Preston Sturges

Easy Living

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Edward Arnold, Jean Arthur and Ray Milland

A perfect farce from 1937, Easy Living catches Jean Arthur at the peak of her career and is so devilishly constructed that explaining the plot would be a fool’s game. But the gist of it is that a normal young woman on the top deck of an open-top bus suddenly finds herself draped in a ridiculously expensive sable coat. A banker sick of his wife’s lavish tastes has thrown it off the roof of his apartment and it’s landed on the shoulders of (un)lucky Mary Smith (Arthur). Her life is transformed, but so are the lives of the banker, the wife, their son, a couturier and a struggling hotelier, whose hotel is the … Read more

The Lady Eve

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Charles and Jean cheek to cheek

The Lady Eve is a brilliant piece of writing by Preston Sturges, and playing by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Screwball comedy you could call it, or a comedy of remarriage, maybe, except nobody remarries. But that is the guiding idea – two people who have been together and possibly will be again, if fate can be encouraged to remove the many obstacles in their path. Fonda plays a wealthy brewing heir who meets a young woman and her father on board a ship sailing back from the Amazon, where he’s just spent a year indulging his passion for snakes. Jean (Stanwyck) and the “Colonel” (Charles Coburn) are a pair of con artists … Read more

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

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The Justice of the Peace with Trudy and Norval

The “miracle” of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is that audiences in 1943 bought Preston Sturges’s film as a proposition. The story makes no sense and Sturges knew it didn’t. Hence the framing device added to distance the “facts” of what we see on screen from their telling. The film begins with a state governor being told a wildly implausible story in a telephone call from an excited journalist, and ends back in the governor’s office, where the final tawdry details are being received. Sturges obviously intends that we understand we’re getting the facts at one remove and that there’s been a bit of journalist licence used in the story’s reporting. Here’s the … Read more