No artist in movies has ever made me feel better about being an American than Preston Sturges, and since the shame of being American is the specific ache lengthening my nights these days, I’ve found myself applying his movies medicinally, and with new gratitude. It’s soothing to be reminded that a nation of crude clowns has a lighter side—that clowns are supposed to make you laugh. Lots of great directors and screenwriters (and actors, for that matter) have managed to find a universal human vein in their work, so that anyone with basic dramatic comprehension is granted access to the feelings inside. I can’t know for sure, but Preston Sturges’ work seems to me so steeped in America, so dependent on America’s unique cultural trappings for its character and the driving force of its humor, that it must surely suffer some loss in translation to a viewer from anywhere else. He certainly could never have come from anywhere else; the ludicrous people he dreamed up, and the soda pop fireworks they spoke in, could only make sense in the land of advertising, guns, and jazz.
Perhaps no other filmmaker ever dialed our number more accurately. In the 1940s, when Sturges rose up from the ranks of playwrights through the Paramount screenplay factory and became the first writer-director to prove he could thrive inside the studio system—in addition to being the sound era’s first writer-director, period—nearly all the movies watched by Americans were made by Americans. But precious few of those movies were about America: not about America’s idea of itself, but about the subconscious muck beneath that idea. (If you wanted to see America’s idea of itself, you went to a Western.) The United States that Preston Sturges taught us about was a great big engine running on the heat of outsized egos bashing into one another. You could even say his movies were about what happens when millions of people with heads full of Westerns try to coexist.
His tack was not exactly sociologically nuanced, but that was part of the point: it found its effect by seizing the Great Man worship at the heart of our national mythos and playing it like a squeezebox—crushing and stretching it to show us that it was mostly just air inside. This is why the commodities markets in Easy Living (1937) are controlled by two men and their telephones; why an ambitious thug could become a governor in The Great McGinty (1940) just because one man, the political boss of the state, wanted to install a pawn; why a chance run-in with a wealthy, half-deaf old eccentric called the Wienie King saves two people from eviction at the beginning of The Palm Beach Story (1942); and why, at the end of that movie, another wealthy man’s crush on one of those two people compels him to offer financial backing to the other for the insane idea of an “airport” comprised of a steel mesh stretched between the tops of the city’s tallest buildings. American viewers both then and now realize that the world isn’t actually so simple, but stories about world-shaking individuals still tug on a deep thread inside of us—and far smarter and more amusing than another earnest entry in that folk tradition is a send-up of it, something that pokes at it to make it dance. There’s a lot less shame in liking it.
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Sturges’ films are not merely comprehensible but intuitive to the American mind, because the elements they contain were always already there, waiting to be arranged into these particular patterns. They felt as true as satire can feel; the funhouse mirror reflection of a good spoof gives new perspective on the real thing, and the way Sturges exaggerated America’s proportions allowed you to see how exaggerated they already were, the hilarious extent to which this place has always been a grand multiple exposure of overlapping projected fantasies. In Sturges’ movies you see the thicket of billboards and slogans that demonstrate Manifest Destiny’s 20th century form: the total collapse of politics into advertising, the old promises of limitless abundance and opportunity now become background radiation. And you also see the millions upon millions of people stumbling and reeling their way through life in a constant state of intoxication as these impossible promises bang around in their heads. The characters Sturges shows us could perhaps only have been produced in such a cauldron. This is America, all right: I recognize all those bullheads, con artists, and reckless dreamers—and feel truly bad for all the butterfingered dolts caught in the wake that the others are kicking up1.
Just about everyone in a Preston Sturges movie, regardless of where they fall along the spectra of intelligence, power, or moral decency, believes themselves the unquestioned master of their own destiny, yet they are all the time dissatisfied. The ones who lack money can think of little else; the ones rolling in it are dying of boredom. The ones without power seethe and simmer for want of it; the ones who have it froth in fear of losing it. Love is a means to an end, and that end is usually money or power again. Everybody yammers constantly; nobody listens. And by the time the movie is over, all will have been humiliated, without ever having really noticed.
But the ironic magic of this quintessentially American artist is that, out of this ragbag of unbearable, untamable individuals—all of whom saw one another either as tools to be used or as simply in their way—Sturges made a society. He rarely had a perfectly square patch to work with but he nearly always made a quilt, and gave you the keen sense that each film was a part of a much larger quilt, that the whole country was as ridiculous as whatever he was showing you this time around. We do, after all, coexist—just not all that well.
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Preston Sturges began working in movies over 90 years ago, and some 50 years before I was born, yet the country he put inside his frame is still the one I have the easiest time recognizing as my own2. It’s largely because he attached so little importance to what he did and would never have described his own work as ‘holding a mirror up to the culture’ that his mirror was able to reflect so brilliantly. His films have an offhand fleetness to them that matches their subject, and further resemble their subject by being contemptuous of art. They often had a specific target in their sights—art and artists’ ambition in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); the political process in Hail the Conquering Hero and The Great McGinty; marriage in The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)3—but his depictions of these targets were as precisely American as the attitude he set loose upon them. It was the American brand of each that Sturges tore at, the version that was broken in the signature American way, because that was the version he knew. What’s more, the looser he was in his attack strategies, the more his id took over and the more he came to resemble his characters—the more American he became. Like his most memorable creations, Sturges was a bull in the china shop of decorum and propriety; his rich characters are just as loutish and crazy as his poor ones—if not more so—and it’s not happenstance that so many of his films contain a scene of pandemonium in which an entire set is destroyed. Everything wonderful in his work is devil-may-care and iconoclastic. He was the first artist of the sound era to merge satire with slapstick, the first to find a mode of speech congruent with the giddy pie-throwing spirit of silent comedy. American English was possibly the only language in the world fit for the job; it’s the only one that dips low enough.
Sturges’ career began its ascent in the latter days of the Great Depression with the best scripts that he wrote for director Mitchell Leisen—Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940)—and reached its apex during the outbreak of World War II. His first five pictures as director—a remarkable run beginning with The Great McGinty and ending with The Palm Beach Story—were all released between 1940 and 1942. The country was in no small amount of pain during this stretch, and the temporary escape offered by a comedy picture became less a disposable pleasure and more a necessary comfort. What’s more, following the imposition of the Hays Code in 1934, social ills could no longer be made light of in comedies, so there could be no equivalent to the kinds of small catharses that Depression-era audiences had been offered in movies like Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) or It Happened One Night (1934), which had reflected their own suffering back at them with a heartening chin-chuck. By the time Sturges hit his prime, any screenwriter or director who wanted to make a movie about the pain of their American moment had to do so in a spirit of utterly sincere optimism and hope, two qualities that aren’t exactly rollicking.
Upon watching many of his colleagues in comedy trip and fall in their efforts to rise above this ‘low’ genre and make movies that spoke to the anxieties of the American people, Sturges did something far more brilliant: he made a movie about the anxieties of just such a filmmaker. Sullivan’s Travels, a masterpiece of comic metatext that anticipates Charlie Kaufman, concerns a director named Sullivan (Joel McCrea) who made a name for himself with a string of successful lightweight comedies and is now suffering exactly this sort of crisis of conscience. His previously amusing work begins to look intolerably frivolous to him, and so he resolves to make a movie about the downtrodden—but not before first going to live among them for a while so that his movie will have the ring of authentic empathy. After a series of mishaps sends him crashing through society’s bottom floor and lands him on a chain gang, Sullivan experiences nothing but misery until a night of recreation where he and his fellow prisoners are invited to sit with a Black church congregation and watch a Pluto cartoon. The total surrender to joy that the crowd allows itself, the light that he sees for the first time in the eyes of all his fellow sufferers, sparks his real epiphany: the best thing he could ever hope to do for the downtrodden is to make ’em laugh.
Sturges’ comfort zone as an artist was comfort itself, yet the air around Hollywood at the time was so thick with insecurity about the responsibility of the movies to comfort the audience—further complicated by a second insecurity about the supposed inadequacy of light comedy as a means to that comfort—that he felt compelled to make a movie that officially stood up for comedy and gave his colleagues (as well as himself) permission to stick with it. The contention of Sullivan’s Travels is that a movie that goes after plain, hard belly-laughs will ultimately be more uplifting than one that actually sets out to uplift4, and the movie proves it. Modern viewers might feel their collars tighten a little at the way the wholesome, pro-comedy resolution at the film’s climax connects to Disney, given how The Mouse’s perpetual infantilization campaign of recent decades illuminates the dangers of repairing to a comedy cocoon. But in the early 40s, for a comedic filmmaker to question comedy’s value in the work itself—and get more laughs in the process—was extraordinarily advanced.
It’s worth pointing out that Sturges often got his laughs at the expense of absurd characters who were more than likely to resemble members of the audience. His heroes were typically just as absurd as his ‘villains,’ which is almost too strong a word to use in reference to a Sturges character anyway. Bathing in a vat of acid is not typically a comforting experience, but it can be under one condition: when you know for certain the acid will do you no harm, and might even provide a pleasing tingle. That’s exactly the calculation that Sturges made when he sold his movies to the very public he was skewering, and perhaps part of the reason his films have lasted, despite the adage that nothing ages worse than comedy, is because America grew so much more materially comfortable in the decades since their production, making the potshots he took at our national character feel all the more fair—maybe even cleansing. Done right, with enough affection, a bit of ribbing is the most entertaining way to remind people of their good fortune5. Sturges dealt in impish inversions, showing us our density and vulgarity in ways that made these things endearing, while making our uniquely rebellious and industrious spirit look obnoxious, sometimes to the point of criminality. His comedy was just cynical enough to sting, but not enough to truly hurt. What’s more, we likely needed the sting, and the positive response to his movies, as well as their lasting significance, is proof that we could take it—that maybe we even enjoyed it. Looking back at his movies now, I wonder whether anybody could have written the country a warmer invitation to laugh at itself.
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Seen through 2026 eyes, the acid tide of Sturges comforts for a slightly different reason: namely because I currently feel a layer of grime on my American soul that needs scouring. It was innocent fun to see my country razzed back when we were merely becoming opulent and isolated, as we were by the end of Sturges’ career. Because of our wealth and power, and the fact that we’ve never lived up to our own stated values, it could be said that we deserved to be razzed—or at the very least, we couldn’t pretend it was unfair. But now that the country has gone full-tilt evil, a good razzing seems vital and urgent and meaningful, providing a satisfaction located somewhere between scratching an itch and flagellating oneself with reeds. It feels not just acceptable but deeply, rawly good to see American attitudes (especially white male attitudes) placed in the crosshairs.
Yet at the same time, so thick is the ugliness on the real ground now that it wouldn’t feel good to attach that scope to something that could do real damage, to see either the anger of the right or of those of us responding to their anger pouring out with real, recognizable potency. That kind of anger is too strong and too everyday now to be diverting on screen. The movies reaching my heart at this moment are the ones that take aim, but that keep the stakes low and gentle—the ones that aim a Nerf gun. And lately nobody else’s movies are reaching me like those of Preston Sturges. It does my heart glad to see that someone once drew an absolutely perfect bead on the American character so many decades ago—so perfect that he proved he could have really hurt us if he’d wanted to—but then decided he would rather make us laugh.
- On the rare occasion when he felt like applying tragic contours, he added another type: people with a natural impulse to do good that their culture never taught them how to express. Americans don’t pursue goodness—they pursue glory, which is closer to goodness’s opposite, and that is what is taught in goodness’s place. This is largely what Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the one about the fake war hero whose hometown drafts him to run for mayor, is about.
- If anyone takes second it’s a joint prize for the Coen Brothers, who are possibly more influenced by Sturges than any other single artist.
- And most of the others, actually.
- If nothing else, slapstick is a lot less likely to go off course and end up patronizing or insipid.
- This is not unusual as a way of comforting an audience per se; Sturges just took a funny route there, because the surface of his movies was usually chaos. But perhaps in this way he wasn’t all that different from his silent forebears; Buster Keaton getting conked on the head and maintaining his stoic facial expression was comforting, too.