Word: preston
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Last fortnight two of the most combustible personalities in Cinema, airminded Multimillionaire Howard (The Outlaw) Hughes (TIME, Feb. 22, 1943) and gadget-brained Preston (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) Sturges (TIME, Feb. 14), announced their cinemanschluss. A new studio was born. Hollywood braced itself for the sort of thing that happens when hydrogen and a match flame meet...
...finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit. His good friend and master, René Clair, is near the heart of it when he says, "Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance: he wants to do everything at once. If he could slow down, he would be great; he has an enormous gift and he should be one of our leading creators. I wish he would be a little more selfish and worry about his reputation...
...life of Preston Sturges might read as dizzily as one of his own comedies if it were not, in essence, so intensely bitter. On his first day at school in Chicago, Preston rode a bicycle and wore a Greek chiton. The bicycle was his stepfather's influence-Solomon Sturges, stockbroker and socialite, was a champion cyclist and a good amateur baseball player. The Attic haberdashery was his mother's idea. Mary Dempsey, who changed her name to Beatricci D'Este and finally settled for Mary Desti, was the bosom friend of Isadora Duncan...
Reluctant Genius. Preston's mother was determined that he should be a genius. "I was never allowed," Sturges says, "to play with other kids. They wedged art into me from every side. I was dragged into every goddamn museum in the world." There were gay moments, but they usually stank of culture...
...which came from 30 years of misery and failure. From his life with his mother he would seem to have gotten not only an abiding detestation for the beautiful per se, the noble emotion nobly expressed, but also his almost corybantic intelligence. From Solomon Sturges, on the other hand, Preston may have derived his exaggerated respect for plain success, which leaves him no patience towards artists of integrity who fail at the box office. The combination might explain his matchless skill in producing some of the most intoxicating bits of nihilism the screen has known, but always at the expense...