Look again at the hilarious, utterly idiosyncratic films of writer-director Preston Sturges, and discover what makes them classic comedies—and something more than comedies. Author and film critic Stuart Klawans joins us in person for three screenings and a book signing.
Read full descriptionPreston Sturges’s ferociously funny attack on the American political system is a twist on the Abe Lincoln myth: even a bum, backed by the right machine, can become president.
Starring Barbara Stanwyck as a cardsharp who plays naive ale heir Henry Fonda not once but twice, Preston Sturges’s comedy of innocence and experience is “one of the most liberatingly funny films ever made” (New Yorker).
When small-town girl Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) gets knocked up by a soldier—she isn’t sure which one—a 4-F local boy (Eddie Bracken) attempts to save the day. That Preston Sturges’s riotous comedy made it past the censors is a miracle in itself.
Preston Sturges provided the sparkling script for this rarely seen comedy. Margaret Sullavan plays a movie usherette, who, to deflect the amorous attentions of a would-be benefactor (Frank Morgan), finds herself a husband in the White Pages.
Jean Arthur plays a working girl whose life is transformed when a fur coat tossed from a millionaire’s apartment lands on her head. Preston Sturges’s screenplay is “funny and gracious and generous in the best Sturges tradition” (Andrew Sarris).
Striving clerk Dick Powell wins an advertising jingle contest and triggers a corporate nervous breakdown in this comedy skewering the American dream of overnight success.
DA Fred MacMurray takes jewel thief Barbara Stanwyck home to Indiana for the holidays in this tender comedy scripted by Preston Sturges. “As smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate” (Village Voice).
Preston Sturges pits the idle rich, embodied by Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor, against the ingenious but impoverished Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea in this fractured fairy tale.
Preston Sturges’s wartime comedy of community stars Eddie Bracken as a soldier who is discharged from military service due to hay fever but is hailed as a hero when he gets home.
Hollywood movie director Joel McCrea wants to switch from lowbrow comedy to dramas with Social Significance, so he sets out to learn something about poverty, and finds out more than he bargained for. Veronica Lake costars.