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The Lady Eve and Sullivan''s Travels. (Home Video).-

Article Excerpt
In 1941, Preston Sturges, though a consummately American storyteller, was well on his way to placing himself esthetically in the company of the likes of Jean Renoir and, in hindsight, the filmmakers of the French New Wave, whom he anticipated by more than a decade through his experimentation with long takes, deep focus, available lighting, location shooting, reflexivity, ambiguity, and his interest in the aleatory. Closer to home, Sturges can be compared to Orson Welles, with whom he arguably expresses kinship at the beginning of Sullivan's Travels when he uses a similar reflexive technique of moving from a film-within-a film to a projection room dark except for a beam of light, as Welles did around the same time in Citizen Kane. But unlike his French confreres who encouraged each other to ignite new and exciting developments in cinema, Sturges never harvested with Welles the potential of their simultaneous, separate advances. Each man was isolated in Hollywood and blocked in his development by a wall of jeal ousy, discouragement, and ultimately repression. Welles has long been acknowledged as an abandoned and traduced American genius. Perhaps the beautiful transfers of The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels distributed on DVD by the Criterion Collection will begin to raise by a few decibels the whispers about Sturges's contributions to film culture.

Both Eve and Sullivan disclose Sturges's tendency to use film as a way of exploring what filmmaking and Hollywood are about, as well as to parade his fond impatience with the vanity of human wishes, and his affectionate regard for both the theatrical clown and the life-seeking if bumbling clown in all of us. Eve is more indirect, Sullivan quite direct, but both paradoxically strip the illusion from tinsel-town productions while simultaneously partaking of Hollywood magic. In Eve, Sturges works out a convoluted narrative about Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a fortune hunter who falls in love with her mark and must battle her father, 'Colonel' Harrington (Charles Coburn), to free herself of his insistence that she exploit men's emotions for financial gain. Although the story is pure screwball romance, Sturges's approach makes Jean's...