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Christmas in July
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About 20 minutes into Christmas in July, Preston Sturges’ second feature as a writer-director,
a Mr Waterbury (Harry Hayden) – office manager of the film’s Everyman hero,
Jimmy (Dick Powell) – delivers a crucial monologue. He anecdotally recalls the
dreams of his youth, similar to Jimmy’s: to have $25,000 (presumably by winning
it), for everything that would enable him to do. In fact, Waterbury confesses,
he thought he would “be a failure if I didn’t get hold of it”. But this dream
did not materialise, and disenchantment later transmuted into cracker barrel
wisdom. Waterbury claims to have realised that:
I’m not a failure, I’m a success. You see, ambition is all right if it
works, but no system could be right where only one half of one per cent were
successes and all the rest were failures. That wouldn’t be right. I’m not a
failure, I’m a success – and so are you, if you earn your living and pay your
bills and look the world in the eye.
What a superbly scripted speech this is. It asserts an
all-American lesson, but in pure double-talk. There’s a shadow of doubt in the
way Waterbury has to tell himself not once but twice: “I’m not a failure, I’m a
success”. As the late Brian Henderson (editor of the invaluable Sturges
screenplay volumes published by University of California Press) pointed out,
the logic of this discourse is mighty strange. It first indicates an evident,
structural failing of the “system” – since this system favours “one half of one
per cent”, indeed! – but then overrides that quasi-Marxist insight (or
indictment) with a blind, individualist, perfectly contradictory affirmation: “I’m
a success”. Moreover, this affirmation gets transmitted to Waterbury’s
co-workers: “And so are you”. It’s ideology in action!
The exclusionary, privileging capitalist logic of this
American society – Waterbury says it himself, and again he turns it over twice
in his short address – “wouldn't be right”. But its citizens have to convince
themselves it’s right. The mental and emotional contortions involved –
contortions that are very much the central subject of Christmas in July – have an undeniably psychoanalytic ring: it’s a
matter of denial, displacement, foreclosure, sublimation – whatever gets these
everyday characters through the night. As Henderson (who had a keen insight
into such psychic distortions of reality) elaborated, Waterbury “thereby
suppresses his minor premise that he and millions like him are not successes by
prevailing standards”. Bear in mind, by the way, that 40 minutes later in Christmas in July (which is only 67
minutes long in total), Jimmy’s fiancée, Betty (Ellen Drew), will evoke the
sad, typical fate of most office workers: “They’ll all be like Mr Waterbury
soon enough”.
Welcome to the wild, weird and wonderful planet of
Preston Sturges. His richly hilarious films are well loved – some of them, at
least, such as The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (both 1941) – but
they may not be so well understood. I am writing this review on the day in late
2019 that Spanish TV is awash with mainly one thing: a delirious celebration of
those lucky few who have just won the national lottery. It is a day when TV
hosts and reporters, broadcasting live, grotesquely pretend to be minutely
interested in the lives of “little people”, from the winners to the owners of
those shops or kiosks that sold them the tickets. Tomorrow, it will be back to
Trump, Greta Thunberg and national pop star Rosalía. But for now, it’s what we
might call the populist spectacle, in all its hysteria and flimsiness. Sturges’
best films, including The Miracle of
Morgan’s Creek and Hail the
Conquering Hero (both 1944), exhibit or perform a passionate belief in this
“mass” of ordinary (and almost always eccentric) people – while, at the same
time, laying bare all the ways they can be whipped up by delusion on a grand
scale. His work is always dancing on the knife-edge of this ambiguity; right
inside the Hollywood system, and yet managing to turn its core values inside
out – for, at least, a few remarkable, iridescent moments.
“Christmas in July” signifies a miracle of good
fortune, perhaps dependent on skill (Jimmy imagines himself a dab hand at
composing advertising slogans), perhaps purely on a throw of the dice – and
that vacillation is already a social contradiction. The deluded dreams of the
characters in Sturges’ film tie the notion of “getting a hold” of sudden wealth
(as Waterbury described it) to a kind of divine, privileged destiny. But it
takes very little for this fragile house of ideological cards to crumble. More
than any other Sturges film, Christmas in
July is at once hilarious, disquieting and melancholic; the pervasive tone
of sadness – desperation, even – comes from the Depression-era setting. Jimmy
is Dick Powell, past the blush of his youthful days in Busby Berkeley musicals;
the character believes he has won a well-paying competition with his brilliant
advertising slogan. But what he doesn’t know is that this triumph is the result
of a prank. Jimmy’s luck (an early departure from his narrative point-of-view
coolly tips us off to this) is all a trick, a lark perpetrated by three
workmates (Tom, Dick and Harry, to be precise).
And in one of the most devastating scenes later on –
Sturges was never afraid to investigate what Henderson rightly called the
“nonlaughing other side” of Hollywood comedy – Jimmy confronts his boss,
Shindel (Alexander Carr), with what seems an irrefutable bit of logic: even if
he didn’t really win the slogan contest, aren’t his brilliant ideas, pitched
earlier in the day, still just as brilliant? Shindel swiftly kicks that dream
in the guts: never trusting his own judgment, as he splutters in self-rationalisation,
he depends entirely on outside validation! What a world, and what a pitiless
portrait of it: ordinary people swallow massive delusions, their cowardly
bosses tow the line, and the system grinds down everybody.
There is an intriguing paradox in the appreciation of
Sturges’ genius. Although he achieved heady success during wartime in the 1940s
– indeed, he was among those few directors whose auteur name could help sell a picture to the general public – and
despite contemporaneous acclaim from James Agee, it took the post war
commentary of Manny Farber and William S. Poster (“Success in the Movies”,
1954) to really start digging deep into the complexities of mood and tone in
his work. Other strains of film criticism, in that era and since, have expressed
enjoyment in Sturges’ output, but found him (like Billy Wilder or Joseph
Mankiewicz) wanting at the elevated level of mise en scène. What rot!
The Kino Lorber “Studio Classics” Blu-ray of Christmas of July (released late 2019 in
a handsome 4K master) will be beneficial to film culture worldwide if it
prompts close attention to the truly virtuosic way that Sturges worked with all
the elements in tandem: speech, movement, performance, setting, mood, rhythm.
He defined for himself not only a unique content but also a unique form.
Crystalline moments in his work – such as the early two-shot of Jimmy and Betty
up on the roof, or the camera movement that then tracks along with them as they
walk – have remained inscribed in my brain since the first, teenage viewing of
them on a small, domestic TV set.
There’s always a poignancy – a very modern poignancy,
moreover – in the pared-down economy, the pressing fragmentation of Sturges’
style. People are always crowded, herded into his frames, even when there’s
simply the air or the night of the city around them; everything is just on the
verge of flying apart, flying away. It’s that lingering chill of the Depression
era, etched deep here in the memory-banks of Christmas in July.
The Kino Lorber release also reflects the depressed
and splintered state of the DVD/Blu-ray market, come 2020. In the age of
streaming, only specialised fans are investing in films they can have and hold.
As I see it, the companies producing these discs are now desperately trying to
please a range of sub-groups that may overlap, but also exhibit some sharp
differences. There are cinephiles who want some meaty, intellectual, analytical
content; “cult film” types (from the world of magazines such as Diabolique or the now defunct Video Watchdog) who like solid
information leavened with displays of enthusiasm; and “old Hollywood” nostalgia
buffs, who just want to wallow and have fun with all the glamour and spectacle.
This Christmas in July disc is light
on supplements: a few trailers plus an audio commentary by Diabolique associate editor Samm Deighan, billed as a “film historian”
(then again, so is anybody who shows up babbling on a DVD commentary these
days). She is among the better critics in her set, and the presentation is
smartly delivered and well prepared. But it is telling that her range of
references, while including Donald Spoto’s spotty Sturges biography, Alessandro
Pirolini’s 2010 book The Cinema of
Preston Sturges (McFarland) and reviewer Stephanie Zacharek, do not stretch
(at least in this instance) to Brian Henderson, Marc Cerisuelo’s Preston Sturges ou le génie de l’Amérique (2002) or even Farber & Poster.
That creates a cognitive dissonance for this listener:
while Deighan demurs that Christmas in
July follows a conventional three-act pattern – which seems to me a simply
wrongheaded observation, and hardly in tune with the ten-minute block
construction that Sturges always used in his screenwriting practice – I
recalled Henderson’s more fruitful conjecture that the film, in its structure,
“resembles the modern notion of mania depression”, and is “not in the least
classical”. Likewise, Deighan’s repeated assertion that Sturges’ predominant
attitude is one of “cynicism” does not, for me, really strike to the heart of
the giddy turnabouts and ambivalences in the texture of Christmas in July. More generally, for all the contextual insights that
Deighan provides here – and despite her endless protestations of love for this
film, for some imaginary masterpiece titled All
Hail the Conquering Hero, and for Sturges – I missed any careful, detailed
attention to the construction of any one moment or scene in the movie. Sturges’
legacy still demands, and deserves, a closer look.
In the week that I’m writing this, apart from the
lottery in Spain, the musical Cats has been widely released. A cat – ominously black – also features in the
closing scenes of Christmas in July.
In another superb and sardonic upending of popular wisdom, Jimmy and Betty –
trundling sadly through a darkened work office – ask the black cleaner, Sam
(Fred “Snowflake” Toones): “Is it good luck or bad luck when a black cat
crosses your path?” Sam replies: “That all depends on what happens afterwards”.
What, in fact, does happen afterwards is one of those crazy, last-minute
reprieves so characteristic of Sturges’ cinema – a cinema
that is determined to be, in the end, optimistic at any cost. Luck (or, as
Deighan names it, coincidence) wins the day, alright. But rewind that Blu-ray
back for a moment and linger on Sam’s wise words. Henderson was right to read
into them a bitter truth, as he rephrased it: “Luck has no meaning or effect at
all”.
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