Collections/August 2024

Directed by Preston Sturges

From capitalism to patriotism to politics to marriage, there was virtually no pillar of American life that escaped unscathed during screwball auteur Preston Sturges’s whirlwind heyday in the 1940s. One of the first Hollywood filmmakers to direct his own scripts (a deal he negotiated by selling his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Great McGinty to Paramount for just $10), Sturges took screwball comedy to new heights of sublime absurdity with his elegantly cockeyed dialogue, free-form approach to narrative, and subversive skewering of conventional morality. These immortal comedy classics—including the zingy Barbara Stanwyck vs. Henry Fonda showdown The Lady Eve , the rocket-speed romantic romp The Palm Beach Story , and the topsy-turvy small-town satire Hail the Conquering Hero —were the result of a brief but dazzling run of creativity that remains virtually unmatched in Hollywood history.

6 films — 0 on the Channel, 6 unavailable