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The Definitives Mission...

With every entry into The Definitives, I examine a movie I consider one of my favorites. This will be an ongoing archive, featuring appreciations posted at an average of one or two a month. More analytical than a simple review, The Definitives focus on the respective film’s production, talent involved, possible “reads,” and its place in film history. With equilibrium between old and new movies, I will attempt to include something for everyone. The Definitives will hopefully give you a new outlook on some of your most cherished films, and perhaps introduce you to some new favorites.

Current Deep Focus:

The Lady Eve (1941)

 

When compared to the work of the genre’s most celebrated practitioner, Preston Sturges, it becomes tragically clear that today’s average romantic comedy has lost something crucial: The ability to innovate within convention. At this point, Hollywood has all but run out of new stories about a guy and a girl falling in love; but the tradition of mechanical, by-the-numbers romantic comedies has existed almost as long as the genre itself. Story originality is not the concern. The approach to the material, the technique in which the story is told, from the flourishes in the dialogue used to the nature of the characters, remains the ever-maltreated element in modern romantic comedies, and the deficient source of their rapidly dwindling appeal.

Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve was released by Paramount Pictures in 1941. The film serves as a grand lesson to any filmmaker posed with the question of how to approach a romantic comedy and the inherent clichés. The film’s plot is dripping with them, and in fact the characters are clichés themselves. But Sturges commands these clichés with such confidence that he helped redefine what made them formulas to begin with. Sturges was a relatively fresh face on the Hollywood scene, graduating from accomplished writer to celebrated director virtually overnight. The previous year, he made his directing debut with The Great McGinty and followed it three months later with Christmas in July, both successes. The greater part of his films prior and subsequent catered to the needs of both the studios and general audiences, but Sturges catered with a particular insight and ingenuity that survives as his signature.

For Sturges, an independent auteur who maintained considerable creative control while working within the established guidelines of a major studio, his greatest pleasure was exaggerating the clichés to emphasize their absurdity. To this end, he provided moviegoers with a considerable but true laugh, what he considered the greatest release of tension films could offer, and the most important of all cinematic escapes. His project after The Lady Eve, entitled Sullivan’s Travels, embodied this theme in its narrative, being about a serious-minded social filmmaker who comes to realize that comedies help people more than message films. As Sturges’ most singular comedy, The Lady Eve provided audiences with the crucial, easy laugh sought by the writer-director. Its success also made Sturges the highest paid filmmaker in Hollywood and further placed him in the upper echelon of America’s top earners, all by very plainly giving audiences what they want and know, just in a smarter and funnier arrangement than they were accustomed to.

Only a handful of true originals have broadened the genre beyond its conventions. The majority of them draw from the inventor of the romantic comedy as audiences know it, Ernst Lubitsch. With pictures such as Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka, Lubitsch became renowned for “The Lubitsch Touch,” that fantastical and elusive charisma that is impossible to define but remains undeniably present within all of his films. Balancing romance and drama with silly humor, Lubitsch created a wellspring of material from the early 1920s into the late 1940s. From that source, Hollywood adopted all manner of cliché and formulas that are still used today. Sturges admitted his adoration of Lubitsch, but he avoided making retreads of his idol’s films.

Instead, Sturges applied his very own sophistication to the formulas so popular in Hollywood at the time. As a rare comedic auteur, following the likes of Lubitsch and Charles Chaplin, Sturges curiously avoided butting heads with studio executives over the messages in his films because, in most cases, there were none. Particularly with The Lady Eve, his scripts avoided heavy commentaries or social observations, and rather relied on the richness of his prose to tell the story. He happily toiled for studios like Fox and Paramount, earning millions in box-office receipts because he catered to his audience, but not in such a way that his pictures were intellectual duds. He worked inside the formulas of his predecessors because the studios demanded it, and yet his films avoided becoming merely studio programmers through the undeniable wit of his scenarios.

 
Read the full article HERE

Coming Soon to
The Definitives

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

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Princess Mononoke (1997)

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The African Queen (1951)

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Knife in the Water (1962)

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Stagecoach (1939)

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8 1/2 (1963)

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City Lights (1931)