Director · Actor · Screenwriter · Producer

Preston Sturges

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Sullivan's Travels

Preston Sturges · 1942

Preston Sturges’s 1942 comedy follows a Hollywood director who abandons frivolous hits to make a serious film about poverty — then tries, and fails, to live as a tramp to gather material. His journey leads him instead to a Southern chain gang, where he discovers laughter’s unvarnished power among the condemned. With Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, and shot by John F. Seitz, it balances screwball pacing with sober observation — less a critique of Hollywood than a defence of comedy’s quiet seriousness.

13:00

The Lady Eve

Preston Sturges · 1941

Preston Sturges’ 1941 screwball comedy follows con artist Jean Harrington as she targets naive ale heir Charles Pike aboard an ocean liner, falls for him, is rejected, then returns disguised as English aristocrat ‘Lady Eve’ to exact revenge — only to fall again. With Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda delivering career-defining performances, the film uses repetition, linguistic precision, and structural symmetry to explore identity, performance, and the porous line between deception and devotion.

13:00

The Palm Beach Story

Preston Sturges · 1942

Preston Sturges’ 1942 romantic comedy follows a woman who leaves her broke husband to seek fortune, only to become entangled with a millionaire and his eccentric club. Written, directed, and produced under the studio system, it sustains a high-wire tone of social satire through rapid dialogue, precise editing, and unwavering commitment to its own absurd rules.

13:00

Unfaithfully Yours

Preston Sturges · 1948

Preston Sturges’ 1948 comedy follows Sir Alfred de Carter, a world-renowned conductor who, suspecting his wife of infidelity, imagines three elaborate responses — murder, magnanimous forgiveness, and Russian roulette — each triggered by a piece of classical music he conducts in concert. Back home, his attempts to enact any of them unravel in farcical detail. With Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell and Alfred Newman, it is a formally inventive, musically anchored satire of ego, creativity and self-deception.