Preston Sturges S/D

Thanks, Dr. M. I was thinking about Morgan's Creek...I need some sort of litmus test, though

I'll tell her a joke about impregnating some girl; if she laughs, Miracle of Morgan's Creek, it is!

well, basically search everything he ever did; I'm not crazy about everything he ever wrote, but I still watch the stuff which doesn't resonate with me just to watch the Preston Sturges Players in action and to marvel at the verbal prowess on display.

aside from that, The Great Moment is being slept on, both as a fascinating stylistic outlier for Sturges (it's a docudrama about the inventor of anesthesia, so it's not a gut-busting laff-a-thon like his straight-up comedies, although it still moves at breakneck speed) and as an opportunity for forensic cinematic analysis (the studio was understandably wary about the commercial prospects for a docudrama about such an obscure and disputed figure, so they sat on it until after he bolted for Fox, at which point they cut it to shit and released it).

honestly though, just get everything he ever directed - he's the Steely Dan of filmmakers in terms of quality output ratio. (I know there's a box set of barebones DVDs which covers everything he directed up to Unfaithfully Yours - I think mine cost like $45 second-hand from Amazon, which is a preposterously good bargain for what you get.) I'd extend this to the movies he wrote, too, but a lot of them are inexplicably hard to find - I spent years trying to find Diamond Jim only to resign myself to disappointment, and it gets cited as an influence on Citizen fucking Kane!

It's The Power and the Glory that gets cited as a precursor to Kane.

ah nuts, that's right - of course, I could never find that one either.

Jim Ridley celebrates Wm Demarest!

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-12-24/film/essential-sturges-fetes-the-director-and-his-powder-keg-muse/

of course the VV runs a pic of someone who IS NOT DEMAREST!

The building superintendent looks like Demarest. I always want to say to him, "Lemme ask ya a hypothermical question..."

"I feel like Charlie Sheen is acting like a character in a Preston Sturges movie who HAS to convince the public he's crazy so he can get out of his hit show and marry his beautiful gal or something." -- a friend of mine gives a worthy observation about the Sheen mess.

I think Demarest's Muggsy in The Lady Eve is his second-greatest character. "I knew a fella who married the same dame 3 times, then turned around and married her aunt!"

Second? Which one is better?

Mr. Kockenlocker? It's a tough call.

I learned (or relearned) from the NYT obit of Norman Gimbel (songwriter of "Killing Me Softly" and TV themes) that he wrote lyrics for a Broadway musical version of Hail the Conquering Hero, starring Tom Poston in the Bracken role. Closed after 8 perfs in 1961. Book by Larry Gelbart!

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/the-conquering-hero-2286

(Lionel Stander for Demarest)

Still waiting for answer from five years ago

of course Officer K

Ya get me?

saw Palm Beach Story the same day as In Which We Serve (the Noel Coward Coward/David Lean film). both were 1942, and as American and British films from that year they couldn't have been more different

Wonder if Preston and his mom knew Noel Coward socially.

Sturges-scripted The Good Fairy new on Blu

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review-william-wyler-the-good-fairy-on-kino-lorber-blu-ray/

I like peace but I ain't morbid about it.

The building superintendent looks like Demarest. I always want to say to him, "Lemme ask ya a hypothermical question..."