Re: Preston Sturges
Posted: July 4th, 2012, 5:01 am
I watched Sullivans Travels so long ago but remember it well, well said Red, I would call it one of the great American movies for all reasons stated.
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[u]JackFavell[/u] wrote:Right now, I think you are the most experienced of us all in Sturges, having sat up all night watching every one of them in a row.
I wish you had seen The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. I am most familiar with it, then The Palm Beach Story. Christmas in July is rapidly moving up my list. The more I think about it, the more I love that speech by Harry Hayden, Dick Powell's boss. Looks like I need a marathon of Sturges myself.
"SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS."So I am curious, was there one that really got you?
A personal favorite?
Was there one that you didn't like so much?
Definitely. The guys got the better end of the stick ( Drew, Raines, Stanwyck, Lake...though drawing McCrea or Fonda in the male lead sweepstakes ain't bad either. ) Powell and Drew just sitting on the roof in the moonlight with the familiarity of being friends and lovers, Colbert sitting on McCrea's lap to get her dress unzipped. Stanwyck calmly tousling Fonda's hair while raising his temperature. All sensuously subtle and gets the point across.I agree that his casting is phenomenal, there is an easy, sexy rapport between his leads in pretty much every movie.
How I loved the porters and dining car waiters. How kind they were to little boys. Mother always let me have the upper berth so I could peek out over the top or slide down inside the green curtain to visit her, then climb up again like a monkey. Years later I make a picture called The Palm Beach Story using just such sleeping car berths in a scene where Claudette Colbert steps on Rudy Vallee's face.
On life with the wealthy --When we went two cars ahead to the dining car for dinner, Mother left her bag with our tickets and her checkbook in the compartment, taking with her what German money she had left, which was just about enough for dinner.
During the middle of this meal, a very pompous uniformed official came into the car and started bawling out some announcement which we neither understood nor paid much attention to. As he passed near our table, Mother asked him if he could get us a little more kartoffeln (potatoes). At this he looked very vexed and departed.
The train stopped somewhere after a while, but this did not interest us. Presently we finished our dinner and started back for our compartment, carrying the bones for the dogs and some bread for the birds. Our compartment, as I noted, was two cars to the rear, but after traversing one car, there wasn't any more train, just a long vista of tracks clickety-clacketing into the distance. The utter disbelief one feels in that situation was mirrored by Claudette Colbert years later in The Palm Beach Story, when she went back to the car carrying the Ale and Quail Club, only to find that it was no longer attached to the train.
One gets the sense that Ms. Colbert was the stand-in for Sturges.The Palm Beach Story, incidentally, was conceived as an illustration of my theory of the aristocracy of beauty, or, as Claudette Colbert expressed it to Joel McCrea, "You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything..." The setting was the Palm Beach I had known during the years when Paris Singer used to invite me to join him there. The few weeks I spent as Eleanor's house guest at Mar-a-Lago were not unuseful to the story either. Millionaires are funny.