Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A shoplifter ends up spending christmas eve with the district attorney and - obviously - falling in love with him. My favorite scene is definitively when the car ends up on the meadow and a cow sticks her head into the car, trying to lick Barbara Stanwyck. Cows are funny creatures, as people have known long before Preston Sturges, but they still work - at least for me. Quite possibly it is their balancing on the tightrope between curiosity and fear, combined with their large, brown eyes that makes them so relentlessly funny. Maybe a character like that might prove interesting. The film as a whole didn't work so good for me, although it has some very funny scenes: the scene with the small town judge/sheriff and some of the exchanges of the couple. It gets a bit too sentimental at the actual xmas ceremony and fails to pick up over that. I did like the ending which was kept at least slightly ambiguous: will he still be there when she comes out? A script analysis would maybe st...

A conductor on tour imagines all the different revenges he should take on his wife's perceived infidelities. This was another great Sturges film. It basically turns on the premise that revenge is easily imagined, but - as they say - "execution is everything". Unfortunately, or rather luckily, the vaunted conductor of a symphony orchestra does not necessarily bring the right skills to the table to perform a laborious and murderous revenge that he figures out in a fit of jealousy. The first part of the film I felt was rather slow, but the buildup took me in. And once I got to the point where the audience expects something certain to happen, it got simply amazing. So in a sense a lot of the humor is derived from the audience's expectation. But it wasn't just a one-off joke. The whole thing was carefully enough constructed to combine the man's fantasies and the real-life into something great. Worth watching again, if not for structure then just for the she...

A dismissed soldier is forced to return to his hometown under false pretenses and is received with undeserved glory The story moves fast enough to keep you entertained. The poor boy is put from one bizarre situation to the next - all of them for his own good, but completely against his will. The gathers a lot of its funny moments just from those confrontations. Most of the other highlights come from the quirkiness of the other characters. They are all weird, offensive and at the same time extremely charming human beings that make life for the hero so unbearable. I was really impressed by this one. The ending is slightly expected and the coming-out of the mistaken hero is something I have seen in a gazillion movies since, but even here Sturges found quite an original ending, with everybody in the town marching down the street. Look at this for great dialogue.

The woman of a hapless inventor tries to divorce him, flees to California and gets picked up by a billionaire. There are a lot of really nice scenes in the film that felt like they posessed a light and innocent quality - although there were a lot of innuendos and hints at adultery in all directions. I especially loved the scenes in the beginning, the old sausage maker, the couple discussing their divorce and some of the slapstick scenes in the train. But at a certain point the story fell a bit apart for me - the characters don't change enough throughout most of the picture. When all the errors resolve, most of that felt contrived to me. I really enjoyed most of everything else by Sturges, but I couldn't follow well on this one on my first viewing.

The son of a rich brewer falls in love with a beautiful con-artist. Only my second Sturges film and I am really amazed by it. The story has an extremely modern feel to it, although some of the jokes on contemporary morale don't work anymore. I loved the cast and the characters they depicted - it felt that every role down to the last little sidekick had been carefully selected to be played by just the right actor. The scene with the horse at the sunset was so amazing that I watched it three times through. Not only the horse but the selection of camera angle and framing had been made in such a way that it looked even more grotesque, without turning the lead actors faces distorted, or funny.

A rich director tries to research the life of the poor by unsuccessfully living as a tramp. I could feel that this movie is following some kind of blueprint for romantic comedy, or maybe, invented it for itself. The plot is quite predictable and the twists are silly to say the least. Most of it seems to work due to the absolutely amazing screen presence of Lake. There are some interesting playful attempts at nudity - the shower scene for example must have given the censors a headache and make Sturges grin diabolically.