COMING TO FILM FORUM
Wednesday, December 24 - Thursday, January 1 :
ESSENTIAL STURGES Film Series

CALENDAR PROGRAMMED BY BRUCE GOLDSTEIN

Click here for a listing of all films in the series

“By an oceanic margin the most distinguished screenwriting voice to emerge
from the Golden Age fun factory....
The masterwork here is the criminally overlooked Remember the Night (1940), a Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck road comedy that is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate.”
– Michael Atkinson, Village Voice. Click here for full review.

EASY LIVING

(1937, MITCHELL LEISEN) In Sturges’s most famed pre-directorial screwball comedy, working girl Jean Arthur is bonked on the head with a mink coat while riding on an open-air Fifth Ave. double-decker bus, mistaken for the mistress of Wall St. lion Edward Arnold, given the Manhattan penthouse suite to end all luxurious Manhattan penthouse suites, and finds love in the Automat with Ray Milland.
3:00, 6:20, 9:40

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

(1933, WILLIAM K. HOWARD) Sturges’s first solo screenplay, inspired by his then-wife’s grandfather C.W. Post (the breakfast cereal magnate), tells of the rise and fall of ruthless industrialist Spencer Tracy in complex, multi-flashback “narratage.” Cited by Pauline Kael as a major influence on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles claims never to have seen it, though his co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz did), it’s been seen for decades only in badly mutilated 16mm prints — until this new 35mm restoration from Twentieth Century Fox and the UCLA Film And Television Archive.
1:25, 4:45, 8:05*
*TOM STURGES, PRESTON’S SON, WILL APPEAR IN PERSON AT THE 8:05 SHOWS ON FRIDAY & SATURDAY.

REMEMBER THE NIGHT

(1940, MITCHELL LEISEN) Assistant New York D.A. Fred MacMurray brings his maiden aunts in Indiana a Christmas present: convicted shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck. Sturges’s last script for another director is one of his most memorable screwball comedy-romances.
3:25, 7:10

THE GOOD FAIRY

(1935, WILLIAM WYLER) Sturges molded a Molnar play into this unsung classic of the comedy-rich 30s, as Margaret Sullavan’s wide-eyed movie usherette Luisa Ginglebusher plays “good fairy” to struggling lawyer Herbert Marshall despite amorous millionaire Frank Morgan. Temperamental Sullavan and stubborn Wyler battled throughout production — then wed.
1:30, 5:15, 9:00

THIRTY DAY PRINCESS

(1934, MARION GERING) When a Ruritanian royal on a goodwill tour of the U.S. gets the mumps, lookalike actress Sylvia Sidney is tapped to go on in her place. Her assignment: the seduction of New York newspaper publisher Cary Grant, who’s against hand-outs to fly-speck nations. Sturges cowrote the screenplay, from a novel by the author of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
1:00, 4:20, 7:40

STRICTLY DISHONORABLE

(1931, JOHN M. STAHL) Sturges’s racy 1929 Broadway smash about love in a speakeasy was faithfully brought to the screen by Universal with stars Paul Lukas and Sidney Fox. Sturges, who had no hand in the adaptation, wrote to studio chief Carl Laemmle, “Arrived with a very superior feeling...and presently found myself admiring my own play.”
2:30, 5:50, 9:10

IF I WERE KING

(1938, FRANK LLOYD) Ronald Colman, as swashbuckling beggar-poet François Villon, engages in battle of wits with wily king Basil Rathbone in superbly-recreated 15th century France. For his re-write of the 40-year-old play, Sturges personally translated Villon’s poetry and added some Villonesque verse of his own.
3:15, 7:00

DIAMOND JIM

(1935, EDWARD SUTHERLAND) Unsung Sturges screenplay stars Edward Arnold as 19th century tycoon, bon vivant and ultragourmand Diamond Jim Brady, with dual-roled Jean Arthur as two loves of his life.
1:30, 5:15, 9:00

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• The Official Preston Sturges Website

For sale at Amazon:

THREE MORE SCREENPLAYS BY PRESTON STURGES
by Andrew Horton (Editor), Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words by Preston Sturges (Introduction), Sandy Sturges (Editor), Tom Sturges

Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges, Tom Sturges, Brian Henderson (Introduction)

Not Shown: Preston Sturges' Vision of America: Critical Analyses of Fourteen Films by Ray Rozgonyi Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges by Diane Jacobs

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