HOLIDAY WITH PRESTON STURGES

SAT.-MON., DEC. 18-JAN. 2

IF THE PERIOD stretching from the mid-teens to the 1940s was the golden age of American comedy (and it indubitably was), Preston Sturges was the class' wittiest storyteller, shunning the one-liner in favor of the delayed gratification of the eventual comic payoff. Where clowns like the Marx brothers or W.C. Fields slapped on some makeup and let the gags fly, Sturges belonged to the royal lineage of Ernst Lubitsch, whose famed "Lubitsch touch" brought sex to the table without raising the hackles of the Hays Code censors. Sturges was never as delightfully smutty as the director of Ninotchka, but his directorial career, maddeningly short and still brilliant, some 60 years later, was a triumph of inspired silliness.

Sturges, born to wealthy parents and educated in Europe, was something of a Sturges character himself, inventing a kiss-proof lipstick while working in the cosmetics business. Breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter in the 1930s, he pressed Paramount for the right to direct his own scripts until, in 1940, he helmed The Great McGinty, and was paid $10 for the privilege. In a remarkable, unmatched burst of creativity, Sturges directed McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story between 1940 and 1942. His films never quite lived up to this original quintet, but, after all, what can? All five, plus three lesser later works, are on view at the American Museum of the Moving Image's "Holiday with Preston Sturges."

While it is always difficult to choose a favorite gift, if forced, I would have to go with Sullivan's Travels. There is always something profoundly moving when those with comic sensibilities come up with a bittersweet offering (see Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, or Wilder's The Apartment), and Sullivan's Travels is perhaps the best apologetic for the human need for silliness, and escapism, ever filmed. A hotshot director (played by the most underrated actor of the era, Joel McCrea), best known for his smash hit Ants in Your Pants of 1939, decides to direct a serious classic about the plight of the working classes during the Depression, meaningfully titled O Brother, Where Art Thou? Journeying around the country as a hobo, he is followed by a cavalcade of studio publicists, executives and hangers-on, who all keep him from experiencing "the real America."

Soon enough, arrested and placed on a southern chain gang, he gets to take a big bite of Depression America's rotten apple. The prisoners, utterly exhausted from their day's toil, take respite in one of the silly movies McCrea has spent the bulk of the film excoriating—a Mickey Mouse gagfest. this is both one of the best films ever made about the Depression (far better than the overrated Grapes of Wrath) and an eloquent defense of the frivolous. In Sturges' accounting, the pleasures of the trivial and absurd are no laughing matter at all.

American Museum of the Moving Image, Riklis Theater, 35 Ave. (36 St.), Astoria, 718-784-0077; call for times, $10, $7.50 st./s.c.