INTERVIEW: Revisiting Preston Sturges’ classic ‘Lady Eve’
Photo: The Lady Eve stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda and will be screened at Film Forum. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures / Provided by Film Forum.
Preston Sturges was a prolific and successful director and screenwriter in the 20th century, crafting some of the most memorable movies in Hollywood’s post-war years. From The Lady Eve to Hail the Conquering Hero to The Great McGinty, Sturges’ filmography is unparalleled for its depth, especially in the 1940s.
The director will be remembered at a special event Monday, Sept. 16 at 8:10 p.m. at the Film Forum in New York City. The respected movie theater will showcase a screening of The Lady Eve, starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, and the late director’s son, Tom Sturges, will be present for a Q&A and to sign copies of his new book, Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director, co-written with Nick Smedley.
Tom knows his father’s career perhaps better than anyone. As he talked to Hollywood Soapbox, he remarked that his dad’s Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Great McGinty was within view, across the room from where he sat. “I’m looking at it right now,” Tom said in a recent phone interview. “It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s a piece history.”
The new book project came about when Smedley, a researcher in England, reached out and expressed interest in writing a book about Preston’s illustrious career.
“He was an expert in post-war film, and I wrote him back,” Tom remembers the conversation going. “I said, ‘There’s 17 books already written about my dad, so the soil may be well-tilled.’ I said, ‘But my mom passed away a little while ago, and I found a ton of correspondence between my parents that I had never known existed. And I found some of his diaries and journals.’ And I said, ‘If you want to write a book about the last 10 years, and you want to do it with me, then I’m happy to do that.’ So that’s where it came from.”
The new book stands apart from the other tomes about the famous writer-director because it relies on sources that have been missing from the public arena. The focus is on the last 10 years of Preston’s life, when the money ran out, but the ideas did not.
“He’s there trying to scratch out a living, writing screenplays,” Tom said about that time period in his father’s life. “I think he wrote seven screenplays and adapted a couple more, wrote two stage plays, invented 50 things, came up with a ton of story ideas, and I include all those in the book at the end, the story ideas he showed up with. He was a fountain of creativity, but nothing made it on to the screen or to the stage.”
Those final 10 years are in stark contrast to his successes in the 1940s, when he sometimes had two or three movies come out per calendar year. In 1940, he had Remember the Night, The Great McGinty and Christmas in July. The last two were also directed by him, and The Great McGinty won Preston his Academy Award — the first-ever Academy Award handed out for an original screenplay.
“He believed in living two lifetimes in one,” Tom said. “The key to this was a good nap, so he could stay up very late and work well into the night and then take a quick nap and be up at a regular time in the morning. I think the film that best exemplifies that is a film called The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. For that film, the screenplay was only 50 pages long when it was approved for production, so he was writing the script at night and shooting it in the day. If you can imagine that pressure, so that’s emblematic of what he was about and what he was capable of, putting in that kind of effort and time and work.”
The Lady Eve, which was released in 1941, is a “masterpiece,” Tom said, calling it a slick and clean film that does not have a wasted line. Stanwyck plays a con woman who is aided by her father, played by Charles Coburn. Her sights are set on Fonda’s character, who is a herpetologist.
“What my dad used to do once the film was shot and out and in theaters is he would sit in the lobby and count the laughs, and he would know his film by the laughs,” Tom said. “And it’s a very, very funny film. My dad didn’t write any jokes. He hated jokes, didn’t tell jokes. The whole concept of it he hated, so everybody is speaking the truth. And it’s the truth that’s so funny.”
Tom admitted to falling in love with Stanwyck at a very young age. He found her so beautiful, so smart, so quick and so funny, and The Lady Eve features one of her most memorable roles.
In 1941, Citizen Kane also came out. Luckily for The Lady Eve, The New York Times’ top 10 list that year had Orson Welles’ classic as #2, behind Preston’s entry. Over the decades, of course, Citizen Kane has risen in notoriety. “Comedies unfortunately don’t have the same staying power as a drama, but I love The Lady Eve,” Tom said.
At the special Film Forum screening, Tom will also play a recording of his father singing a song and reading a poem in 1938. It was recorded on a phonograph, and it is the only time Tom has ever heard his father’s voice. The family moved from Paris to Hollywood when he was only 1, and Preston died when Tom was only 3.
Still, he has an entire filmography and many diaries, letters and journals to remember the man and his legacy.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges, will play 8:10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16 at the Film Forum in New York City. Tom Sturges, Preston’s son, will take part in a Q&A and sign copies of his new book, Preston Sturges: The Last Year of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director, co-written with Nick Smedley. Click here for more information and tickets.
