Preston Sturges
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced by Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942)
The movie takes its title from Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels."
The film's title and its opening 1930s chain-gang setting are a tip of the hat to Preston Sturges' classic Hollywood comedy "Sullivan's Travels," but what "O Brother" is really riffing off is something different.
Preston Sturges, in "Sullivan's Travels," told the story of a Hollywood director known for lightweight comedy who sets out to make a serious social statement in his next film, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"--though his producer insists it should be a musical.
Taking its classical-sounding title from an in-joke in Preston Sturges' screwball comedy " Sullivan's Travels ", "O, Brother" is resolutely uncategorisable.
The title comes from Sturges's great movie, the 1941 "Sullivan's Travels," in which a filmmaker (played by Joel McCrea) decides to draw inspiration for his next film from the "real world" and sets out with only ten cents in his pocket.
Yet, following an amiable trio of escaped cons through an embellished rendition of the Depression-era South, the Coens' new widescreen odyssey appears more strongly informed by The Wizard of Oz, Down by Law, the films of Preston Sturges (Sullivan's Travels in particular), and, perhaps most of all, the toe-tapping bluegrass tunes that pepper the soundtrack.
In that vein, the film pays lofty tribute to great comedies past, from The Lady Eve to Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Punch-Drunk Love , but Meyers has clearly failed to learn anything from these great works.
It's made by people so dumb they really think that references to The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday will augment their project for its imaginary "discriminating" audience (let me break this to you gently: no one who respects film is voluntarily viewing The Holiday) while simultaneously mystifying the "broader" audience with a depth of movie knowledge.
He's introduced her to classic movies and heroines such as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.
American Hustle (2013)
Directed by David O. Russell
influenced by The Lady Eve (1941), The Great McGinty (1940)
Characters Themes
The scene that follows this unabashed request, with Adams and Cooper gyrating to “I Feel Love” at a strobe-lit disco, is more than simple era-evoking: It conveys the feral energy between the two, with Richie never certain whether or not he’s being played by Sydney (whose British alias, Lady Edith Grassley, is clearly a nod to the title flimflammer in Preston Sturges’s peerless 1941 screwball comedy, The Lady Eve) and too turned on to really care.
She left Phoenix, adopted what she thought sounded like a posh English accent and, perhaps in tribute to Barbara Stanwyck’s aristocratic alter ego in The Lady Eve , called herself Lady Edith Greenley.
In that respect, there’s a dash of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (Adams’ on-and-off British accent plays like an homage to Barbara Stanwyck) in a picture that otherwise suggests an Altmanesque spin on “The Sting.”
There are whiffs of Preston Sturges in the strong, willful female characters and rumbustious physical and interpersonal comedy, as well as the element of the virtuoso scammers scamming other scammers hailing toward both Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” and the definitive comedy clockwork of Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson’s “Trouble in Paradise.”
The short-form description of American Hustle is that it's Martin Scorsese, the chronicler of New York sleaze and crime, meeting Preston Sturges, the antic 1940s screwball-comedy king behind The Great McGinty and Sullivan's Travels .
Jay Kelly (2025)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Themes Visuals Plot
…as it made me think at times of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Preston Sturges’ sublime Sullivan’s Travels.
Con un poco del Fellini de 8 y medio, otro poco del Preston Sturgues de Los viajes de Sullivan y hasta dos gotas del Hitchcock de cualquiera de sus películas con un hombre que huye, el director compone la quintaesencia de las películas agradables, simpáticas, disfrutables y bastante bobas, todo sea dicho.
En esos momentos en que la película pretende ser Los viajes de Sullivan (ya quisiera el director de Historia de matrimonio tener el toque de Preston Sturges), el andamio se tambalea.
La huella de Sullivan’s Travels sobrevuela el film, pero solo como eco temático. En vez de un viaje físico y emocional que confronte al artista con su propia ignorancia, Baumbach parece replicar el gesto sin la convicción necesaria.
Jay Kelly’s attempt to reconnect with the people who watch his movies is akin to Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels…
Baumbach, a skilled neo-screwball farceur, pays extended homage to “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), Preston Sturges’s comedy about a commercial Hollywood filmmaker who, in a fit of high-mindedness, seeks to rub elbows with the common man.
Pleasantville (1998)
Directed by Gary Ross
influenced by The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
Characters
She's a spiritual descendant of the little sister in Preston Sturges' "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," who looked at her small town and saw only rubes and suckers.
Wedding Crashers (2005)
Directed by David Dobkin
influenced by The Palm Beach Story (1942), Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Plot
John and Jeremy's hapless attempts to bluff their way through a weekend at the Cleary estate by pretending to be venture capitalists from New Hampshire are oddly reminiscent of writer-director Preston Sturges' 1940s social satires, such as "Sullivan's Travels," in which a rich filmmaker decides to live among the common people to get a taste of the real world, or "The Palm Beach Story," about a flighty wife who leaves her penniless husband to hobnob with millionaires.
John and Jeremy's hapless attempts to bluff their way through a weekend at the Cleary estate by pretending to be venture capitalists from New Hampshire are oddly reminiscent of writer-director Preston Sturges' 1940s social satires, such as "Sullivan's Travels," in which a rich filmmaker decides to live among the common people to get a taste of the real world, or "The Palm Beach Story," about a flighty wife who leaves her penniless husband to hobnob with millionaires.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Directed by David Yates
influenced by The Lady Eve (1941)
Characters
He’s part earnest conservationist in the David Attenborough mould, part hapless innocent in the vein of Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, and Newt has barely arrived in America before he finds himself in trouble with the Magical Congress (Macusa) .
The Greatest Showman (2017)
Directed by Michael Gracey
influenced by Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Themes
Its rehashed theme, which dates back at least as far as Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, holds that entertainment has an inherent value in its capacity to amuse the downtrodden classes and make them forget their worries.
It wouldn't be a Bond movie without a high-stakes prologue, but the "Skyfall" showdown has another precedent in film history: Preston Sturges' indispensable 1941 Hollywood satire "Sullivan's Travels" opens with a movie-within-a-movie featuring two men coming to blows while holding tight to a moving train.
Her and Harry’s laughter isn’t sweet, though, but off-puttingly exaggerated — just like Joel McCrea’s in the Sullivan’s Travels sequence it nods to.
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Directed by David O. Russell
influenced by Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
More than any other Hollywood filmmaker, Russell has demonstrated a facility with nutty situations, screwball energy, and eccentric characters, the kind of facility that recalls Sturges in his Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek heyday, the kind that approximates the manic farce of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot together with the acerbic wit and sentiment of The Apartment.
The Tourist (2010)
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
influenced by The Lady Eve (1941)
Dialogue
They also share some decent dialogue, the sharpness of which harkens back to romantic capers like “The Lady Eve’’ and “Charade.’’
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Great McGinty (1940)
Dialogue
To contrast, take Sturges' Oscar-winning screenplay from The Great McGinty, his first film, and William Demarest's line, "If you didn't have graft, you'd have a lower class of people in politics!"
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Directed by Nicholas Stoller
influenced by Unfaithfully Yours (1948), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Lady Eve (1941)
Themes
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was "Topic A." The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad suggests that Apatow concurs.
This diverting and generally affable costarring pretext for Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, opening today at area theaters, solicits comparisons in its press material to such Preston Sturges' comedies as "Easy Living" and "Christmas in July."
The American President (1995)
Directed by Rob Reiner
influenced by The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Dialogue
Often Shepherd's dialogue is witty and dry, like something out of a 1930s comedy along the lines of Sturges' "The Palm Beach Story."
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
influenced by The Lady Eve (1941)
Themes
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) "comedies of remarriage," in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical/magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after.
"Up in the Air" bears comparison to Preston Sturges ' " Sullivan's Travels ," that dark, dark comedy about Hollywood and Depression America.
Preston Sturges isn't listed, but he should have been, for this is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's funniest picture, and closer than you would expect to Unfaithfully Yours.
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Directed by Joe Johnston
influenced by Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
Plot
I thought I even caught a whiff of one of my favorite films, Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero, which also centers on a 4F who dreams of fighting in World War II — but doesn’t have a scientist to pump him full of supersizing chemicals.