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Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges Paperback – January 10, 2023
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In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads―discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight―and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers―and funnier than ever.
- Print length376 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherColumbia University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 10, 2023
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100231207298
- ISBN-13978-0231207294
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Stuart Klawans has extended and upended the field with takes that are as witty and audacious as his subject. One has only to read his wry unpacking of the contradictions in Sullivan’s Travels or his sympathetic dissections of my own favorites, The Lady Eve and Unfaithfully Yours. Klawans really knows these films, has a nuanced understanding of cinema in general, writes beautifully, and is the best, most trustworthy guide imaginable to the genius of Preston Sturges. A triumph. -- Phillip Lopate, author of Totally, Tenderly, Tragically
Stuart Klawans’s deep dive into the films of Preston Sturges is a gift for cinephiles. Whether providing context or close analysis, his tone is witty and accessible as well as erudite and profound. -- Annette Insdorf, author of Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes
Nobody wrote better screenplays than Preston Sturges, whose dialogue remains among the most sparkling ever committed to the screen. Yet, until now, his achievements as a visual artist have been overlooked. Klawans’s wonderful new study has finally remedied that, demonstrating that Sturges was an artist as skilled with the camera as he was with a typewriter. -- Richard Peña, director emeritus, New York Film Festival, and professor of film and media studies, Columbia University
[A] portrait of a director with a gift for character development and 'head-spinning dialogue executed at high speed' by an author with a keen critical eye and plenty of flair in his own writing. Film buffs will relish this. ― Publishers Weekly
It’s obvious Klawans has pored over Sturges’s films. After reading his thoughtful analyses, film buffs will want to rewatch them, armed with new insights. ― Library Journal, starred review
[Klawans] carefully shows how these complicated comedies work, exploring what one might call Sturges’s ‘moral universe,’ which can be more unforgiving toward 1940s America than the surface froth suggests. . . The author deserves admiration for taking Sturges’s comedy seriously. ― Wall Street Journal
A perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation. ― Film International
[An] incisive, compelling, and spirited analysis of the screwball maestro’s life and oeuvre. ― The Arts Fuse
The book is both a compelling biography of Sturges and a close read of his films, and Klawans writes with great wit and insight. ― The Film Stage
An invaluable, in-depth examination of the style and substance of 10 of Sturges' finest films. ― Pop Culture Classics
Crooked, but Never Common brings new perspective to old movies that are in many minds better remembered for their motley assortments of expertly deployed character actors―among them William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Jimmy Conlin, and Eugene Pallette―than for their depth and magnificent construction. ― Air Mail
A well-argued read for Sturges connoisseurs. ― Total Film
A fine book by one of the best critics in the country. -- Antonio Monda ― La Repubblica
[Klawans's] prose positively sizzles at every turn, in what is sure to be a defining study of Sturges’s films. ― Times Literary Supplement
Klawans is a virtuoso writer and a savvy political thinker . . . Sturges's personal dilemmas flicker within an entertainment that becomes even more complex and stylish when we detect their traces. ― Cineaste
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- Publisher : Columbia University Press (January 10, 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 376 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0231207298
- ISBN-13 : 978-0231207294
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #619,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #504 in Video Direction & Production (Books)
- #622 in Movie Direction & Production
- #1,192 in Movie History & Criticism
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It is not a biography of Surges, but a film by film guide to his work.
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This list is far from exhaustive, but in the middle of those luminaries and oceanic talent, a name is mandatory to add. Preston Sturges came to be one of the most popular, admired and successful moviemakers of the decade. James Agee, perhaps the best cinema critic of the forties and early fifties and never prone to exaggeration, called Preston Sturges in 1944 the “most gifted American working in Hollywood”. And the fact that he directed only ten movies, all of which he wrote, only proves further the case of his extraordinary talent.
Born at the very end of the XIX Century, Preston Sturges had quite an unusual childhood and teenage years. He spent long periods traveling with his mother, mostly in Europe, and mingling with intellectuals and Royals. In 1930 already settled in America and recovering at the hospital from a minor operation, Sturges started writing theatre pieces to kill time. Backed with the family money (his stepfather with a stockbroker) he managed to take to Broadway one of the plays, which was a great success. Hollywood called and by 1933 he was a full-time screenplayer. Permanently upset with the changes and alterations the directors made to what he wrote, he decided to get behind the camera. Later it became normal for directors to write and direct their own movies, but the tradition of doing so, from Billy Wilder to Noah Baumbach all the way through Woody Allen, the Coen brothers and many others, only started with Preston Sturges. Before him, the joint capacity of writer/director almost was non-existing in Hollywood and only a few moviemakers were allowed to direct what they had written – only those with the stature of Chaplin could do it.
Preston Sturges directed eight pictures between 1940 and 1944, releasing only in 1941 two flawless comedies and timeless classics many times copied yet never equaled: “The Lady Eve” and “Sullivan's Travels”. Moreover, bookending the eight films there are two pieces (“Christmas in July” and “Hail, the Conqueror Hero”) that are exemplary comedies and a manual of movie construction, plot progression and, overall, humanity.
Sadly, after 1944 all changed. His matrimonies and divorces (Sturges had four wives) dented his finances as well as his health via a drinking problem that only got worse at par with his career. Looking for total independence from the studio system, he devised a project with the notorious and very rich (and very odd) Howard Hughes. It was a doomed partnership that for many reasons didn't last – who thought that a worldly, talented and outspoken artist could get along, let alone make business, with the more reclusive and misanthropist man of the XX Century?
Sturges never recovered and after the venture was dissolved no major studio had him back nor wanted to finance his movies. He was able to direct (and completely control) only one more film, the magnificent “Unfaithfully Yours”. Yet it tanked at the box office and that was the end of his career.
His last years were very, very sad and at some point he was seen begging for a drink in bars and hotel restaurants, sometimes promising as payment an old Hollywood story. He tried to write his autobiography – to which he wanted to give the title of “The Events Leading to my Death”, (very Sturges) but he didn't have the time to complete it. He died alone and broke in a New York City hotel room ten years after he finished his last movie. He was sixty years old.
There's been a few movies on Sturges, but not as many (or good) as he deserves. An autobiography or sorts made by his family with letters and diaries entries is poor, and almost doesn't cover his Hollywood years. There's a few studies of the cinema of the master, but "the" great and canonical book on Preston Sturges is still to be written.
"Crooked, but never common" is a worthy attempt at dissecting Surtges'movies. The author, a renowned cinema critic, knows his lines, likes the subject of his book without drooling for him as he writes and is very original. One by one, from "The great McGinty" to Unfaithfully yours" the analysis is deep, detailed and very readable. There are many new angles that even fans of Sturges will learn here for the first time.
Then, why not five stars. Simple. After a very general intro to each movie the author deals with said movie, but almost only with the screenplay. There's little on camera movements, acting or the actors'performances. Mr Klawans should have seen each movie beyond the ingenious plot and the masterly lines. Preston Sturges filmed all his movies with what's known as a stock of actors, all secondary, all excellent, but there's little on them here.
In any case, minor flaws and all, this is a very good - and funny - book that deals right with someone right at the core of the best decade that cinema has known: a writer and director whose influence is way larger than his fame.