Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Cast: Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, William Demarest, Ernest Truex, Franklin Pangborn, Georgia Caine. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick. Film editing: Ellsworth Hoagland. Music: John Leipold, Leo Shuken.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)

Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

Longfellow Deeds: Gary Cooper
Babe Bennett: Jean Arthur
MacWade: George Bancroft
Cornelius Cobb: Lionel Stander
John Cedar: Douglass Dumbrille
Walter: Raymond Walburn
Judge May: H.B. Warner
Mabel Dawson: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Emile Von Hallor: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Morrow: Walter Catlett
Farmer: John Wray
Mrs. Meredith: Emma Dunn

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick
Music: Howard Jackson

Frank Capra's perennially popular Mr. Deeds Goes to Town currently has an 8.0 score on IMDb and an 89% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So let me cavil a little bit about its psychological dishonesty, namely the scene in which Deeds, engagingly played by Gary Cooper, is subjected to a sanity hearing because of his attempt to give away to distressed farmers the $20 million he has inherited -- a scheme that economically speaking doesn't bear much close scrutiny. Capra (and Robert Riskin, who as writer must bear his share of blame) brings on an "expert," a caricature Viennese psychiatrist, who explains that Deeds suffers from "manic depression," the now-discarded term for bipolar disorder, and exhibits a peaks-and-valleys chart of Deeds's mood swings. It's pretty clear that Capra and Riskin want us to regard this testimony as quackery. But anyone who has dealt with bipolarity, either first-hand or with family or friends, can see the element of truth in the diagnosis. We don't know enough about Deeds's daily life in Mandrake Falls, Vt., where, as the Faulkner sisters testify, everyone is "pixilated" but them, to give a confident diagnosis that Deeds is in fact bipolar, and the attempt to use the diagnosis as a smear is reprehensible. But Deeds's decision to refuse legal council at the hearing is the act of someone who really is depressed, and while we are supposed to dismiss as chicanery the attempt to classify his eccentricities -- playing the tuba, sliding down banisters, chasing firetrucks, feeding doughnuts to a horse, and above all wanting to give away his money -- as manic behavior, there's a grain of truth there. Moreover, Deeds does in fact exhibit violent tendencies: witness his punching out the poets who mock his greeting-card verses -- who beats up poets? -- and his assaulting the lawyers at the trial. Capra intends his film as a valorization of small-town virtues against city cynicism, but even that doesn't bear much close scrutiny, especially in the age of more critical looks at small town life as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It has always struck me that Capra was the most empty-headed of the great American directors, making films that annihilate thought, or at least anesthetize it. I like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town more than most Capra films: At its best it's lively and funny, but its worst is pretty annoying and even pernicious stuff.

Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944)

What sort of nerve must it have taken to make a film that pokes fun at patriotism, mother love, small towns, political campaigns, and the Marines in the middle of World War II? Preston Sturges's film begins in a small nightclub, where a singer (Julie Gibson) and her backup group of singing waiters launch into a stickily sentimental song, "Home to the Arms of Mother" (music and lyrics by Sturges), whereupon John F. Seitz's camera begins a traveling shot from the group and down a long bar at the end of which we see Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) drowning his sorrows. When a group of six Marines on leave after having fought at Guadalcanal enters the bar, Woodrow buys a round for them, and is prodded into telling them his sad story: He joined the Marines, trying to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Marine who died in World War I, but was discharged because of chronic hay fever. But instead of returning home to the arms of mother, he went to work in a shipyard and arranged for a friend to send his letters to her from overseas, disguising the fact that he was no longer a Marine. One of the men, Sgt. Heppelfinger (William Demarest), learns that Woodrow's father was his old buddy who fought with him at Belleau Wood, while another, Bugsy (Freddie Steele), is appalled that Woodrow hasn't been home to see his mother since the start of the war. So the Marines collude to take an extremely reluctant Woodrow back to his hometown and pretend that he's a war hero who has just been discharged. Naturally, the plan backfires spectacularly when the whole town joins in the celebration and even railroads Woodrow into running against the corrupt mayor (Raymond Walburn). Speed is of the essence in a farce like this, because if anyone ever gave Woodrow a moment to talk, the whole thing would collapse like a soufflé. On the other hand, too much fast talk can be wearying, so Sturges introduces a romantic subplot: Feeling that he can never return home, Woodrow has written his girlfriend, Libby (Ella Raines), that he has met someone else, so Libby has gone and got herself engaged to Forrest Noble (Bill Edwards), the son of the town's corrupt mayor. To slow the pace down, Sturges introduces a long walk-and-talk tracking scene in which Libby, confused by her revived feelings for Woodrow, tries to sort things out with Forrest, but to no avail. It's a funny, beautifully written scene, but it doesn't quite work because neither Raines nor Edwards is up to the acting demands it puts on them -- I kept thinking how much better Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert or Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck would have played it. Bracken, however, is wonderful, as are Demarest, Steele, Walburn, and other members of Sturges's usual crew of brilliant character actors, including Franklin Pangborn as the harried planner of the celebration and Jimmy Conlin as the town judge. This was, sadly, the last film Sturges made under his Paramount contract, which he ended because of studio interference during the making of the movie. It objected, perhaps rightly, to Ella Raines's lack of star power, but also took the film out of Sturges's hands and edited it. After a couple of disastrous previews of the studio version, however, Sturges was called back in for rewrites and some new scenes. The revised Sturges version was a hit, and earned him an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges, 1947)

The sad finale of two great Hollywood careers: Harold Lloyd's and Preston Sturges's. One of the great silent comedians, Lloyd had been making movies since 1913, but like so many stars of silent films he failed to make an impression in talkies and retired from movies in 1938. Sturges, who was starting up a new studio, California Pictures, with Howard Hughes, persuaded Lloyd to come out of retirement as a producer and director for the studio, but as so often happened when Hughes had a hand in things, nothing worked out right for either Sturges or Lloyd. Sturges had had a run as writer-director of seven comedies, from The Great McGinty in 1940 through Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944, that are some of the greatest ever made in Hollywood, but his attempt at a serious movie, The Great Moment (1944), was a major flop that led to his departure from Paramount and into his partnership with Hughes. Unfortunately, tensions with both Hughes and Lloyd over The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which Lloyd had been led to believe he would direct, contributed to the poor marketing and release of the movie. Its failure at the box office caused Hughes to pull it and to re-edit it into a shorter film renamed Mad Wednesday, which also failed. Lloyd never acted in another movie, and although Sturges wrote and directed three more, only Unfaithfully Yours (1948) has the comic finesse of his great 1940-44 films. It, too, was a box office flop, though it is now regarded by many as a late masterpiece. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, unfortunately, is no masterpiece, though it has some good moments. Many of Sturges's great company of character players are in the film, including Jimmy Conlin, Raymond Walburn, Rudy Vallee, Franklin Pangborn, and Robert Dudley, and the scenes in which they appear are invariably the best. It's perhaps unfortunate that Sturges chose to open the film with an excerpt from Lloyd's silent classic, The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925), because the slapstick sequences that follow in Sturges's part of the film pale in comparison. The central knockabout comedy scene in the film involves Lloyd, Conlin, and a lion stuck precariously on the ledge of a building; it recalls the classic skyscraper sequence in Lloyd's Safety Last! (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923), but the gag becomes overextended and glaringly improbable in this version.