Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Preston Sturges' final classic was this farce comedy about a temperamental symphony conductor (Rex Harrison) who suspects his wife (Linda Darnell) has been unfaithful to him, and his overheated imagination gets the better of him as he concocts various schemes to exact revenge on his wife and her supposed lover.

An interesting blend of Sturges' characteristic comedy-of-manners laced with slapstick, and a strong dose of dark comedy, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS is an uneven but highly interesting and often quite funny film. It is filled with Sturges' sharp observations about human behavior, offering a wry commentary on how the best laid plans often go awry.

Thoughts on SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS and Preston Sturges

Seen: Sat., Feb. 20, 2016, Loew's Jersey (Jersey City), 35mm

It finally occurred to me why I fail to respond positively to this film, and to Sturges' work in general: it's marked by a self-conscious cleverness that I find ultimately distracting. I'd been considering this idea for some time, but it really crystallized after viewing SULLIVAN on a double bill with Capra's ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, which -- I should point out -- I was also disappointed by but for different reasons, reasons that became apparent in comparing Capra's approach to Sturges'. However uneven ARSENIC might be in its tone, it certainly demonstrates a consistency of style in Capra's direction, which is typically effective.

With Sturges, I am always aware of his technique showing. In SULLIVAN I see this with erratic stylistic approach to the "dramatic" scenes, as if the director is proving his seriousness through self-consciously "artistic" (and disorienting) camera angles and filters -- as in the courtroom scene -- or the heavy-handed juxtaposition of the prisoners and the church congregation in a later scene, finally reaching a fever-pitch during the hallucinatory montage of laughing faces during the Disney cartoon.

It would be tempting to view these as temporary lapses in style due to the director working in unfamiliar territory, except that the same heaviness is apparent throughout even the comic scenes, which becomes even more apparent in comparison with the work of other filmmakers. Sturges' handling of dialogue, for example, strikes me as a case of a screenwriter in love with his own words, failing to achieve any particular sense of rhythm or poetry, as Lubitsch or Hawks say, were able to. Nor does his staging of physical comedy achieve the graceful, deceptive ease of McCarey or Capra, feeling rather too obviously constructed as opposed to rising organically out of the situations (see, for example, the rather forced way in which Sturges gets his characters to fall into a swimming pool).

The sharp, almost bipolar contrast in tone of SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS magnifies these issues, but I think they are apparent throughout Sturges' filmography. With Sturges, I am too often aware of the clever screenwriter "behind the curtain".

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Probably Preston Sturges' best-known film, though not necessarily the funniest or finest comedy he made during his brilliant streak of hits at Paramount from 1940-44. Engagingly acted by Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, ably supported by Sturges' famous stock company of expert character actors, the film is at times quite uneven in tone, veering between fast-paced satirical farce and surprisingly dark moments of violence and grim social realism for a comedy.

The dramatic scenes make for some of the most self-consciously stylized moments in all of Sturges' filmography, particularly the courtroom sequence, in which McCrea is swiftly sentenced to a prison term while in a dazed and confused state, and the sequence in the Southern black church, where the chain gang inmates have been invited to join the congregation for a movie night, and the entire audience breaks down laughing hysterically at a Disney cartoon.

Where the film becomes problematic is in the heavy-handedness and contradiction of its message, that laughter is the most important thing of all to those who have nothing else ("It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan," McCrea intones somberly at the film's conclusion). Sturges' point seems to be a bit more complex than that, and he offers as much an indictment of self-righteous Hollywood types who want to change the world instead of producing entertainment. But if Sturges' personal philosophy is indeed that laughter is the best medicine, and that Hollywood should stick to entertaining the masses rather than delivering a message, then his explicit dealing with that message here can't help but seem a bit hypocritical.