The American dream of overnight success is Sturges' target in Christmas in July. A radio contest to find a promotional jingle for a coffee company turns into a corporate nervous breakdown when, by an absurd fluke, the prize is prematurely awarded to a company clerk (Dick Powell), whose entry is “If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk.” From then on, the film embarks on a series of lunatic reversals that can best be compared to a roller-coaster ride.
In his excellent essay on Preston Sturges, subtitled “Success in the Movies,” Manny Farber notes that Sturges' characters “seem to be haunted by the spectres of such nationally famous boneheads as Wrong-Way Corrigan...incarnations of the great American nightmare that some monstrous error can drive individuals clean out of society into a forlorn no-man's-land, to be the lonely objects of an eternity of scorn, derision and self-humiliation. This nightmare is of course the reverse side of the uncontrolled American success impulse, which would set individuals apart in an apparently different, but really similar and equally frightening manner.... (In his films) events are used to obtain the comic release that is, indeed, almost the only kind possible in American life: the savage humor of absolute failure or success.”