“The only amazing thing about my career in Hollywood is that I ever had one at all.”
—Preston Sturges
IN THE 1940s, the only first-rate filmmakers who worked steadily and at their best in Hollywood were Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, and Preston Sturges. All of them began to turn out movies in Hollywood in that decade; what made Sturges unlike the others was that his career, dazzling for a few years, disappeared by the end of the decade. And yet he was perhaps, alongside Welles, the most prodigiously gifted of this half-dozen. He was certainly the most unorthodox. In fact, there was never any movie director like him before he rose to prominence at Paramount with The Great McGinty, released in 1940, and there has never been anyone like him since.
As a child, Sturges was dragged around Europe by his artsy mother, who called herself Mary d'Esti and whose major achievements appear to have been the perfume business she founded in New York and her friendship with Isadora Duncan. (The scarf that broke Duncan's neck when it caught on the wheel of a sports car was a gift from d'Esti.) Sturges's abhorrence of art with a capital A was the consequence, he later declared, of his mother's efforts to ram it down his throat. But he worked for her company, even inventing a smear-proof lipstick. Business bored him, though, so he sat down and wrote a couple of plays that premiered on Broadway eight months apart in 1929. The second one, a romantic comedy called Strictly Dishonorable, opened a month and a half before the stock market crash yet managed to play for more than a year. It's a breezy, convivial play, set in and above a speakeasy, and so unfettered and vivid and immediate that one can believe it was dashed off, as Sturges claimed, in six days.
