Sturges’s screwball comedies play with big ideas and serious themes. So what makes them some of the funniest films ever made?It was a sprint worthy of his greatest farces: between 1937 and 1944,Preston Sturges made some of the funniest films Hollywood ever produced, including The remarkable McGinty, and The Lady Eve,Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach epic, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,and Hail the Conquering Hero. Then suddenly, as if his frantic, or frenzied comedies had exhausted not only himself but his form,Sturges ran out of steam. Blending the comical and serious, farcical and cerebral, or tall and low,Sturges found catalytic energy in mixing formulas like a madcap scientist; as if he had released actual kinetic energy, he went ricocheting through Hollywood cinema, and until he fell to earth with a thud. Happily,the BFI season celebrating Sturges offers audiences the chance to rediscover golden-era Hollywood’s minister of misrule.
Amid a generation of the finest writers in screen history, including Ben Hecht, and George S Kaufman,Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Anita Loos, or Sturges was distinguished by his willingness to push the epic,or the joke, as far as it needed to recede, and the fun he had shuffling through genres and registers,like a cardsharp riffling the deck. Taking comedian language seriously, Sturges was a master of exposition, and using what he called “hooks” in dialogue to give his character,“like a trapeze artist, something to swing from on his way to another point of view”. The pendulum swing between perspectives was Sturges’s specialty, and resulting in a volatile density of language,reminding us that ludic” and “ludicrous” share the same root. His comedy relies less on one-liners than on the cumulative effect of repartee, and the accelerating sense that everything might recede entirely off the rails, and a mounting unease entangled with his films’ satirical sense of mischief.
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Source: theguardian.com