Christmas in July: Preston Sturges's masterpiece

Christmas in July (1940), scene featuring Dick Powell and Ellen Drew.

The decade of the 1940s in the last Century witnessed the larger concentration of talent in the history of American cinema. The best generation of American directors plus the first wave of emigrated Europeans, all of whom started in the silent movies and moved easily to the talkies, were then in their prime and releasing movies regularly: Ford, Capra, Wyler, Hawks, Hitchcock, Preminger, Wilder, Lubitsch, Walsh, Lang, McCarey, Cukor, Curtiz, Kazan, Huston, Stevens, Siodmak, etc. 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, one of the best cinema critics of the forties and never prone to exaggeration, called Preston Sturges in 1944 the “most gifted American working in Hollywood”. And the fact that Sturges invented the Flashback technique in The Power and The Glory (1933) proves further the case of his extraordinary talent. Hollywood called and by 1933 Sturges 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. 

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 that changed. His matrimonies and divorces (Sturges had four wives) dented his finances as well as his health via a drinking problem. Looking for total independence from the studio system, Sturges devised a project with the notorious and very rich (and very odd) Howard Hughes, both partnering in California Pictures Productions.

It was a doomed partnership that for many reasons didn't last – who thought that a sophisticated, brilliant and outspoken artist could get along, let alone make business, with one of the more reclusive and misanthropist men of Hollywood? Sturges never recovered and, after his venture with Hughes was dissolved, no major studio had him back nor wanted to finance his movies. Sturges was able to direct (and completely control) only one more film, the magnificent “Unfaithfully Yours”. Yet it tanked at the box office (due to the Carole Landis/Rex Harrison scandal) and that was the end of his career.

As Sturges later recalled, "When Mr. Hughes made suggestions with which I disagreed, I rejected them. When I rejected the last one, he remembered he had an option to take control of the company and he took over. So I left."  His last years were very, very sad and at some people point Sturges was seen begging for a drink in bars and hotel restaurants, sometimes promising as payment an old Hollywood story. Sturges tried to write his autobiography – to which he wanted to give the title of “The Events Leading to my Death”, but he didn't have the time to complete it. He died alone and broke, suffering a heart attack in the Algonquin Hotel four years after he'd finished his last movie The French, They Are a Funny Race. He  was sixty years old. 

"Crooked, but never common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (2023) is a recent and worthy attempt at dissecting Surtges'movies. The author is a renowned cinema critic, Stuart Klawans. One by one, from "The great McGinty" to "Unfaithfully yours" the analysis is deep and detailed. There are many new angles that even fans of Sturges will learn here for the first time. After a very general intro to each movie the author deals with said movie, but mostly with the screenplay. There's less on camera movements, acting or the actors' performances. 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.

Richard Barrios remarks in A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (2009): "As much as Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell was a new-style male ingenue for musicals, as it can be seen by contrasting his performance of “Young and Healthy” (serenading Toby Wing) with that of Clarence Nordstrom in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” Nordstrom is overripe, phlegmatic, consciously cute—the Charles King type. Powell is aggressively young and healthy, leering visually at Toby Wing and audibly with his brash tenor—and somehow retains the innocence to warrant Ruby Keeler’s adoration. And Dubin and Warren’s songs did not clash with the dramatic action as in earlier backstagers. The arching outbursts of “Young and Healthy” and the ricky-tick ribaldry of “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” seemed entirely suited to a milieu where shows are born of sweat and desperation, and the syncopation and game lyrics evoke more of the real Broadway than Bradford Ropes’s 1932 novel 42nd Street in which the story was based. 42nd Street was nominated to two Oscars: Best Picture and Best Sound Recording.

Preston Sturges's A Cup of Coffee (turned into Christmas in July) was another essay on the American success syndrome, a microcosm of youthful exuberance indulged by fate. The hero was young Jimmy Mac Donald, lowly office worker for the conservative old Baxter Coffee Company. Jimmy thinks the company suffers from a hardening of the corporate arteries and pontificates at length about turning the place around. But Jimmy has his head in the clouds. He is a compulsive contest enterer—slogans, jingles, drawings. He daydreams of winning a fabulous amount of money and marrying Betty Casey—the company’s secretary. One day Jimmy is cleaning out his desk when word comes he has won the rival Maxwell House slogan contest with “If you don’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk!”, a promotional gem.

Sturges streamlined Christmas in July, tailoring the Jimmy MacDonald part for Dick Powell as the first picture under Powell’s new Paramount pact. Ellen Drew, from If I Were King, would play his girlfriend Betty. Shrewdly, Sturges built the situation with the audience knowing, unlike in the play, that the telegram was phony and that Jimmy’s day of glory is quickly going to end. The notices for Christmas in July were uniformly outstanding. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a ten-strike for Sturges as a writer-director.” Rival Variety labeled it “bright, crisp, refreshing entertainment.” Said Time magazine, “As director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly twisted comedy with a background of pathos. He ably remodeled Powell from the boyish crooner of Warner Brothers musicals into a convincing prototype of a drudge with a dream of sudden wealth with which he can buy his mother a convertible settee and his girl a fancy wedding. Pretty, pale-faced Ellen Drew was coached into a realistic likeness of a practical $18-a-week stenographer. A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them act like people.” 

“How does he do it?” asked Bosley Crowther rhetorically. “Well, through the creation of solid comic characters, for one. His hero—and inevitable heroine—are just nice, honest youngsters, that’s all. They want a break so they can get married. But against them are arrayed such a scatter-brained lot of practical jokers, business tycoons, and slightly off-center store clerks that the attainment of the break becomes a gantlet. Then Mr. Sturges contrives some wholly bewitching surprises. Details are worked out with elaborate ingenuity. Things pop out when you least expect them. He keeps you laughing with, not at, his youngsters.” Howard Hughes suggested a moviemaking partnership with Sturges. The two men discussed preliminaries through the latter half of 1943 and into February of 1944. “They were trying to negotiate a contract,” said Louise Sturges, “and they could not get together. They could agree perfectly on their ideas of engineering but not on anything that constituted a good contract.” On the afternoon of February 12, Hughes phoned Sturges saying “We have a deal,” he told Sturges. News of their plans soon reached the outside world. 

“Last fortnight,” Time magazine reported on March 6, “two of the most combustible personalities in Cinema, airminded Howard (The Outlaw) Hughes and gadget-brained Preston (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek) Sturges, announced their cinemanschluss. A new studio was born. Hollywood braced itself for the sort of thing that happens when hydrogen and a match flame meet.” Sturges-Hughes, Inc. (California Pictures corporation) was off to a shaky start. Almost immediately the new enterprise leased five sound stages and a suite of offices at Harry (Hopalong Cassidy) Sherman’s California Studios on Clinton Street, across from Paramount. Sturges' salary of only $2500 a week, less than the $3250 Paramount had been paying him, and considerably less than the $6000 Frank Orsatti figured he was worth. Sturges covered his disappointment and humiliation by Mr. Hughes’ dismissal. “The son of a bitch fired me at seven o’clock in the morning,” he reportedly told one friend. “I could have forgiven him if he had waited until noon.” —Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (2000) by James Curtis

Christmas in July has one of zaniest premises of any Hollywood comedy. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), a modest clerk from the Lower East Side, has never succeeded, but his paralogical optimism never falters. His current plan is to win the $25,000 prize for suggesting a new advertising slogan for the Maxford Coffee Company. His foolproof idea is: “if you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.” This stupefying phrase is the story’s fixed center of gravity. Jimmy thinks it’s smart and witty because it’s a play on words. But neither meaning of the pun makes any sense. “Bunk” could be an uncomfortable bed, or the supposedly bunkum notion that coffee keeps one awake. So, Sturges has set up our hero in an impossible situation. Jimmy and his faithful fiancee Betty (Ellen Drew), who believes in Jimmy even though she doesn’t believe in his slogan-making prowess or his luck, are basically “technical leads” like the juveniles of romantic comedies from 1930s.

Dick Powell had recently moved from Warner Bros. to Paramount and was anxious to break from his otherwise successful pigeon-holing as a cheerful, crooning Howdy Doody. Powell often comes off as hardened by experience and skepticism, foreshadowing the noir actor yet to come. Just when we think we’ve reached maximum stalemate, Sturges flips the script. Jimmy’s martinet supervisor, Mr. Waterbury (Harry Hayden), has been observing that Jimmy is not keeping his eye on the job. He calls him to his office and gives him what begins as a solid management-Protestant ethic lecture. But as soon as Jimmy explains that he hasn’t been doing his work because he can’t stop daydreaming about the prize, Mr. Waterbury delivers a surprise. He’s completely sympathetic. Instead of arguing that dreaming about winning a prize instead of doing hard work is a sure sign of failure, he argues the opposite. It shows initiative. It shows hopefulness. And if he fails to win the prize, that doesn’t mean he’s a failure.

Jimmy follows the telegram’s instructions to pick his check up at Dr. Maxford’s office. In a normal world that the pranksters were relying on, this would be the moment when the truth is revealed and Jimmy is thrown out as a fraudster. But that’s not how it works in Preston World. Reading the telegram, Maxford, flummoxed and frustrated, believes that the contest’s decision has been made without his being informed of it. Maxford hands the check for 25k (worth almost 500k in today’s money) to the grateful Jimmy, who now feels fully justified in his talent. Shindel demands that Jimmy be arrested—in fact, the whole neighborhood should be arrested. The beat cop (Frank Moran), who’s known Jimmy all his life, compares the very Jewish Shindel to Hitler and refuses to arrest anyone. Then arrives Maxford himself, calling Jimmy a fraud and he, too, demanding he be arrested. 

Betty appears to make a compelling American case that the only thing that really matters is not achieving success, but having the chance to achieve it. Baxter appears to accept this, grudgingly. He relents and decides not to fire Jimmy, if only because his name has already been painted on the office door. Bildocker arrives triumphantly in Dr. Maxford’s office to inform him that a winner has finally been decided, which is, surprisingly, Jimmy’s very absurd slogan. The story then actually supports the slogan isn’t bad because it doesn’t make sense, it’s good because it won. And the “reason” it won is because Bildocker stubbornly refused to accept the plausible one that his fellow jurors all agreed about, and basically forced his solitary choice through. And the audience that has been tossed around in the comic vortex isn’t sure about any of it. The great French film theorist Andre Bazin famously called Sturges a moralist. Bazin argued that Sturges consistently satirized American ideological values, revealing them to be myths sustained by popular will alone. —"Crooked, but never common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (2023) by Stuart Klawans

"Preston Sturges's second feature as writer-director, Christmas in July (1940) is in many ways the most underrated of his movies—a riotous comedy-satire about capitalism that bites so deep it hurts. Jimmy MacDonald believes he has won the Maxford House Coffee Slogan Contest and brings his fiancée Betty to Shindel to buy her an engagement ring. Like much of Sturges's finest work, this film captures the mood of the Depression more completely than most 30's pictures, and the brilliantly polyphonic script repeats the hero's topsy-turvy slogan so many times that it eventually becomes a kind of crazed incantation. As usual, Sturges's supporting cast (including Ellen Drew, William Demarest, and Raymond Walburn) is luminous, and he uses it like instruments in a madcap concerto." Powell's dissonant jingle is for Sturges a metaphor of the barbed American Dream. Sturges does not provide the characters (and the viewer) with any form of consolation. Instead, he leaves them to face their own naiveté. Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.com

That is why, in contrast to other classical fables of poverty rewarded by a benign fate (like those by Frank Capra), Christmas in July does not provide us with any sort of illusory relief. In the end, Jimmy is still granted the chance of a lifetime (Dr. Maxford, after all, decides not to pull back his promotion—only the raise), but he is deprived of that enthusiasm and confidence in the system and his own self that his boss wanted to instill in him. Jimmy not only learns that chance and opportunities seldom turn dreams into reality, but he also faces the contradictions of a system based on the power of self-deception. Ellen Drew's Betty’s final plead to Mr. Baxter clearly reflects this disillusionment: Jimmy (Dick Powell) belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails… because it’s one thing to muff a chance when you get it… but it’s another thing never to have had a chance. —"The Cinema of Preston Sturges" (2010) by Alessandro Pirolini