One of Hollywood's genuinely legendary directors, Preston Sturges redefined the boundaries and meaning of screen comedy as a filmmaker during part of the early '40s. The full range of his influence on movies, however, extended far beyond the director's chair or the success of the pictures that he helmed. Sturges first made his mark in Hollywood as a screenwriter through a series of acclaimed (and still-admired) scripts across the 1930s whose qualities still resonate seven decades later.
The son of a socially prominent couple, he was born Edmund Preston Biden in Chicago in 1898. He had a cosmopolitan upbringing throughout Europe and America, and served in the Air Corps during World War I. He worked for a time in his mother's cosmetics company before moving into other fields, including inventing. Sturges began writing plays in the late '20s, creating one major hit, Strictly Dishonorable, which was subsequently filmed twice, the first time in 1931 by John M. Stahl (in a form surprisingly close to the source, in terms of sexually charged repartee) at Universal, and in 1950, as a musical, by Melvin Frank at MGM.
Sturges then got some experience writing screen dialogue and became a scriptwriter in 1933. His early notable work in this field included the screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1933), starring Spencer Tracy and directed by…  » Read more