of ideas — and I won't — we'll have some fun. There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and God willing, I will make some of them."

Screenwriting heights

Sturges won the first Academy Award ever given for Writing Original Screenplay for the McGinty script. Perhaps more impressively, Sturges received two screenwriting Oscar nominations in the same year, for 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

Veronica Lake, Joel McCrea in
Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Though he had a 30-year Hollywood career, Sturges' greatest comedies were filmed in a furious 5-year burst of activity from 1939 to 1943, during which he turned out The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. Half a century later, four of these films – The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek – were chosen by the American Film Institute as being among the American Film Institute's 100 funniest American films. Their inimitable combination of sentiment and cynicism has kept them fresh for today's audiences.

Sturges' rich writing style has been described as that of "a lowbrow aristocrat, a melancholy wiseguy." His scripts were almost congenitally unable to deliver a single mood. During a tender romantic lakeside stroll in Sullivan's Travels, a hanged corpse dangles from a tree, independent of the storyline and uncommented upon. Yet, in Hail the Conquering Hero, the series of lies, crimes, and embarrassments all somehow bolster the film's theme of patriotism and duty.

Studio battles

Production on these films did not always go smoothly. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was literally being written by Sturges at night even as the production was being filmed in the daytime, and Sturges the screenwriter was rarely more than 10 pages ahead of the cast and crew. Despite box office success for The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, conflict with Paramount's studio bosses increased. In particular, executive producer Buddy DeSylva never really trusted his star writer-director and was wary (and arguably, jealous) of the independence Sturges enjoyed on his projects.

One of the sources of conflict was that Sturges liked to reuse many of the same character actors in his films, thus creating what amounted to a regular troupe he could call upon within the studio system. Paramount didn't especially appreciate this, fearing that the audience would tire of repeatedly seeing the same faces in Sturges productions. But the director was adamant: "[T]hese little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures."[8]

Rudy Vallee, Claudette Colbert
in The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Members of Sturges' unofficial "stock company" included George Anderson, Al Bridge, Georgia Caine, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest,[9] Robert Dudley, Byron Foulger, Robert Greig, Harry Hayden, Esther Howard, Arthur Hoyt, J. Farrell MacDonald, George Melford, Torben Meyer, Charles R. Moore, Frank Moran, Jack Norton, Franklin Pangborn, Emory Parnell, Victor Potel, Dewey Robinson, Harry Rosenthal, Julius Tannen, Max Wagner and Robert Warwick. In addition, Sturges re-used other actors, such as Sig Arno, Luis Alberni, Eric Blore, Porter Hall and Raymond Walburn, and even stars such as Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee, who both did three films with Sturges, and Eddie Bracken, who did two.

The prolonged clashes between Sturges and Paramount came to a head as the end of his contract approached. He had filmed The Great Moment and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek in 1942 and Hail the Conquering Hero in 1943, but Paramount was suffering from a surfeit of films, too many to release at one time. Indeed, some of the studio's finished movies were sold off to United Artists, who needed product to distribute.[10] The studio held onto Sturges' three films, since he was their star filmmaker at the time, but did not immediately release them. Internally, studio heads expressed serious reservations about them, as did the censors at the Hays Office. Sturges managed to get The Miracle of Morgan's Creek released with only minor changes, but the other two films were taken out of his control and tinkered with by DeSylva. When the revamped Hail the Conquering Hero had a disastrous preview, Paramount allowed Sturges – who by that time had left the studio – to come back and fix the film. Sturges did some rewriting, shot some new scenes, and re-edited the film back to his original vision, all without pay.

Although he was able to rescue Hail the Conquering Hero from studio interference, Sturges was unable to do the same for The Great Moment. The historical biography about the dentist who discovered the use of ether for anesthesia ended up being Sturges' only flop during this period. More significantly, it marked the onset of a downturn that Sturges never really recovered from.

Independence and decline

Sturges was a temperamental talent who fully recognized his own worth. He had invested in entrepreneurial projects such as an engineering company and The Players, a popular restaurant and nightclub, which were both net losses. At one point the third highest paid man in America - for writing, directing, producing, and numerous other Hollywood projects - he was often known to borrow money (from his stepfather and studio, amongst others).

Millionaire Howard Hughes, who had formed a friendship with Sturges, offered to bankroll him as an independent filmmaker. In early 1944, Sturges and Hughes formed a partnership called California Pictures. The deal represented a major pay cut for Sturges, but it established him as a writer-producer-director, the only one in Hollywood and one of only three in the world along with England's Noel Coward and France's Rene Clair. The status led, again, to widespread admiration and envy among his Hollywood peers.

However, this career peak also marked the beginning of Sturges' professional decline. While the startup California Pictures was being created and structured, it was three years until Sturges' next release. That film, a Harold Lloyd vehicle entitled The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), for which Sturges had coaxed the silent film icon out of retirement, went over budget and far over schedule, and was poorly received when it was released. Hughes, who had promised not to interfere in the film's production, stepped in and pulled the movie from distribution in order to re-edit it, taking almost four years to do so. Released in 1950 by RKO, which was by that time owned by Hughes, the retitled Mad Wednesday was no more successful than Sturges' original version had been.

In the meantime, California Pictures had put another film into production, Vendetta. At Hughes' behest, Sturges had written the script as a vehicle for Hughes' protegé, Faith Domergue. Max Ophüls was hired to direct, but after only a few days of filming, Hughes demanded that Sturges fire Ophüls and take over direction of the film. Seven weeks later, Sturges himself was fired, or quit (accounts differ). The partnership between the two iconoclasts was dissolved, having fallen apart after just one completed picture. As Sturges later recalled, "When Mr. Hughes made suggestions with which I disagreed, as he had a perfect right to do, I rejected them. When I rejected the last one, he remembered he had an option to take control of the company and he took over. So I left."

Coming on the heels of the failure of The Great Moment, these further flops, disappointments and setbacks served to tarnish the once stellar reputation of the golden boy of Hollywood.

Sturges was left professionally adrift. Accepting an offer from Darryl Zanuck, he landed at Fox where he wrote, directed, and produced two films. The first of these, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), was not well received upon release by either reviewers or the public, though its critical reputation has since improved. However, his second Fox film, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), was the first serious flop in star Betty Grable's career, and Sturges was again on his own. He built a theater at his Players restaurant, but the project did not pan out.

Over the next several years, Sturges continued to write, but many of the projects were underfunded or stillborn, and those that emerged did not approach the same success as his earlier triumphs. His 1951 Broadway musical, Make a Wish, underwent extensive rewriting by Abe Burrows and ran for only a few months.[11] His next Broadway project, Carnival in Flanders, a musical which Sturges wrote and directed in 1953, closed after six performances.[12]

Sturges was having no better luck in Hollywood, where his clout was gone. Katharine Hepburn, who had starred in the 1952 Broadway production of the George Bernard Shaw play, The Millionairess[13] got Sturges to agree to adapt the script and direct. But she could not get a single Hollywood studio to back the project.

A 1953 lien by the Internal Revenue Service, with whom he'd been having tax problems, cost Sturges the Players and other assets. Sturges put a brave public face on the situation, writing, "I had so very much for so very long, it is quite natural for the pendulum to swing the other way for a while, and I really cannot and will not complain." However, his drinking became heavy, and his marriage and many of his relationships continued to deteriorate.

Sturges began spending more time in Europe, as he had as a young man. His last directorial effort took place there when he wrote and directed Les Carnets du Major Thompson, an adaptation of a popular French novel. The film was released in France in 1955 and two years later in the U.S., under the title The French, They Are a Funny Race. It failed to register with critics or the audience.

Sturges made four brief onscreen appearances during his career: in two of his own films (Christmas in July and Sullivan's Travels), in the Paramount all-star extravaganza Star Spangled Rhythm, and, in the years of his decline, in the Bob Hope comedy Paris Holiday, which was filmed in France and would be the last film he worked on. Two decades earlier, Sturges had been a writer on one of Hope's earliest film successes, Never Say Die.

Family and death

Sturges was married four times and fathered three children:[2][14]

  • Estelle deWolfe Mudge – married in December 1923, separated in 1927, divorced in 1928
  • Eleanor Close Hutton (a daughter of Marjorie Merriweather (Post) Close Hutton Davies May) – eloped on April 12, 1930, marriage annulled on April 12, 1932
  • Louise Sargent Tevis – married on November 7, 1938 in Reno, Nevada, separated in April 1946, divorced in November 1947
    • son: Solomon Sturges IV (b. June 25, 1941) - actor
  • Anne Margaret "Sandy" Nagle (a lawyer and former actress) – married on April 15, 1951, marriage ended in 1959 with Sturges' death, mother of his two younger sons
    • son: Preston Sturges Jr. (b. February 22, 1953) - screenwriter
    • son: Thomas Preston Sturges (b. June 22, 1956) - music executive

Sturges died of a heart attack at the Algonquin Hotel while writing his autobiography (which, ironically, he'd intended to title The Events Leading Up to My Death), and was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. His book Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words was published in 1990 by Simon & Schuster.[15] In 1975, he became the first writer to be given the Screen Writers Guild's Laurel Award posthumously.

Partial filmography

Awards and honors

Sturges won an Academy Award in 1941 for his screenplay for The Great McGinty, and was subsequently nominated two more times, for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek in 1944 and for Hail the Conquering Hero in 1945. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) was nominated for the Grand Prize of the 1951 Cannes Film Festival.

Posthumously, Sturges received the Laurel Award for "Screen Writing Achievement" from the Writers Guild of America in 1975. He has a star dedicated to him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1601 Vine Street.[17]

Adaptations

Published screenplays

Examples of Sturges' dialogue

Remember the Night (1940)

John Sargent (Fred MacMurray): You know, that's called arson.
Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck): I thought that was when you bit somebody?

The Great McGinty (1940)

The Politician (William Demarest): If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!
Catherine McGinty (Muriel Angelus): Especially since you can't rob the people anyway.
The Politician: Sure! ... How was that?
Catherine McGinty: What you rob, you spend, and what you spend goes back to the people, so where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.
The Politician: That book should be in every home!
(Riding inside the political boss' bulletproof car)
Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy): What makes this bus so quiet?
The Boss (Akim Tamiroff): Armor!
Dan McGinty: Armored for what?
The Boss: So people shouldn't interrupt me!

The Lady Eve (1941)

Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck): I need him like the axe needs the turkey.
"Colonel" Harrington (Charles Coburn): Don't be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common.
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda): Nice fella, your father.
Jean: He's a good card player, too.
Charles: You think so? I don't want to be rude, but I thought he seemed a little uneven.
Jean: He's more uneven some times than others.
Charles: Well, that's what makes him uneven, of course.
Jean: Are you always going to be interested in snakes?
Charles: Snakes are my life, in a way.
Jean: What a life.
Charles: I suppose it does sound sort of silly. I mean, I suppose I should have married and settled down. I imagine my father always wanted me to. As a matter of fact, he's told me so rather plainly. I just never cared for the brewing business.
Jean: Oh, you say that's why you've never married?
Charles: Oh no. It's just I've never met her. I suppose she's around somewhere in the world.
Jean: It would be too bad if you never bumped into each other.
Charles: Well...
Jean: I suppose you know what she looks like and everything.
Charles: I . . . I think so.
Jean: I'll bet she looks like Marguerite in Faust.
Charles: Oh no, she isn't, I mean, she hasn't, she's not as bulky as an opera singer.
Jean: Oh. How are her teeth?
Charles: Huh?
Jean: Well, you should always pick one out with good teeth. It saves expense later.
"Colonel" Harrington: That's the tragedy of the rich. They don't need anything.
Jean: I'm terribly in love, and you seem to be too, so one of us has to think and try and keep things clear. And maybe I can do that better than you can. They say a moonlit deck is a woman's business office.
Jean: Do you know Charles?
Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore): Oh, is he the tall backward boy who's always toying with toads and things? Yes, I think I've seen him skulking about.
Jean: He isn't backward, he's a scientist!
Sir Alfred: Oh, is that what it is? Oh well, I knew he was . . . peculiar.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

John Sullivan (Joel McCrea): There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.
(Studio executives, arguing over a movie)
Mr. Lebrand (Robert Warwick): It died in Pittsburgh.
Mr. Hadrian (Porter Hall): Like a dog!
Sullivan: Aw, what do they know in Pittsburgh?
Mr. Hadrian: They know what they like.
Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn't live in Pittsburgh!
Sullivan: This picture is an ANSWER to Communists. It shows we're awake and not dunking our heads in the sand, like a bunch of ostriches. I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions, stark realism, the problems that confront the average man.
Mr. Lebrand: But with a little sex.
Sullivan: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity, a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.
Mr. Lebrand: But with a little sex.
Sullivan: (resigned) With a little sex in it.
Mr. Lebrand: O Brother, Where Art Thou? is going to be the greatest tragedy ever made! The world will weep! Humanity will sob!
Mr. Jones (Willam Demarest): It'll put Shakespeare back with the shipping news!
The Girl (Veronica Lake): You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to laugh at his jokes.
(Questioned by a policeman)
Desk sergeant (J. Farrell MacDonald): How does the girl fit in this picture?
Sullivan: There's always a girl in the picture. Haven't you ever been to the movies?

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Geraldine Jeffers (Claudette Colbert): (looking at a yacht) Is all this yours?
John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee): Actually, it was my grandfather's, but he didn't like it. He only used it once. This is his hat.
Hackensacker: There is a name for such reptiles, but I won't sully this fair ocean breeze by mentioning it. I suppose he's large?
Geraldine: Well, he's not small.
Hackensacker: That's one of the tragedies of this life, that the men who are most in need of a beating are always enormous.
Hackensacker: Chivalry is not only dead, it's decomposed.
Weenie King (Robert Dudley): I'm cheesy with money. I'm the Weenie King! Invented the Texas Weenie. Lay off 'em, you'll live longer.
Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea): So, this gent gave you The Look?
Geraldine: The Weenie King? At his age, it was really more of a blink.
Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor): I'd marry Captain McGloo tomorrow, even with that name.
Hackensacker: And divorce him the next month.
Princess Centimillia: Nothing in this world is permanent, except for Roosevelt, my dear.
Geraldine: You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

Constable Kockenlocker (William Demarest): Listen, zipper-puss. Someday they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else. The mystery of Morgan's Creek.
Emmy Kockenlocker (Diana Lynn): If you don't mind my mentioning it, Father, I think you have a mind like a swamp.
Constable Kockenlocker: The trouble with kids is they always figure they're smarter than their parents. Never stop to think if their old man could get by for fifty years, and feed 'em, and clothe 'em, he maybe had something up here to get by with. Things that seem like brain twisters to you might be very simple for him.
Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken): You'd think they'd give a party sometime for those who have to stay behind. They also serve, you know, who only sit and...or whatever they do, I forget.
Trudy Kockenlocker: (Betty Hutton): They’re fine, clean young boys from good homes and we can’t send them off to be killed in the rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air without anybody to say goodbye to them, can we?

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

Sgt. Heppelfinger (William Demarest): It's an honor to meet you, kid. What's your name?
Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken): Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith. Go ahead and laugh.
Sgt. Heppelfinger: That ain't anything to laugh at, to anyone who knows anything. I guess you never got to know your father very well, eh?
Woodrow: Well, not exactly, as he fell the day I was born.
Sgt. Heppelfinger: That's right. It's hard to realize. He was a fine-looking fellow. He didn't look anything like you at all.
(After the news that the town plans to build a statue of Woodrow, the fraudulent war hero)
Woodrow: What do I do now?
Sgt. Heppelfinger: Well, you just let it blow over.
Woodrow: Did you ever see a statue blow over?
Sgt. Heppelfinger: I tell you it'll all blow over. Everything is perfect ... except for a couple of details.
Woodrow: They hang people for a couple of details!
Libby's Aunt (Elizabeth Patterson): Well, that's the war for you. It's always hard on women. Either they take your men away and never send them back at all, or they send them back unexpectedly just to embarrass you. No consideration at all.

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947)

Harold Diddlebock (Harold Lloyd): A man works all his life in a glass factory, one day he feels like picking up a hammer.

Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Detective Sweeney (Edgar Kennedy): The way you handle Handel, Sir Alfred! For me, there's nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel! There's you up here, and then there's nobody, no second, no third...maybe way down here, Arturo on poor fourth. And your Delius – delirious!
Sir Alfred De Carter (Rex Harrison): Have you ever heard of Russian roulette?
Daphne De Carter (Linda Darnell): Why, certainly. I used to play it all the time with my father.
Alfred: I doubt that you played Russian Roulette all the time with your father!
Daphne: Oh, I most certainly did. You play it with two decks of cards, and . . .
Alfred: That's Russian Bank.' Russian roulette's a very different amusement which I can only wish your father had played continuously before he had you!
August Henshler (Rudy Vallee): Nothing is too much trouble for the busy man. If you ever want anything done, always ask the busy man. The others never have time. Now, you asked me to keep an eye on your wife, and I assure you that . . .
Alfred: You keep repeating 'Keep an eye on your wife' as if it had some special meaning. I don't know what you're leading up to, but for some reason I feel my back hair rising.
August: You see, Alfred, being a little near-sighted, I couldn't very well keep an eye on her from Palm Beach. Nevertheless, I did not fail you.
Alfred: Again something's happening to my back hair. I don't recollect saying anything to you at the airport, except possibly "goodbye," but even if I did say "Keep an eye on my wife for me," I meant, see if she's lonely some evening and take her out to the movies, you and Barbara.
August: But you didn't say that, you said, "Keep an eye on my wife for me"!
Alfred: Oh, supposing I did, how could you do it from Palm Beach?
August: With detectives.
Alfred: With detectives... With detectives?! You stuffed moron!
(Grabs August by his shirt.)
August: Control yourself, Alfred, control yourself! This is entirely uncalled for. Kindly release my scarf.
Alfred: You dare to inform me you had vulgar footpads in snap-brim fedoras sluicing after my beautiful wife?
August: I believe it's called sleuthing. Alfred, kindly let go of my shirt, you're tearing it. There's nothing to be so upset about. Good heavens, I merely had her tailed.
Alfred: You merely had her what? (Again grabs August by the shirt.) I give you my solemn word, August, if I don't regain control of myself in a few minutes (tears August's shirt apart), concert or no concert, I'll take this candelabrum and beat that walnut you use for a head into a nutburger, I believe they're called!

References

  1. ^ "Genealogy of Edmund Preston Biden ("Preston Sturges")". RootsWeb. http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~battle/celeb/sturges.htm. 
  2. ^ a b Preston Sturges at the TCM Movie Database
  3. ^ Hotbed at the Internet Broadway Database
  4. ^ The Guinea Pig at the Internet Broadway Database
  5. ^ Strictly Dishonorable at the Internet Broadway Database
  6. ^ Preston Sturges at the Internet Broadway Database
  7. ^ Sturges, Sandy. "Preston Sturges Biography". Official Site. http://www.prestonsturges.com/biography.html. 
  8. ^ Frankel, Mark "Hail the Conquering Hero" (TCM article)
  9. ^ Demarest appeared in ten films written by Sturges, eight of which he also directed: Diamond Jim (1935), Easy Living (1937), The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and The Great Moment (1944)
  10. ^ This included a film Sturges was involved with as producer, I Married A Witch.
  11. ^ Make A Wish at the Internet Broadway Database
  12. ^ Carnival in Flanders at the Internet Broadway Database
  13. ^ The Millionairess at the Internet Broadway Database
  14. ^ 100 Years Prestontennial (timeline)
  15. ^ ISBN 0-671-67929-5
  16. ^ Complete filmographies: IMDB,TCM, AllMovie, PrestonSturges.com
  17. ^ IMDB Awards

External links

Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Lady Eve
Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Palm Beach Story

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