The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (403 page)

She acted in
Nuts
(87, Martin Ritt), and effectively revealed her limits as an actress—she has a fierceness of her own that does not easily give way to other characters now.
The Prince of Tides
(91) was her second direction, from the Pat Conroy novel—it was less original or beguiling than
Yentl
, but it was a decent domestic melodrama with one of Nick Nolte’s finest performances.

Over New Year’s in 1993/4, she took Las Vegas (and America) by storm for a two-night stand. She arranged a grand sale of her deco collection, and embarked on a high-ticket world tour—all in the echo chamber of publicity. Ditto 1999/2000.

She rations herself these days, and so—apart from the occasional concert extravaganza—she has restricted herself to directing and starring in
The Mirror Has Two Faces
(96). Not that “restricted” seems the proper word, when unbridled self-dramatization made that one of the most inadvertently comic pictures of the century. I know: I’ve been warned all along that this was the real Streisand—and how could I like
Yentl
so much? Well, I still like
Yentl
, and I still think she’s a great singer. But
The Mirror Has Two Faces
(and its dreadful abuse of Jeff Bridges) doesn’t need to go to trial.

Joseph Strick
(1923–2010), b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1948:
Muscle Beach
(codirected with Irving Lerner) (s). 1953:
The Big Break
. 1959:
The Savage Eye
(codirected with Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers) (d). 1963:
The Balcony
. 1967:
Ulysses
. 1969:
Tropic of Cancer
. 1970:
Interviews with My Lai Veterans
(d). 1973:
Janice
. 1977:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. 1996:
Criminals
(d).

It is a weird dividend of Strick’s immersion in modern confusion that his My Lai film was set up on profits from his production of
Ring of Bright Water
(69, Jack Couffer), that inquiry into whether Bill Travers/Virginia McKenna is/are more cuddly/dumb than various otters. Strick is a schizoid, looking to make commercial underground movies, to turn a blind eye to the sexational reputation of classics of the literary avant-garde. His
Ulysses
, for instance, could only distress devotees of Joyce; it would hardly prompt anyone to read the book; its Irishness, its sex, its mythology, its Bloom are all desperately cautious creations. Its Dublin is a pasteboard suburb.

Strick impressed as a wintry, disenchanted personality, much more suited to the cynicism of
The Savage Eye
and the brutal pragmatism of
Tropic of Cancer
than to the lyrical exuberance of a Joyce, Genet, or even Lawrence Durrell—Strick originally began
Justine
, before the mangled subject was dumped on George Cukor. Strick fought strident battles over freedom from censorship, freedom to bring art to the people, freedom of speech; but his work was tight-lipped, grindingly unfluent, and unable to shed the approach to life’s variety of the tabloid press. Far too simple to call him a phony, he genuinely stood for disintegrating purpose, striving for significance and the life force, but coming across with the implausible and dispiriting frankness of a barker outside a strip show.

John Sturges
(1910–92), b. Oak Park, Illinois
1946:
The Man Who Dared; Shadowed
. 1947:
Alias Mr. Twilight; For the Love of Rusty; Keeper of the Bees
. 1948:
The Best Man Wins; The Sign of the Ram
. 1949:
The Walking Hills
. 1950:
Mystery Street; The Capture; The Magnificent Yankee; Right Cross
. 1951:
Kind Lady; The People Against O’Hara; It’s a Big Country
(codirected). 1952:
The Girl in White
. 1953:
Jeopardy; Fast Company; Escape from Fort Bravo
. 1954:
Underwater!; Bad Day at Black Rock
. 1955:
The Scarlet Coat
. 1956:
Backlash
. 1957:
Gunfight at the OK Corral
. 1958:
The Old Man and the Sea
(codirected with Fred Zinnemann);
The Law and Jake Wade
. 1958:
Last Train from Gun Hill
. 1959:
Never So Few
. 1960:
The Magnificent Seven
. 1961:
By Love Possessed
. 1962:
Sergeants Three
. 1963:
The Great Escape; A Girl Named Tamiko
. 1965:
The Satan Bug; The Hallelujah Trail
. 1967:
Hour of the Gun
. 1968:
Ice Station Zebra
. 1969:
Marooned
. 1972:
Joe Kidd
. 1973:
Chino
. 1974:
McQ
. 1976:
The Eagle Has Landed
.

The fact that Sturges was born in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway prompts the thought that there is action that expresses human beings and action that merely exercises them. Sturges was an athlete director, obsessed by inane feats of skill and strength—like Steve McQueen’s teaching his motor bike to jump barbed-wire fences in a film that tastefully avoids the massive reprisals taken after
The Great Escape
—they are off-camera. Equally,
The Magnificent Seven
—a transplantation of Kurosawa that began the wholesale internationalization of the Western—prefers to dwell on the feats of lethal dexterity rather than invest the story with any social irony.

Sturges joined the RKO art department in 1932 and went on to be an assistant editor. Selznick then hired him as an assistant producer and editor. During his war service, Sturges directed an instructional film,
Thunderbolt
, with William Wyler. After the war, he joined Columbia where he quickly became a director. The period around 1960 saw the elevation of Sturges as the maker of successful spectacles:
The Magnificent Seven; The Great Escape; The Hallelujah Trail; Marooned
. But the size of these films only emphasized his lack of substance. In the 1950s, when films were more modest and compressed, he made some pictures in which the action was less pretentious, more compressed, and more enjoyable. Thus
Escape from Fort Bravo, Bad Day at Black Rock
, and
The Law and Jake Wade
were effective adventure stories, and
Backlash
seemed not too far from the intense concept of honor in Anthony Mann’s Westerns. Later,
Joe Kidd
was a well-paced handling of Clint Eastwood’s grudging explosiveness. But
Hour of the Gun
(a revision of Wyatt Earp) is his most intriguing picture.

It should be said that whenever Sturges forsook the Western or the West he was inclined to be clumsy:
The Old Man and the Sea, By Love Possessed
, and
A Girl Named Tamiko
are all inept—the first so bad that Sturges may never have been told about Oak Park’s other famous son.

Preston Sturges
(Edmond Preston Biden) (1898–1959), b. Chicago
1940:
The Great McGinty; Christmas in July
. 1941:
The Lady Eve; Sullivan’s Travels; The Palm Beach Story
. 1944:
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek; Hail the Conquering Hero; The Great Moment
. 1946:
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock/Mad Wednesday
. 1948:
Unfaithfully Yours
. 1949:
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
. 1956:
The Diary of Major Thompson/Les Carnets du Major Thompson/The French They Are a Funny Race
.

It is tempting to see Preston Sturges as a character from a novel that Scott Fitzgerald never actually wrote: a versatile, humorous, charming man, an artist by fits and starts, yet lacking the stamina, graft, or authority to keep his own works intact. His best movies came in a rush, from 1940 to 1944, and were notably out of key with the musicals, war heroics, and sultry dream world of
Casablanca
that Hollywood opted for. But when would Sturges’s mixture of affectionate satire and eccentric originality have been close to traditions? It was his apartness from Hollywood modes, as well as the exposure of the movie kingdom in
Sullivan’s Travels
, that endeared him to people fundamentally hostile to American cinema. By birth and upbringing, Sturges was an outsider: rich, cosmopolitan, artistic, worldly. Yet Sturges was deeply rooted in a merry, corrupt but absurd America, as wayward and frequently misled as an inventor, but at his best the organizer of a convincingly cheerful comedy of the ridiculous, which is rare in American cinema.

Sturges’s own life was a comedy—or that’s how he chose to play it. His parents led largely separate lives, and Sturges was enthralled by his mother, Mary Desti. “My mother was in no sense a liar, nor even intentionally unacquainted with the truth … as she knew it. She was, however, endowed with such a rich and powerful imagination that anything she had said three times, she believed fervently. Often, twice was enough.”

The mother took the boy to Europe where they were part of the untidy court of Isadora Duncan (if only Sturges could have directed
Isadora
). Then Mary Desti took a fresh husband, a Chicago broker named Sturges, who was well disposed to the boy. In time, the son ran the mother’s cosmetics business and invented a kiss-proof lipstick. Stated once, it does seem unlikely. He fought in the war and only then started work writing plays, several of which were hits on Broadway. He married Barbara Hutton’s cousin.

In the 1930s, he gravitated toward Hollywood where he worked as a scriptwriter:
The Big Pond
(30, Hobart Henley);
Fast and Loose
(30, Fred Newmeyer);
The Power and the Glory
(33, William K. Howard), a supposed forerunner of
Citizen Kane; We Live Again
(34, Rouben Mamoulian);
The Good Fairy
(35, William Wyler);
Easy Living
(37, Mitchell Leisen), a Wall Street satire, including the nucleus of Sturges’s later company of supporting actors;
Port of Seven Seas
(38, James Whale); and
Remember the Night
(40, Leisen).

Sturges was the first of modern writer-directors, but his films are undisciplined in their scenarios. The novelty of his central situation—for instance, the film director at large in
Sullivan’s Travels
, the uncomfortable good fortune in
Christmas in July
, the comic misunderstanding of
Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
, or the bold use of contradictory subjectivity in
Unfaithfully Yours;
the pungent wit, above all, in
Lady Eve;
and the sense of supporting characters piling in pell-mell, as in
Palm Beach Story
, together make for confusion; a unique, American whipping up of local chaos, without that rigorous artistic order that underlies
La Règle du Jeu
and
Eléna et les Hommes
, two films that Sturges would surely have admired. Thus
Sullivan’s Travels
, it seems to me, falls flat when it tries to move from comedy to pathos—though Andrew Sarris sees the change working as well as the altering of mood in
The Winter’s Tale
.

If
The Lady Eve
is his best film, it is also the most conventional—the story is Hawksian in the pugnacity of its sexual conflict—and the one least troubled by background characters, delightful but foolish coincidence, and those sudden lurches in a new direction that suggest a magician losing control of his assistants. The “Ale and Quail” club is symptomatic of Sturges’s dilemma; initially appealing, they soon drag
Palm Beach Story
away from the very fruitful central plot of Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert, and Rudy Vallee.

In the same way, Sturges’s fatal fondness for novel casting and eccentric behavior led him on from the excellence of Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff in
The Great McGinty
and McCrea and Veronica Lake in
Sullivan’s Travels
to a disappointing interest in Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, Betty Grable, and Rex Harrison. And yet even
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
has an elegant structure, witty dialogue, and inventive slapstick. By then, Sturges had frankly lost his own comedic purpose—much clearer in
Lady Eve
and
Palm Beach Story
—but the conclusion must stand that he was too busy, too carried away by the moment to give his films a true calm and order.

In the end, it seems that Sturges could never stand far enough back from his comedy to see the human perspective. As G. W. Stonier wrote:

The curious thing about this caricaturist … with his packed, active screen, is that he should have quite a streak of sentiment. It isn’t sentimentality. It leaks out not only in parodies, which cherish some of the feelings they mock, but in efforts to express or at least unearth a love of humanity. That Sturges scarcely succeeded in this does not in itself fatally reduce him: indeed it is the fate and inspiration of most comedians. What
is
damaging is that, so yearning, he shouldn’t have been able to go on splashing satire and discovering fun. The giddy whirl declines into raucousness; he tries being serious and can’t square it with side-splitting.

The strain grew, and showed itself in fewer films.
Beautiful Blonde
is the excess of action over subject, while
Unfaithfully Yours
is an insane and, at times, disturbing picture of marital hostility.
Major Thompson
was a disastrous attempt to turn his exile in France to advantage. Long before that he was worn out. A year before his death, he played a small part in
Paris Holiday
(58, Gerd Oswald). The death itself occurred at the Algonquin Hotel—and only once.

Margaret Sullavan
(1911–60), b. Norfolk, Virginia
Sullavan was an elusive woman, enchanting before the cameras but uneasy with life and something of a tyrant. Louise Brooks admired her above others: “That wonderful voice of hers—strange, fey, mysterious—like a voice singing in the snow.” Sullavan seemed to listen to what was being said in a film, and to be changed by what happened. She was slight and deceptively conventional in looks. One realized that she was beautiful when her face lit up in response to the events of a film. Above all, she seemed vulnerable, harboring her strength and the chance of happiness. Her voice and bearing were haughty, frail, and bold, like that of a perilously recovered invalid, or a girl in a summer dress on a winter day.