Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, by Stuart Klawans. Columbia UP, 2023, 366 pp.
Has there ever been a director who burned brighter, and for a shorter period, than Preston Sturges? The first to utilise, and subsequently capitalise on, the “written and directed by” credit, Sturges was a wunderkind filmmaker—acidic in both his portrayal of politics and romance over the course of e...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University College Cork
2025-02-01
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| Series: | Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue28/HTML/ReviewGallichio.html |
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| Summary: | Has there ever been a director who burned brighter, and for a shorter period, than Preston Sturges? The first to utilise, and subsequently capitalise on, the “written and directed by” credit, Sturges was a wunderkind filmmaker—acidic in both his portrayal of politics and romance over the course of eight masterpieces in as many years. That his filmography actually consists of twelve features over fifteen years (not counting the twenty or so screenplays he had a hand in writing) is a central tension in Stuart Klawans’s deft and dutiful examination Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges. Here, the long-time Nation critic unpacks Sturges’s filmography with an eye towards “the trains of thought, ambiguities, and semicovert artistic impulses that emerge in his films on a second viewing, or a fifth” |
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| ISSN: | 2009-4078 |