Preston Sturges: More Than Comedy

July 27–August 26, 2023

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.

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The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The Lady Eve
The Palm Beach Story
Sullivan’s Travels
The Good Fairy

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Past Films

The Great McGinty
Preston Sturges
United States, 1940
Thursday, July 27 7 PM
Introduced by Stuart Klawans
Preston 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.
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The Lady Eve
Preston Sturges
United States, 1941
Saturday, July 29 5 PM
Introduced by Stuart Klawans
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).
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The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Preston Sturges
United States, 1944
Sunday, July 30 7 PM
Book Signing and Introduction by Stuart Klawans
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.
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The Good Fairy
William Wyler
United States, 1935
Wednesday, August 2 7 PM
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.
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Easy Living
Mitchell Leisen
United States, 1937
Sunday, August 6 7 PM
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).
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Christmas in July
Preston Sturges
United States, 1940
Wednesday, August 9 7 PM
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.
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Remember the Night
Mitchell Leisen
United States, 1940
Friday, August 11 7 PM
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).
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The Palm Beach Story
Preston Sturges
United States, 1942
Saturday, August 19 7:30 PM
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.
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Hail the Conquering Hero
Preston Sturges
United States, 1944
Wednesday, August 23 7 PM
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.
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Sullivan’s Travels
Preston Sturges
United States, 1941
Saturday, August 26 7:30 PM
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.
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Preston Sturges: More Than Comedy

July 27–August 26, 2023

“The most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in cinema history.” —Andrew Sarris

The first writer-director of Hollywood’s sound era, given unprecedented permission to translate onto celluloid a script entirely of his own devising, Preston Sturges went into production on his first feature, the uproariously cynical fable of big-city politics The Great McGinty, in December 1939. By the time he wrapped his last movie at Paramount, four and a half years later, he had made eight of film history’s most hilarious and utterly idiosyncratic pictures, won one Oscar, created the box-office smash of 1944, and single-handedly hog-tied the censors of the Production Code Authority.

“The most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in cinema history.” —Andrew Sarris

Sturges’s ability to, as he put it, “spritz dialogue”—letting his characters shower the audience from every angle with giddy, startling, constantly inventive language—has won him a reputation as one of the wittiest of all filmmakers. His paradoxical narrative method—combining sophisticated attitudes and settings with raucous slapstick and a stock company of the humblest mugs on the Paramount lot—created a comedic style that is widely influential and (in another paradox) unrepeatable. But for all that, critics have often been grudging about accepting Sturges as one of the great filmmakers—on a par, for example, with Orson Welles, his fellow displaced Midwesterner and Broadway veteran, who almost beat him to the “first writer-director” credit.

Featuring three films written by Sturges and directed by others, along with works from the peak of his career at Paramount, this series invites you to look again, more closely, at the most astonishing films of this singular talent—to discover the cleverly concealed depths, near-obsessive rigor, and directorial flair that make them classic comedies, and something more than comedies.

—Stuart Klawans

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We are delighted that film critic Stuart Klawans, author of the recent Crooked but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, will join us to discuss three of Sturges’s films. Guest curated by Klawans and coordinated at BAMPFA by Kathy Geritz. There will be a book signing on Sunday, July 30, at 6:30, prior to the screening of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.