New York Times article about the film

April 1, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Sturges's Travels, a Screwball Tale
By MANOHLA DARGIS

The comic genius Preston Sturges entered the film business in 1929, shortly after the movies began to talk. In the years that followed, he wrote a handful of original screenplays and added his voice to more than a dozen others, before directing his first feature, "The Great McGinty," released in 1940. Over the next four years, he directed a clutch of peerless, timeless comedies, including "The Lady Eve," "Sullivan's Travels," "The Palm Beach Story," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "Hail the Conquering Hero" - movies as Mad Hatter tea parties in which Dorothy Parker traded quips with Bugs Bunny and Montaigne.

By the end of the 1940's, Sturges was a Hollywood washout (more on that later). Even during his greatest success, when the press and the publicists were calling him the town's newest golden boy, Sturges waxed hot and cold at the box office and with the critics, who could not always appreciate his innovations. (His masterpiece, "Sullivan's Travels," confused some with its promiscuous mixture of comedy and drama.) Before the fall, however, it was a creative streak so prodigiously original, so fast and furious, it is hard not to think that movies were made to talk for one reason: to give Sturges a forum for the snaky stories, sophisticated wordplay, razor-sharp zingers, belly-aching guffaws and sexual entanglements he served up as casually as a short stack of flapjacks.

You can get a sense of the tensile quality of Sturges's creative gifts, the breadth of his intellect and passions, in the eight-title series that opens today at the Film Forum, "The Early Sturges: Preston Sturges Screenplays, 1930-39." Programmed to show Sturges at advantage - in the role of the budding visionary rather than that of the hired gun he sometimes assumed - the series includes charming entertainments like William Wyler's "Good Fairy" (1935) and one must-see, "The Power and the Glory" (1933), a robust, affecting drama about the rise and fall of a railroad tycoon. Inspired by the life of C. W. Post, the founder of the cereal company that grew into General Foods, "The Power and the Glory" was early evidence that Sturges's genius was as much for narrative as it was for comedy.

Post was the grandfather of one of Sturges's four wives, Eleanor Hutton (stepdaughter of the financier E. F. Hutton). The screenwriter borrowed Post's rags-to-riches trajectory, but added a twist, telling the story nonchronologically, which is how he had heard it from his wife. The film begins with the death of its lead character, Tom Garner, beautifully played by Spencer Tracy, then in his early 30's and not yet Hollywood royalty. Directed by William K. Howard and told mostly in flashback, the story is narrated by the dead man's best friend, who hopes to persuade his wife that Tom wasn't a scoundrel. After a creaky start, "The Power and the Glory" evolves into a dark character study and - as Tom grasps each new ladder rung - a pitch-black cautionary tale about the American dream.

The film's producer, Jesse L. Lasky, told Newsweek, "I believe Mr. Preston Sturges is the first author to avail himself of the full resources of the new medium." Four decades later, Pauline Kael unfavorably noted the similarities in subject and structure between the film and Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane," released in 1941. The resemblances neither diminish the Welles film nor elevate "The Power and the Glory," which is far from a masterpiece. The earlier film has its enchantments nonetheless, notably a lovely scene in which Tom urges the woman he hopes to marry farther and farther up a mountain path because he doesn't have the courage to pop the question. The narrator voices the dialogue while actors play out the scene without an audible word, like characters in a silent picture.

"The Power and the Glory" is surprisingly moving, but it's also sentimental and heavy-handed. In the early 1930's, Sturges was still a work in progress. Aside from Tracy's powerhouse turn and the flashback structure, what stands out today is the film's richly shaded, complex hero. Sturges was irresistibly drawn to stories about great men brought to their knees, for reasons that now seem prophetic. It was a theme he revisited several times, in films he directed and in his screenplay for the 1935 "Diamond Jim." Directed by Edward Sutherland, this fanciful interpretation of the life of the financier and gourmand Diamond Jim Brady will be shown at Film Forum with "If I Were King," a 1938 period picture directed by Frank Lloyd with Ronald Colman and a deliciously hammy Basil Rathbone.