Chez Artiste Classics: Sullivan's Travels with John Anzalone

Join John Anzalone at the Chez Artiste for a delightful new Preston Sturges marathon with our dear friends at the Chez!

The most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in cinema history.” —Andrew Sarris
The first writer-director of Hollywood’s sound era, given unprecedented permission to translate onto celluloid a script entirely of his own devising, Preston Sturges went into production on his first feature, the uproariously cynical fable of big-city politics The Great McGinty, in December 1939. By the time he wrapped his last movie at Paramount, four and a half years later, he had made eight of film history’s most hilarious and utterly idiosyncratic pictures, won one Oscar, created the box-office smash of 1944, and single-handedly hog-tied the censors of the Production Code Authority.
Sturges’s ability to, as he put it, “spritz dialogue”—letting his characters shower the audience from every angle with giddy, startling, constantly inventive language—has won him a reputation as one of the wittiest of all filmmakers. His paradoxical narrative method—combining sophisticated attitudes and settings with raucous slapstick and a stock company of the humblest mugs on the Paramount lot—created a comedic style that is widely influential and (in another paradox) unrepeatable. But for all that, critics have often been grudging about accepting Sturges as one of the great filmmakers—on a par, for example, with Orson Welles, his fellow displaced Midwesterner and Broadway veteran, who almost beat him to the “first writer-director” credit.
—Stuart Klawans

Free on-site parking

Due to the length of the program no after event is scheduled.