Preston Sturges: The PurPOLL one, with the pluuuuuuuuuuuumes at the hips.

I'll take over from here, Ambrose.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

having seen only sullivans travels, i shall watch the rest of his movies in the order the poll above suggests (i didnae vote)

I watched the Palm Beach Story again last night. Fun, but I am well content with my vote for Sullivan's Travels.

Saw Christmas in July today, laffed like moron about every other minute. When he was explaining his convoluted slogan all I could think of was, uh, ILM.

it isn't the coffee...

I'm not sure, but my favorite scene of these might be in "Unfaithfully Yours" when the wife is being given a death sentence and Rex Harrison is in the back of the courtroom laughing his head off.

Holy Smokes, The Palm Beach Story! Just...WOW.

The Ale & Quail Society=The NRA in my eyes.

morgan's creek the funniest, voted sullivan's travels cuz lake is so smashable

― s1ocki kong country (cankles), Tuesday, March 3, 2009 10:11 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^

WEENIE KING

Yeah, c'mon, the Weenie King! Palm Beach Story is the best.

I got a Sturges box for Christmas, and re-watched "Palm Beach Story" recently. I love how unsentimental Colbert is in the break-up scenes, and Vallee is pitch-perfect as John D. Hackensacker. Just about perfect.

Jim Knipfel praises The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (I really liked it the one time I saw it):

http://chiseler.org/post/48926315855/harold-lloyds-last

haven't watched any of these in a long time but the one that affected me most was 'christmas in july.' the final speech mentioned upthread still makes me choke up a bit.

From Unfaithfully Yours:
"Is there any insanity in his family?"
"I don't know but there's plenty in mine."

Glad I've finally made the mental genre adjustment and warmed up to that one.

crick! CRICK!

Sullivan's Travels never quite got to the level of the first scene again, although Lake killed it.

Lost its way quite a bit, and not only on one occasion.

Have Morgan Creek and Palm Beach Story ready to once I get a college break.

Sullivan's Travels doesn't stay in standard Romantic Comedy mode the whole way through, it is somewhat similar to Unfaithfully Yours in that regard, but this doesn't necessarily mean it is lesser than the other films.

I agree with darraghmac though -- it's my least favorite of the classics.

Yeah, mine too, truth be told, but I've watched the others so many times feel like it was time to give some love to that one. Also, I didn't fully get Unfaithfully Yours until last year.

yeah, i don't think that it was a failure to hold to a given genre that pulled me out of it though, and i wouldnt hold such a failure as a negative if the script kept a thread moving throughout the events. for all its snappy lines and good character turns (you'd not expect less anyway) it tacked on a beginning and an ending to a bit of a muddled middle imo.

tbh a lot of Depression and post-Depression films garble their politics. Check out My Man Godfrey or Easy Living.

you hafta appeal to eberbody!

also fuck you guys

I need to watch it again. Trying to remember, is Al Bridge the heavy when Sullivan is on the chain gang? If so, a departure from his usual grumpy but ultimately amiable self in the other films.

But not from his prior roles as in Hopalong Cassidy films apparently. He's like another splinter member of The Wild Bunch.

In the forties, Bridge was part of Preston Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors, appearing in ten of the eleven American films that Sturges wrote and directed.[7] He is perhaps best remembered for his role as "The Mister", the chain-gang boss over Joel McCrea in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels.[8][9]

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend isn't that bad. Kind of Tashlin-like, if I remember correctly, at least in its brightness and zip and silliness, if not in its style of editing and use of blackout gags.

Thanks, darraghmac, but I already reconstructed that gone missing neurological pathway between posts, same way I recently had to remind myself of Julius Tannen's "talking picture" bit in Singin' in the Rain

Palm Beach the last night. Lovely.

miracle last night. patchy greatness, didn't really ever get behind the two leads as the two leads (obv dad and sister are great great great).

^heresy

They are obviously cartoonish, funhouse versions of the boy & girl next door, and Bracken freely admitted they were trying to upstage each other the entire film.

TRUDY KOCKENLOCKER

^^^^^^^

great McGinty

maybe the one that holds together best?

The Lady Eve.

The Lady Eve seconded.

Positively the same opinion!

Lemme aks you a hyperthermical question.

Gimme a spoonful of milk, a raw pigeon's egg and four houseflies.

OK its a clear top 3 with eve and it happened one night.

ya I know I've watched a gang of talkies lately gimme a break

i watched it happened one night again last summer, not having seen it since i was a teenaged capra fanatic (and not really getting it then, because it wasn't, y'know, idealistic and soppy), and it was just gangbusters.

is that a good thing?!

Yeah, I watched It Happened One Night a couple of times in the last two years and it was still good, but I tried rewatching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town a few months ago and its politics made me retch.

gangbusters def a good thing!

reluctant to watch deeds again for the same reason, though i caught the last 90 mins of Its A Wonderful Life at xmas and was still destroyed by it.

The Lady Eve under discussion at The Dissolve:

http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/746-the-scorching-sensuality-and-style-of-the-lady-eve/

http://www.criterion.com/films/28103-the-palm-beach-story

http://www.criterionforum.org/caps/palmbeachblu00011.jpg

American...Sniper

Saw If I Were King (1938) as my only visit to the latest NYC Sturges series -- probably the most 'major' of his pre-directing writing jobs I'd never seen. It's real good! More high comedy than swashbuckler, Ronald Colman never wittier than as Francois Villon in an already oft-filmed story. (A Parisian peasant girl asks him as they share time in a dungeon, "An epitaph? What's that?" "Oh, usually something good about someone bad.") Pro direction by Frank (Mutiny on the Bounty) Lloyd. Basil Rathbone, cackling as Louis XI, reminded me weirdly of SCTV's Joe Flaherty.

It's a little like McGinty in 15th-century France, tho libertine virtue dominates corruption. Blotchy rendering on YT, don't watch that; otherwise hard to see cept on TCM i guess.

You're up late!

Saw Sullivan's Travels again last week. I forgot how broad the slapstick is! The smart in Sturges is really smart, but the stupid is really stupid. As a director he doesn't seem to have much of an idea how to shoot pratfalls, even though there are a LOT of them.

I think a lot of the directors Sarris lowballed in the '60s he ultimately came around on when the '90s rolled around

That's probably true, but I get the feeling that many people weren't paying close attention by that time and still live by the sacred text that is The American Cinema.

Just saw The Lady Eve for the first time (actually caught the last 3/4 then watched the entire thing with my wife.

"I need him like the ax needs the turkey."

What a great movie! One thing that was incredible watching it the second time was how so much happens in the last 20 minutes (the whole second relationship).

I just rewatched a few weeks ago for the umpteenth time and was also amazed when I noted how short that section is time-wise.