Three Takes on Coincidences

 

In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal, and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died. She had had another stroke, she said, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether Rose was still alive. I guessed not. She’d had a major stroke about 10 years ago and had gone on to suffer a series of minor strokes, descending into a sorry state of physical incapacity and dementia.
 
I mentioned the dream to my partner over breakfast, but she wasn’t much interested. We were staying in the Midlands at the time, in the house where I’d spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was long gone, and my mother, Doreen, was in a care home, drifting inexorably through the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. We’d just sold the property we’d been living in, and there would be a few weeks’ delay in getting access to our future home, so the old house was a convenient place to stay in the meantime.
 
I gave no further thought to my strange dream until, a fortnight later, we returned from the supermarket to find that a note had been pushed through the letterbox. It was addressed to my mother, and was from Rose’s daughter, Maggie. Her mother, she wrote, had died “two weeks ago”. The funeral would be the following week. I handed the note to my partner and reminded her of my dream. “Weird,” she said, and carried on unloading the groceries. Yes, weird. I can’t recall the last time Rose had entered my thoughts, and there she was, turning up in a dream with news of her own death.
 
So, what am I to make of this? Here’s one interpretation: Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the need to tell me and found its way into my dream. Perhaps she had first tried to contact Doreen, but for one reason or another – the impenetrable wreckage of a damaged brain? – couldn’t get through. Here’s another interpretation: the whole chain of events occurred by sheer coincidence, a chance concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. There’s nothing at all supernatural about it.
 
If you ask me which of those two interpretations I prefer, it would, unequivocally, be the second. But here’s the thing. There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue. I don’t believe the universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go so far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact there’s nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.
 
The term “coincidence” covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the sun, by sheer chance, appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the personal and parochial (my granddaughter has the same birthday as my late wife). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction can be drawn between serendipity – timely, but unplanned, discoveries or development of events – and what the 20th-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer called seriality, which he defined as “a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things or events … in time and space”.
 
The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.
 

Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific children’s author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with a worn velvet collar, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: “Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum”. Baum had died 20 years before the film was released, but the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed.
 
Some coincidences seem to contain an element of humour, as if engineered by a capricious spirit purely for its own amusement. Not long after first moving to Bath in 2016, I made a dash across the busy London Road, misjudged the height of the kerb on the other side, tripped, fell awkwardly and fractured my right arm. Over the next five years, I lived variously in Bath, rural Worcestershire and London. Soon after moving back to Bath on a more permanent basis, I noticed a stylish mahogany chair in the window of a charity shop on London Road, went straight in and bought it. I thought I’d have no trouble lugging the chair back to my flat half a mile away, but it turned out to be heavier than I expected and awkward to carry. As I was crossing the road where I’d had my fall, the chair slipped, crashed to the ground and splintered its right arm. Hear the chuckles of the coincidence imp.
 
While some coincidences seem playful, others feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on “an intermittent rock-grave odyssey”, visiting the last resting places of revered UK rock musicians. About halfway through, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to gather thoughts at the headstone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died at the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious quantity of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a few days earlier to get a picture to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, “an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen”, and, fitting with one of the key motifs of that film, the photographer was “spooked by the appearance of an unaccompanied black dog, which urinates on the gravestone and then disappears”. Black Dog (1971) happens to be the title of one of the most iconic songs in the Led Zeppelin catalogue.
 
If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My “broken arms” coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange forces.
 
It’s a state of mind resembling apophenia – a tendency to perceive meaningful, and usually sinister, links between unrelated events – which is a common prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Individual differences may play a part in the experience of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality characterised by experiences that in some ways echo, in muted form, the symptoms of psychosis, including magical ideation and paranormal belief. There is evidence to suggest that people who score high on measures of schizotypy may also be more prone to experiencing meaningful coincidences and magical thinking. Perhaps schizotypal individuals are also more powerfully affected by coincidence. Someone scoring high on measures of schizotypy would perhaps be more spooked by a death dream than I (a low scorer) was.
 
I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition, but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance. This was the position adopted, in different ways, by Kammerer, and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972) introduced Kammerer’s work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving interest in Jung’s ideas. Kammerer began recording coincidences in 1900, most of them mind-numbingly trivial. For example, he notes that, on 4 November 1910, his brother-in-law attended a concert, and number 9 was both his seat number and the number of his cloakroom ticket. The following day he went to another concert, and his seat and cloakroom ticket numbers were both 21.
 
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or The Law of Seriality, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, “the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy”. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the universe, which, as Koestler puts it, “acts selectively to bring similar configurations together in space and time”. Kammerer sums things up as follows: “We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.” Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as “original and by no means absurd”.
 
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung, follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the “acausal connecting principle”.
 
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
 
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mother’s suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage, Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics, he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.
 
Pauli turned for help to Jung, who happened to live nearby. His therapy involved the recording of dreams, a task at which Pauli proved remarkably adept, being able to remember complex dreams in exquisite detail. Jung also saw an opportunity: Pauli was a willing guide to the arcane realm of subatomic physics; and furthermore, Pauli saw Jung’s theory of synchronicity as a way of approaching some fundamental questions in quantum mechanics – not least the mystery of quantum entanglement, by which subatomic particles may correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a form of double-aspect theory of mind and matter, which viewed the mental and the physical as different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.
 
Jung was the first to bring coincidences into the frame of psychological inquiry, and made use of them in his analytic practice. He offers an anecdote about a golden beetle as an illustration of synchronicity at work in the clinic. A young woman is recounting a dream in which she was given a golden scarab, when Jung hears a gentle tapping at the window behind him and turns to see a flying insect knocking against the windowpane. He opens the window and catches the creature as it flies into the room. It turns out to be a rose chafer beetle, “the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes”. The incident proved to be a transformative moment in the woman’s therapy. She had, says Jung, been “an extraordinarily difficult case” on account of her hyper-rationality and, evidently, “something quite irrational was needed” to break her defences. The coincidence of the dream and the insect’s intrusion was the key to therapeutic progress. Jung adds that the scarab is “a classic example of a rebirth symbol” with roots in Egyptian mythology.
 
Whereas Kammerer hypothesised impersonal, acausal factors intersecting with the causal nexus of the universe, Jung’s acausal connecting principle was enmeshed with the psyche, specifically with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung’s archetypes are primordial structures of the mind common to all human beings. Resurrecting an ancient term, he envisioned an unus mundus, a unitary or one world, in which the mental and physical are integrated, and where the archetypes are instrumental in shaping both mind and matter. It’s a bold vision, but where, we are bound to ask, is the evidence for any of this? There is more than a grain of plausibility in the suggestion that archetypal structures have an influence in shaping thought and behaviour. But the entire universe? Pauli aside, the idea of synchronicity received little support from the wider scientific community.
 
Contemporary cognitive science offers a more secure, if less colourful, conceptual framework for making sense of the experience of coincidence. We are predisposed to encounter coincidences because their detection, it might be said, reflects the basic modus operandi of our cognitive and perceptual systems. The brain seeks patterns in the flow of sensory data it receives from the world. It infuses the patterns it detects with meaning and sometimes agency (often misplaced) and, as a part of this process, it forms beliefs and expectations that serve to shape future perceptions and behaviour. Coincidence, in the simple sense of co-occurrence, informs pattern-detection, especially in terms of identifying causal relationships, and so enhances predictability. The “world” does not simply present itself through the windowpanes of the eyes and channels of the other senses. The brain’s perceptual systems are proactive. They construct a model of the world by continually attempting to match incoming, “bottom-up” sensory data with “top-down” anticipations and predictions. Raw sensory data serve to refine the brain’s best guesses as to what’s happening, rather than building the world afresh with each passing moment. The brain, simply put, is constantly on the lookout for coincidence.
 
From a wide-ranging survey of psychological and neurocognitive research, Michiel van Elk, Karl Friston and Harold Bekkering conclude that the overgeneralisation of such predictive models plays a crucial part in the experience of coincidence. Primed by deeply ingrained cognitive biases, and ill-equipped to make accurate estimates of chance and probability, we are innately inclined to see (and feel) patterns and connections where they simply don’t exist. “Innately inclined” because, in evolutionary terms, the tendency to over-detect coincidences is adaptive. Failure to detect contingencies between related events – for example, rustling in the undergrowth/proximity of a predator – is generally more costly than an erroneous inference of a relationship between unrelated events. Another driver of coincidence is what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the “frequency illusion”, a term that originated in a blogpost but has since found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary:
 
“frequency illusion n. a quirk of perception whereby a phenomenon to which one is newly alert suddenly seems ubiquitous.”
 
Van Elk and his colleagues were not the first to signal the unreliability of intuitive judgments of probability as a factor in the perception of coincidence. Various authors before them – such as Stuart Sutherland in his book Irrationality (1992) – have suggested that paranormal beliefs, including the belief that some coincidences are supernatural, arise because of failures of intuitive probability. The so-called birthday problem, a staple of introductory classes in probability theory, reliably exposes the flaws of our intuitions. It asks what is the likelihood that two people will share a birthday in randomly selected groups. Most people are surprised to learn that a gathering of only 23 people is required for the chances of two of them sharing a birthday to exceed 50%. I’d been meaning for some time to try a simple empirical exercise involving “deathdays” to mirror the birthday problem. When I found myself again staying briefly at my parents’ old house, a short drive from Rushock, I decided I would use Bonham’s grave as the starting point for my research, for no reason other than the vague pull of that black dog story.

 
His headstone is easy to locate, festooned as it is with drumsticks and cymbals left as offerings by the many pilgrims who make their way to the shrine from around the world. The grave lies in the shade of a spreading, blue-needled conifer and, to the right, there’s a row of three other graves – so just four graves in total (there is also a small, sandcastle-like monument at the base of the tree trunk, which I discounted for lack of name and dates). The plan was to conduct a self-terminating search. Starting with Bonham’s headstone, and with my notebook in hand, I would inspect the other graves in the row and then the rows behind and in front, working my way methodically around the graveyard, until I found any two matching dates of death, but my mission ended almost as soon as it had begun. I needed to go no further than the four graves (with five occupants) in Bonham’s row. The occupants of the two on the right shared 29 September as their date of death (21 years apart). I wish I could report that the mysterious black dog made an appearance, but it didn’t.
 
Turning to the probability of dream coincidences, suppose for the sake of argument that the probability of a dream coincidentally matching real-world events is 1 in 10,000, and that only one dream per night is remembered. The probability of a “matching” dream on any given night is 0.0001 (ie, 1 in 10,000), meaning that the probability of a “non-matching” dream is 0.9999. The probability of two consecutive nights with non-matching dreams is 0.9999 x 0.9999. The probability of having non-matching dreams every night for a whole year is 0.9999 multiplied by itself 365 times, which is 0.9642. Rounding up, this means that there is a 3.6% chance of any given person having a dream that matches or “predicts” real-world events over the course of a year. Over a period of 20 years, the odds of having a matching/precognitive dream would be greater than even.
 
Rose, the woman in the death dream I experienced, was 90 years old, and the chances of a 90-year-old woman in the UK dying before her 91st birthday are around one in six, which is to say, not unlikely. Given her medical history, the likelihood that Rose would die before her 91st birthday was probably much greater than that. But why should I dream about her in the first place? It’s true, I hadn’t been consciously thinking about Rose, but, staying in my childhood home, there would have been many implicit reminders. She used to live close by, and came to our house often. Also, visiting my ailing mother more often than usual at her care home would have me thinking about death at both conscious and unconscious levels, and perhaps (unconsciously) about her friendship with Rose.
 
Attempts at understanding coincidence thus range from extravagant conjectures conceiving of acausal forces influencing the fundamental workings of the universe, to sober cognitive studies deconstructing the basic mechanisms of the mind. But there is something else to consider. Remarkable coincidences happen because, well, they happen, and they happen without inherent meaning and independently of the workings of the pattern-hungry brain. As the statistician David Hand puts it, “extremely improbable events are commonplace”. He refers to this as the improbability principle, one with different statistical strands, including the law of truly large numbers, which states that: “With a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” Every week, there are many lottery jackpot winners around the globe, each with odds of winning at many millions to one against. And, in defiance of truly phenomenal odds, several people have won national and state lottery jackpots on more than one occasion.
 

I am a naturalist, but coincidences give me a glimpse of what the supernaturalist sees, and my worldview is briefly challenged. Soon, though, for good or ill, I am back on my usual track. One final coincidence story: it was a warm afternoon in mid-June, and I was feeling sorry for myself. My partner had walked out on me just the week before, and I thought a good way to deal with self-pity would be to launch into a new project. I would do some research into the psychology of coincidence. I settled in an armchair surrounded by books and articles on the subject, including Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. Among other things, I’d been reading his account of Jung’s golden scarab story.
 
In need of coffee, I set Koestler aside and went to the kitchen, returning to find, set squat on the back of my armchair, a golden beetle, a rose chafer like the one that had made its way through the window of Jung’s consulting room. It must have flown in through the wide-open balcony door. I quickly took a picture in case the insect took flight again, and then nudged it on to my palm to return it to the wild, but it simply rolled on to its back and lay motionless. Dead.
 
I sent the picture to my ex, and asked how she was doing. She didn’t reply, but later that evening called with unsettling news. Zoe, an acquaintance of ours, had that afternoon killed herself. My brain by now was in magical thinking mode, and I said I couldn’t help but link Zoe’s death to the appearance, and death, of the golden beetle. I didn’t believe there was a link, of course, but I felt there might be. There was something else at the back of my mind. In Greek mythology, all that king Midas touched turned to gold. His daughter’s name was Zoe, and she too was turned to gold.
 
Ah, but rose chafers are quite common in the south of England; they are active in warm weather; the balcony opens out on a water meadow (a typical rose chafer habitat); et cetera. And it has since been suggested to me that the beetle was quite likely “playing dead” rather than truly dead. Perhaps, after I’d thrown it back out on to the meadow, there was a “rebirth” of the kind these creatures are said to symbolise.
 
Weird, though.
 
 
Are coincidences real? By Paul Bloks. The Guardian, April 13, 2023.

In the 1920s, one of Carl Jung’s female patients proved particularly frustrating to him – notwithstanding her ‘excellent education’ and ‘highly polished Cartesian rationalism’. She was ‘psychologically inaccessible’, the Swiss psychiatrist later wrote in his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), by which he meant that she wasn’t accepting his pseudo-scientific methods.
 
To better understand her subconscious mind, Jung had her recount her recent dreams. She told him that, the night before, she had dreamed that she’d been given a golden scarab as a piece of jewellery. As she was describing the dream, there was a tapping on the window and Jung turned around. ‘I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in,’ he wrote. ‘It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab.’ Jung knew this was just what his skeptical patient needed to see. ‘I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.’
 
Jung called this an instance of ‘synchronicity’, a concept whose application to psychology he developed with the Austrian-born theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe the way that seemingly unrelated events can in fact be significantly related and held together by an unseen force – in this case, his patient’s dream and shared reality coalescing with the appearance of the scarab beetle. Jung believed in an unus mundus, or a unitary world, in which there is no separation between mind and matter. Everything is connected; every event has a reason behind it. It spurred his belief in even wilder ideas such as telepathy, and fed his concept of the ‘collective unconscious’, for which he claimed there were certain universal ideas, beliefs and archetypes implicitly understood by everyone from birth.
 
The Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, a contemporary of Jung’s, built on ‘synchronicity’ with his theory of ‘seriality’, which says that coincidences are a basic force of the Universe, like gravity. Albert Einstein, always pushing the boundaries between faith and reason, found the quasi-spiritual idea of seriality intriguing, and is rumoured to have called it ‘original and by no means absurd’.

 
Today, nearly all scientists say that coincidences are just that: coincidences – void of greater meaning. Yet, they’re something we all experience, and with a frequency that is uniform across age, sex, country, job, even education level. Those who believe that they’ve had a ‘meaningful coincidence’ in their lives experience a collision of events so remarkable and unlikely that they chose to ascribe a form of grander meaning to the occurrence, via fate or divinity or existential importance. One of the most commonly experienced ‘meaningful coincidences’ is to think of your friend for the first time in a long while only to have her telephone you that instant. Any self-respecting statistician would say that if you tracked the number of times you thought of any friend, and the number of times you had that friend immediately ring you, you’d find the link to be statistically insignificant. But it is not necessarily irrational to attribute grander significance to this occurrence. To those who believe in meaningful coincidences, statistical insignificance does not undermine an event’s causality or importance. To them, just because something could happen doesn’t mean it wasn’t also fated to happen.
 
It’s a mindset that applies equally to our habit of weaving relationships between coincidental events into epic myths, religious stories, even conspiracy theories. Longwinding, Dickensian stories of interconnected coincidences leading to a cathartic conclusion can provide us with a sense of meaning, of life holding subtler, unseen mysteries that make even our suffering worthwhile – as if our lives were really a series of sophisticated, interconnecting puzzle pieces. This largely explains the seductiveness of most mainstream religions as well: a divine hand orchestrating our lives is a particularly comforting notion, even if, scientifically, there’s little to lend credence to such beliefs.
 
But just because we might ‘know’ that meaningful coincidences don’t really exist doesn’t mean that they don’t still move us. The poet John Keats in 1817 accused Isaac Newton of trying to ‘unweave the rainbow’, by which he meant that Newton was attempting to take the magic out of life by paring it down to its scientific basis. The young poet might have been wishful in his thinking, but such a statement also raises the question of how we should grapple with mysteries – with or without a belief in a greater meaning to life? Even if every possible coincidence could be scientifically explained, we shouldn’t necessarily discount its importance. You can watch a movie or read a novel, and be at once aware of its nonreality while also being moved by it. Must these ideas therefore be incompatible? Indeed, might the continued belief in meaningful coincidences even be rational and necessary to our experience of existing in the world? And, is a belief in meaningful coincidences something vital to our survival as humans?
 
After the so-called Freud Wars starting in the 1970s, led by the American essayist Frederick Crews, any orthodox adherence to Freudian or Jungian ideas has since been frowned upon in the mainstream scientific community. Statistical and evolutionary arguments against notions of synchronicity, seriality and meaningful coincidences at large have come to seem ironclad, and the existential aspects of coincidence have been wholly discounted. Those who do believe in meaningful coincidences also haven’t been doing many favours for themselves. People who strongly believe in the paranormal and in conspiracy theories, for instance, tend to be significantly worse at probabilistic and statistical reasoning than those who don’t believe in them, according to studies from the University of Bristol and Goldsmiths, University of London, respectively. In truth, most of us are surprisingly poor at gauging the probabilities of events, so when we receive that phone call from the friend we’re thinking of, we’re prone to ascribe to it a significance disproportionate to its relative commonness.
 
A good example of our lack of statistical logic is when gamblers interpret a run of black or red numbers in roulette as meaningful, in spite of the fact that each time one colour comes up, the next spin has exactly the same 50 per cent probability of landing on black or red. Or, take ‘the birthday problem’, which simply asks: how many people would you need to get into the same room in order to statistically assure that at least two share the exact birth month and day? Given that there are 365 days in a non-leap year, and that most people you know probably don’t have the same birthday, you might reasonably suppose that you’d need quite a high number to find an exact match. Hundreds, perhaps, and even then you’d be lucky to find two people with the same birth month and day. Statistically, however, you need only 23 people in the room for a greater than 50 per cent (hence ‘statistically probable’) chance of finding two people with the exact same birth month and day. For a 99.9 per cent chance, you need only 70 people.
 
We ascribe exceptional meaning to what we perceive as exceptionally low-probability events, but they’re often not as low-probability as we think. And, even if they are unlikely, the most unlikely events are – with 7 billion people on Earth – actually relatively common, thanks to the so-called law of truly large numbers, the statistical adage of Frederick Mosteller and Persi Diaconis, in which a big sample size will eventually lead to essentially any result. Many people have survived being struck by lightning (even multiple times). Many have won the lottery (even multiple times). Plus, we’re culturally trained to see meaning in intrinsically meaningless events: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died hours apart on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; Mark Twain was born and died on days in which Halley’s Comet could be viewed from Earth. There’s statistically nothing further to be derived from these events, but we talk about them regardless as evidence of a greater, often spiritual, meaning. Every coincidence can be statistically explained. Even Plutarch understood this. Writing in ‘The Life of Sertorius’, a volume in his Parallel Lives series (1st century CE), he noted: ‘It is no great wonder if in the long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur.’

 
Irrespective of the mathematics of coincidence, there are still psychology specialists unwilling to give up on adapting theories of synchronicity and seriality. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist in Virginia and the author of the bestselling Connecting with Coincidence: The New Science for Using Synchronicity and Serendipity in Your Life (2016), believes that meaningful coincidences both exist and can be proven. One story he likes to tell about coincidence is extremely personal. He was 31 years old and living in San Francisco. One night, at about 11pm, he began violently choking over the sink. He hadn’t been eating or drinking, and the attack seemed to come out of nowhere. He drank some water, recovered, and then went to bed wondering what had spurred his choking fit. The next morning, he received a call from his brother, who told him that their father had died at two in the morning in Connecticut – which, because of the three-hour time difference, made it the same time as when Beitman had begun choking. His father had died choking to death on his own blood. Beitman found this pair of events incredibly significant, but he couldn’t find a sufficiently scientific explanation for them other than random chance. So he developed his own explanation, taking, in part, from Jung’s idea of synchronicity.
 
Beitman called this experience ‘simulpathity’ – or the experience of another person’s suffering, even from afar. He has since tried to provide a scientific basis for other Jungian ideas such as serendipity and seriality, and his overarching view is inherently Jungian, invoking the unus mundus while adding a distinctly New Age twist. ‘I use a term called “the psycho-sphere”,’ Beitman told me, ‘by which I mean only that mental atmosphere that surrounds Earth, in which we are immersed right here.’ Admittedly, trying to find a scientific basis for believing in meaningful coincidence is not a widespread pursuit (Iris Bell, a psychiatrist at the University of Arizona, with whom Beitman has co-written a book, is another rare exception). Statisticians still push back.
 
‘I find it very surprising, given the incontrovertible mathematical arguments,’ says David Hand, a prominent statistician and emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College London. ‘If you look at the relative numbers – especially of statisticians and probabilists, who are expert in such matters – you will find a vanishingly small percentage who would agree with concepts like synchronicity.’ But, perhaps, Hand reasons, the popularity of Beitman’s ideas isn’t all that surprising given human nature. ‘It’s very seductive, because mysteries always are.’
 
In fact, Beitman has taken a clever tack in recognising that just because something is random doesn’t also mean it’s not significant. It’s a similar argument that an atheist will eventually face when debating with a religious person who believes that God pulls the strings of life. Just because the atheist can use the law of truly large numbers to statistically prove that every event that happens within the boundaries of the physically conceivable world is possible without a god, this proof doesn’t also mean that those chance events are not somehow hiding meaning. (Or indeed, that some magical string-puller might not be behind at least some of them)
 
Meaning cannot be quantified or even clearly and routinely identified. The difficulty that Beitman faces is in trying to make meaningful coincidence into a scientific concept. Like a religious person, the greatest asset to believing in meaningful coincidence is that you cannot prove that something is devoid of meaning since ‘meaning’ is not scientifically testable. Where Beitman is most successful – even rational – is when he shows how experiencing a coincidence can encourage psychological shifts. He tells the story of a patient who told him that she was letting her abusive husband return to living with her. But before she went to get him from the airport, she received a phone call. The woman on the other end had the wrong number; yet, for reasons unexplained, they continued to talk, and it came out that the other woman had an abusive boyfriend. The other woman sounded fearful and unstable, and after hanging up the married woman decided to separate from her husband after all. This, Beitman says, is a meaningful coincidence that fundamentally altered her psychology and outlook on life. It is also why meaningful coincidences are so important. With the exception perhaps of the chilliest of rationalists, these types of events tend to have deeply visceral, sometimes life-changing effects.
 
Cynically, one could reason that trying to add a scientific patina to the belief in meaningful coincidence is driven by greed: there will always be money to be made in writing books about or giving talks that exploit people’s desire to see chance coincidences as significant. We want evidence of a hidden meaning in life – and we’re willing to pay for it. Beitman might be one of the few trying to provide an academic spin to meaningful coincidences, but there are literally thousands of books and movies about the beauty, significance and importance of coincidences (not to mention how they’re used to win religious adherents). Coincidences, write Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal in their bestselling book Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidences From Everyday Life (1997), show ‘the rich promise of a bounteous universe and the splendour lying dormant within your soul. Coincidences are everywhere and can happen any time. When your soul is ready, they will come. All that is required is that you open your heart.’ This is obviously just a bit of feelgood hocus pocus. But it’s not actively harmful either, other than in taking advantage of people’s willingness to pay to hear what they want to hear.
 
Where a belief in meaningful coincidences can become dangerous, however, is when it begins to impair your judgment. For one, it can make you think illogically. For instance, ‘overfitting’ occurs when you fit your belief model to the noise rather than the signal, like suddenly ‘seeing’ UFOs after your friend has been talking about them. ‘Hidden meanings’ come out of the Jungian and Freudian ideas of the collective and individual unconscious, in which ‘slips’ of words or phrases are viewed not merely as linguistic errors but as pointing towards a greater subconscious, psychological meaning that’s not really there. Or the aforementioned ‘gambling fallacy’, which occurs when you begin to see seemingly hidden patterns in outcomes that result only by chance.
 
But while these might seem like small-time issues – UFOs, Freudian slips – there are sometimes larger questions at play. For instance, when the anti-vaccination movement was embraced in the United States, children died or had their health imperilled by parents who aligned rising rates of autism in children to the rising number of vaccines being given. It’s true that autism tends to be diagnosed around the same time that vaccinations are administered, but anti-vaxxers confused correlation with causality, relying, in part, on a belief in meaningful coincidence. Something has to be making certain children around the age of vaccinations get sick, they thought. But as study after study has shown, there’s no stock in the claim that vaccines make children autistic or even sick. Scientists, therefore, need to help ‘people to make decisions on the basis of concrete evidence, not half-baked pseudoscience,’ says Hand, the statistician. ‘Scientists have a public duty to help to disperse the mists of confusion.’

 
‘When we experience coincidences, we experience a pattern of events, sometimes perceived to be very rare, and that are surprising to us, that feel like they are caused by something,’ adds Magda Osman, who teaches experimental psychology at Queen Mary University of London. But just because we can’t say why, exactly, certain events happen at certain times doesn’t give them meaning, she says. ‘Coincidences are just an inevitable part of our cognitive system. That is it.’
 
What so much of the question around meaningful coincidence comes down to is how you choose to fill the vacuum of life’s mysteries. Is the realm of the unknown a place of spirituality and existential significance for you, or does the world remain entirely material?
 
Beneath the statistical incorrectness, beneath any economic ploys, beneath even the potentially grave errors that can result, a belief in meaningful coincidence is, from an existential perspective, surprisingly rational. If your father were to choke to death across the country at the same time that you felt a phantom choking, you might know, intellectually, that there was no mysterious, invisible connection at play. But, if you did let your mind wander to that possibility, it would allow you a new way to grieve your father’s death, giving you a sense of intimacy or a fatalist understanding of events. Beitman claims that science is ‘fairly flexible’, which seems like a red flag to serious researchers. But behind such a statement – and motivating the millions of people who buy books on, watch movies about, or have ever thought about what the many links between the events in one’s life mean – is the sometimes-necessary need to fabricate meaning.
 
We do this in infinite ways, not least via the apparatus of religion, but one way of finding meaning is to marry the mental and material worlds, signing up to what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’ – an invisible realm that binds together our lives. It’s a belief that’s scientifically disproven, of course, and it’s flawed from its start; but, like so many other non-scientific beliefs, from a psychological angle, it makes some sense. There is, after all, a difference between statistical significance and human significance – one does not always dictate the other. Wrong and right all at once. A beetle is just a beetle until you decide that it’s not.
 
On Coincidence. By Cody Delistraty.  Aeon, July 10, 2018.

Toward the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which midwestern middle-school bands traveled. (I imagine it still is.)  They had this indoor roller coaster there, called the Disaster Transport. My friends and I were standing in line for this roller coaster, winding up the dimly lit cement steps, when we turned a corner and came across a huge pile of money.

 We picked it up and counted it; it was a very specific amount of money. I don’t remember now exactly how much, but for the purposes of this retelling, let’s say it was $134. That sounds close.

 We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn it in before a group of older kids ahead of us snatched the cash wad out of our hands. They claimed it was theirs; it was not theirs—they counted it in front of us and exchanged “Whoa”s and high fives. We were hapless, gangly middle schoolers (I was growing out my bangs; it was a rough year). They were confident we would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. So that was the end of that.

 Until, Part Two:

 A little more than a year later, I went to a summer program at Michigan State University, a nerd camp where you take classes like genetics for fun. One evening, as we were sitting around in the common area, chatting and doing homework, I overheard a kid telling his friends how he’d lost a bunch of money last year at Cedar Point.

 With very little attempt at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars.

 Was he there on May whatever date I was also there? He was.

 Did he lose the money in line for the Disaster Transport? In fact, he did.

 How much money did he lose? $134, exactly.

 * * *

 Though “What are the odds?” is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled “coincidences” is packed with an amazing variety of experiences, and yet something more than rarity compels us to group them together. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

 Some might say it’s just because people don’t understand probability. In their 1989 paper “Methods for Studying Coincidences,” the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as “a rare event,” but decided “this includes too much to permit careful study.” Instead, they settled on, “A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.”

 From a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, not meaningfully related, and they shouldn’t be that surprising because they happen all the time. “Extremely improbable events are commonplace,” as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans generally aren’t great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives.

 For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother’s birthday, or your best friend’s. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental.

 And there are lots of people on this planet—more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen,” Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it’s surprising and miraculous, but the fact that someone won doesn’t surprise the rest of us.

 Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you’ll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point. But it’ll still seem like a coincidence when you do. When something surprising happens, we don’t think about all the times it could have happened, but didn’t. And when we include near misses as coincidences (you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater.

 To demonstrate how common unlikely seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room before there’s a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer is 23.

 “Oh, those guys and their birthdays really get me mad,” says Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and author of the forthcoming book Connecting With Coincidence. That’s not the way the average person would frame that question, he says. When someone asks “What are the odds?” odds are they aren’t asking, “What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would have happened to anyone in the room?” but something more like, “What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and now?” And with anything more complicated than a birthday match, that becomes almost impossible to calculate.

 It’s true that people are fairly egocentric about their coincidences. The psychologist Ruma Falk found in a study that people rate their own coincidences as more surprising than other people’s. They’re like dreams—mine are more interesting than yours.

 “A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder,” says David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it’s not really a coincidence.

 * * *

 I told Spiegelhalter my Cedar Point story on the phone—I couldn’t help it. He collects coincidences, see. (A thriller novel called The Coincidence Authority has a professor character based on him.) He has a website where people can submit them, and says he’s gotten about 4,000 or 5,000 stories since 2011. Unfortunately, he and his colleagues haven’t done much with this treasure trove of information, mostly because a pile of free-form stories is a pretty hard data set to measure. They’re looking for someone to do text-mining on it, but so far all they’ve been able to analyze is how many coincidences fall into the different categories you can check off when you submit your story:

 Common Types of Coincidences AFB

 

 

David Spiegelhalter

 

 

He says he’d categorize mine as “finding a link with someone you meet.” “But it’s a very different sort of connection,” he says, “not like having lived in the same house or something like that. And it’s a very strong one, it’s not just like you were both at the theme park. I love that. And you remember it after all this time.”

 And the craziest thing is not that I found someone’s money and then that I was in a room with him a year later, but that I found out about it at all. What if he hadn’t brought it up? Or “you might not have heard him if you’d been somewhere slightly away,” Spiegelhalter says. “And yet the coincidence would have been there. You would have been six feet away from someone who lost their money. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was only because you were listening that you noticed it. And so that’s why the amazing thing is not that these things occur, it’s that we notice them.”

 “This is my big theory about coincidences,” he continues, “that’s why they happen to certain kinds of people.”

 Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

 “Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never notice anything,” Spiegelhalter says. “I never talk to anybody on trains. If I’m with a stranger, I don’t try to find a connection with them, because I’m English.”

 Beitman, on the other hand, says, “My life is littered with coincidences.” He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8 or 9 years old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen it; they hadn’t. Then, “I was crying a lot and took the wrong way home, and there was the dog … I got into [studying coincidences] just because, hey, look Bernie, what’s going on here?”

 For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. Because statistics can describe what happens, but can’t explain it any further than chance. “I know there’s something more going on than we pay attention to,” he says. “Random is not enough of an explanation for me.”

 Random wasn’t enough for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung either. So he came up with an alternative explanation. Coincidences were, to him, meaningful events that couldn’t be explained by cause and effect, which, so far so good, but he also thought that there was another force, outside of causality, which could explain them. This he called “synchronicity,” which in his 1952 book, he called an “acausal connecting principle.”

 Meaningful coincidences were produced by the force of synchronicity, and could be considered glimpses into another of Jung’s ideas—the unus mundus, or “one world.” Unus mundus is the theory that there is an underlying order and structure to reality, a network that connects everything and everyone.

 For Jung, synchronicity didn’t just account for coincidences, but also ESP, telepathy, and ghosts. And to this day, research shows that people who experience more coincidences tend to be more likely to believe in the occult as well.

 This is the trouble with trying to find a deeper explanation for coincidences than randomness—it can quickly veer into the paranormal.

 * * *

 Beitman, like Spiegelhalter, is interested in sorting and labeling different kinds of coincidences, to develop categories “like an early botanist,” he says, though his categories are more expansive and include not only things that happen in the world but people’s thoughts and feelings as well. In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories—environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-mind interactions.

 Environment-environment are the most obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world. You’re at a gin joint in Morocco and your long-lost love from Paris shows up. I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it.

 A nurse named Violet Jessop was a stewardess for White Star Line and lived through three crashes of its ill-fated fleet of ocean liners. She was on the Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911. In 1912, she was there for the big one: the Titanic. And four years later, when White Star’s Britannic, reportedly improved after its sister ship’s disaster, also sank, Jessop was there. And she survived. That one, I guess, is an environment-environment-environment.

 Mind-environment coincidences are premonition-esque—you’re thinking of a friend and then they call you, for example. But unless you happen to write down “I am thinking of so-and-so [timestamp]” before the call happens, these are cool for the person they happen to, but not really measurable. “We banned premonitions from our site,” Spiegelhalter says. “Because, where’s the proof? Anybody could say anything.”

 Another sort of mind-environment interaction is learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere. Or getting a song stuck in your head and hearing it everywhere you go, or wondering about something and then stumbling onto an article about it. The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us. But, though it makes them no less magical, life’s motifs are created not by the world around us, but by humans, by our attention.

This is an effect that the Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky calls “the frequency illusion,” and it’s not the same as a premonition. It’s just that once you’ve noticed something, your brain is primed to notice it again the next time you encounter it. A word or a concept you’ve just learned feels relevant to you—you may have seen it hundreds of times before and just never noticed. But now that you’re paying attention, it’s more likely to pop out at you the next time it whizzes by.

 And then the final category, mind-mind, of course, is straight-up mystical. One example of this is “simulpathity,” a term Beitman coined to describe feeling the pain or emotion of someone else at a distance. His interest in this particular type of coincidence is deeply personal.

 “In San Francisco, in 1973, February 26, I stood at a sink uncontrollably choking,” he says, clarifying, “There was nothing in my throat that I knew [of].”

 “It was around 11 o’clock in San Francisco. The next day my brother called, and told me my father had died at 2 a.m. in Wilmington, Delaware, which was 11 in San Francisco, and he had died by choking on blood in his throat. That was a dramatic experience for me, and I began to look to see if other people had experiences like this. And many people have.”

 * * *

 This is where we start to leave the realm of science and enter the realm of belief. Coincidences are remarkable in how they straddle these worlds. People have surprising, connective experiences, and they either create meaning out of them, or they don’t.

 Leaving a coincidence as nothing more than a curiosity may be a more evidence-based mindset, but it’s not fair to say that the people who make meaning from coincidences are irrational. The process by which we notice coincidences is “part of a general cognitive architecture which is designed to make sense of the world,” says Magda Osman, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Queen Mary University of London. It’s the same rational process we use to learn cause and effect. This is one way to scientifically explain how coincidences happen—as by-products of the brain’s meaning-making system.

 People like patterns. We look for them everywhere, and by noticing and analyzing them we can understand our world and, to some small degree, control it. If every time you flick a switch, a lamp across the room turns on, you come to understand that that switch controls that lamp.

 When someone sees a pattern in a coincidence, “there’s no way I can say ‘Yes, that was definitely a chance event,’ or ‘There was an actual causal mechanism for it,’ because I’d have to know the world perfectly to be able to say that,” Osman says.

 Instead what we do is weigh whether it seems likelier that the event was caused by chance, or by something else. If chance is the winner, we dismiss it. If not, we’ve got a new hypothesis about how the world works.

 Take the case of two twins, who were adopted by different families when they were four weeks old. When they were later reunited, their lives had … a lot of similarities. They were both named James by their adoptive families, were both married to a Betty and had divorced a Linda. One twin’s first son’s name was James Alan, the other’s was James Allan. They both had adoptive brothers named Larry and pet dogs named Toy. They both suffered from tension headaches, and both vacationed in Florida within three blocks of each other.

 You could hypothesize from this that the power of genetics is so strong, that even when identical twins are separated, their lives play out the same way. In fact, the twins were part of a University of Minnesota study on twins reared apart that was asking just that question, though it didn’t suggest that there was any gene that would make someone attracted to a Betty, or likely to name a dog Toy.

 Drawing inferences from patterns like this is an advantageous thing to do, even when the pattern isn’t 100 percent consistent. Take learning language as an example. There isn’t going to be a dog, or even a picture of a dog, nearby every time a child hears the word “dog.” But if dad points at the family Fido enough times while saying “dog,” the kid will learn what the word means anyway. 

 “Small children are justified in being conspiracy theorists, since their world is run by an inscrutable and all-powerful organization possessing secret communications and mysterious powers—a world of adults, who act by a system of rules that children gradually master as they grow up,” write the cognitive scientists Thomas Griffiths and Joshua Tenenbaum in a 2006 study on coincidences.

 We retain this capability, even when we’re older and have figured out most of these more obvious patterns. It can still be very useful, especially for scientists who are working on unsolved questions, but for most adults in their daily lives, any new coincidental connection is likely to be specious. From a scientific perspective, anyway. If we realize that, then we wave it off as “just a coincidence,” or what Griffiths, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a “mere coincidence.”

 On the flip side, for someone who believes in ESP, thinking of a friend right before she calls may not be a coincidence to them at all, but just more evidence to support what they already believe. The same goes for someone who believes in divine intervention—a chance meeting with a long-lost lover may be, to them, a sign from God, not a coincidence at all.

 “You really come across a question of just what belief system you have about how reality works,” Beitman says. “Are you a person who believes the universe is random or are you a person who believes there’s something going on here that maybe we gotta pay more attention to? On the continuum of explanation, on the left-hand side we’ve got random, on the right-hand side we’ve got God. In the middle we’ve got little Bernie Beitman did something here, I did it but I didn’t know how I did it.”

 In the middle zone lie what Griffiths calls “suspicious coincidences.”

  “To me, that’s a key part of what makes something a coincidence—that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is false and being certain that something is true,” he says. If enough suspicious coincidences of a certain nature pile up, someone’s uncertainty can cross over into belief. People can stumble into scientific discoveries this way—“Hmm, all these people with cholera seem to be getting their water from the same well”—or into superstition—“Every time I wear mismatched socks, my meetings go well.”

 But you can stay in that in-between zone for a long time—suspicious, but unsure. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the coincidences that present as evidence for some kind of hidden but as-yet undiscovered ordering principle for reality, be that synchronicity or a sort of David Mitchell–esque “Everything Is Connected” web that ensnares us in its pattern. Meaningful connections can seem created by design—things are “meant to be,” they’re happening for a reason, even if the reason is elusive. Or as Beitman puts it, “Coincidences alert us to the mysterious hiding in plain sight.”

 I suppose no one can prove there isn’t such a thing, but it’s definitely impossible to prove that there is. So you’re left with … not much. Where you fall on the continuum of explanation probably says more about you than it does about reality.

 * * *

 In The Improbability Principle, Hand cites a 1988 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report that concluded that there was “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.”

 “One hundred thirty years!” Hand writes. The fact that people kept trying to find proof for the paranormal was “a testament to the power of hope over experience if there ever was one.”

 But I disagree. It may be that researching the paranormal is partly an act of hope that you’ll find something where no one has found anything before. But it seems like, often, experiences are the building blocks of belief in the paranormal, or in an underlying force that organizes reality. Even if they’re not doing formal research, people are seeking explanations for their experiences. And structure is a much more appealing explanation than chance.

 Where you fall on the chance-structure continuum may have a lot to do with what you think chance looks like in the first place. Research shows that while most people are pretty bad at generating a random string of numbers, people who believe in ESP are even worse. Even more so than skeptics, believers tend to think that repetitions in a sequence are less likely to be random—that a coin flip sequence that went “heads, heads, heads, heads, tails” would be less likely to come up randomly than one that went “heads, tails, heads, tails, heads,” even though they’re equally probable.

 So we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why we want to make meaning from them, and we have probability to explain why they seem to happen so often. But to explain why any individual coincidence happened involves a snarl of threads, of decisions and circumstances and chains of events that, even if one could untangle it, wouldn’t tell you anything about any other coincidence.

 Jung seems to have been annoyed by this. “To grasp these unique or rare events at all, we seem to be dependent on equally ‘unique’ and individual descriptions,” he writes, despairing of the lack of a unifying theory offered by science for these strange happenings. “This would result in a chaotic collection of curiosities, rather like those old natural-history cabinets where one finds, cheek by jowl with fossils and anatomical monsters in bottles, the horn of a unicorn, a mandragora manikin, and a dried mermaid.”

 This is supposed to be unappealing (surely these things should be put in order!), but I rather like the image of coincidences as a curio cabinet full of odds and ends we couldn’t find anywhere else to put. It may not be what we’re most comfortable with, but a “chaotic collection of curiosities” is what we’ve got.

 Coincidences and the Meaning of Life. By Julie Beck. The Atlantic, February 23, 2016.

 

The Comic Genius of Writer-Director Preston Sturges

 

Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the place. Eleanor Hutton, his second wife, was the daughter of the food magnate Marjorie Merriweather Post, who built this ‘seventy-bedroom cottage on the sea’, as he called it, in the late 1920s. The weeks Sturges spent as Eleanor’s house guest at Mar-a-Lago supplied him with abundant material when he came to write and direct The Palm Beach Story (1942), which exemplifies his approach to film in the challenge it poses to Hollywood decorum through riotous alternations of slapstick and salty dialogue. ‘Millionaires are funny’ was the lesson he drew from the experience. The millionaires in The Palm Beach Story are funny both in the sense that their customary exemption from everyday rough-and-tumble renders them particularly susceptible to humiliation by pratfall and in the sense that their vast wealth has by this account equipped them – contrary to popular prejudice – with an unquenchable desire to help out those less fortunate than themselves. Sturges certainly possessed a soft spot for the super-rich. It’s idiosyncrasies of this kind which ensure that his films, while unapologetically straight off the studio production line, are never bland.
 
Sturges came late to writing, later to writing for film, and later yet to directing what he had written. Judging by his autobiography – a text ‘adapted and edited’ by his fourth wife, Sandy, from the mass of memoirs he left at his death – he had no wish to be famous for being famous. It takes him until page 292 (out of 340) to get to his debut as writer-director. Some debut it proved, too. The Great McGinty (1940) didn’t just make his name. It scooped the inaugural Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The six further comedies he went on to write and direct for Paramount, from Christmas in July (1940) to Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), enjoyed consistent critical and commercial success. At least two of them, The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), have since achieved classic status in accounts of Hollywood comedy.
 
But there is something else that demands acknowledgment, something woven into the pell-mell seriality of a life in which career opportunities, like wives and children, came and went: artist, store manager, airman, stockbroker, private secretary (fired on his first day), gigolo (declined), inventor, industrial magnate, playwright, script doctor, film director. Sturges was a born overreacher. You don’t get very far into any of his films before the sound of breaking glass announces the consequence of yet another false step or expansive gesture. But these are, for all their amplified vehemence, the blithest of shatterings. Sturges liked the idea of being able to act with impunity. ‘I am, always was, and always will be violently optimistic. I knew at twenty that I was going to be a millionaire. I know it today. In between times, I have been.’ The violent optimism arose from the life. It sets the tone of the autobiography, and of the films.
 
Sturges was born in August 1898 in Chicago. His biological mother and father soon separated. The place of the nuclear family in his upbringing was to be taken by an eerily symmetrical ad hoc quasi-parental quartet: two mothers (one biological, the other surrogate), two fathers (both surrogate). In January 1901, Mary Biden, née Dempsey, set off for Paris to study for the stage, with the infant Preston in tow. A woman of inexhaustible enterprise, she was always going to land on her feet. To help things along, she now called herself Mary d’Este, on the grounds that Dempsey had always been a crude anglicisation obscuring noble (if distant) Italian ancestry. When she gave the cosmetics business she subsequently established the name Maison d’Este, the noble Italians objected, and she had to revert to Desti. She had barely set foot in Paris before becoming best friends with Isadora Duncan, then cutting a swathe through the more bohemian reaches of the avant-garde with her lyrical interpretations of dance. A good deal of Sturges’s life until the age of fifteen was lived as a junior member of Duncan’s entourage. His biographer Diane Jacobs regards these two ‘complex women’ as the ‘crucial influences’ on Sturges both as a person and as a filmmaker. The optimism they instilled in him was made possible by their excess of talent, beauty and charm. ‘I have never waited to do as I wished,’ Isadora was to declare. The attitude evidently rubbed off on Mary, who also knew that she was, as Jacobs puts it, ‘among the world’s elite’, and thus ‘entitled to do as she pleased’.
 
In September 1901, Mary took the three-year-old Preston back to America, where she proceeded to marry Solomon Sturges, a well-to-do stockbroker from a prominent Chicago family. This was his first encounter with a kind of entitlement drawn not from late Romantic aesthetic ideology, but from an inheritance of power and prestige accumulated over generations. The two kinds, it appeared, could co-exist. Solomon promptly agreed that his wife and adopted son should henceforth spend six months of the year in Chicago, and six in Europe. The arrangement came to an end in 1907, after a violent quarrel during which Preston first learned that Solomon was not his biological father. Solomon, however, remained a much loved surrogate, even – or especially – after his separation from Mary. For one thing, his kind of entitlement generated helpful displays of largesse. ‘Father always put up the money for everything.’ In 1909, the quasi-parental quartet was completed by the arrival of Duncan’s new lover, Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine millions, who made an immediate, lasting impression. When Singer was in town, Sturges later recalled, ‘I became a temporary millionaire and went every place.’ It was Singer who introduced him to Palm Beach. There can be no doubt about the enduring influence exerted on Sturges by his two surrogate fathers. ‘He was conservative in politics,’ Stuart Klawans observes, ‘after the fashion of moneyed people who resent paying taxes, and proudly cynical.’
 
Although scarcely definitive as an account of the life, the autobiography does establish and maintain a revealing tone. Facetiousness – a form of wit which is less a statement about the world than an indirect expression of character by means of sheer nagging insistence – came naturally to Sturges. He sometimes caught himself at it. ‘Money? My God, I earned so much money, so much that it seemed unimportant to me and I came to pooh-pooh it ... the last thing in the world one should pooh-pooh.’ Money was not the only thing to receive a pooh-poohing. In 1918, Sturges trained as a pilot. He was just getting the hang of the appropriate Top Gun manoeuvres ‘when a terrible disaster overtook us all: on 11 November 1918, the war ended.’ It’s understandable that he should have been eager to ‘take some shots at some Germans’; and that he subsequently came to regret his bravado. But the autobiography’s recantation still has the ring of a classic non-apology apology. ‘Much time has passed since that war, and my feelings about the end of it are now quite correct.’ Facetiousness flows from the violent optimism bred by entitlement.
 
In January 1927, Sturges’s first wife, Estelle de Wolfe Mudge, an heiress, like Eleanor Hutton though on a less lavish scale, walked out on him. He fled to Chicago, and the care of his adoptive father. This seems to have been a low point. Eventually, however, violent optimism kicked in again, and over the next few years he made a new career for himself, first on Broadway, where the success of Strictly Dishonourable (1929) was followed by a string of failures, and then in Hollywood. In 1933, he sold The Power and the Glory, an original screenplay based on the life of Hutton’s grandfather, C.W. Post, to Jesse Lasky, who had just joined Fox as a producer. Lasky expected a brief treatment; what he got instead was the ‘most perfect script’ he had ever seen. ‘I felt that proceeding sans director and sans teammates,’ Sturges said later, ‘gave me an opportunity to show how I thought it should be done.’ He was soon rubbing shoulders with some of his new teammates on the Fox lot. He couldn’t get over the superb condescension unfailingly displayed by the studio’s star directors. ‘They were all princes of the blood.’ The metaphor is telling. Here, at last, was an elite worth joining.
 
Klawans makes it clear that his approach to Sturges’s major films will ‘veer’ from ‘biographical-psychological’ interpretation. Instead he means to follow Stanley Cavell in demonstrating that these films, like many others produced in the studio era, ‘can be understood to unfold like reasoned arguments about subjects of real concern. That is to say, they can be read’ – literally so, in fact, since we’ve long been able to draw on two hefty volumes of screenplays superbly edited by Brian Henderson. What I have described as idiosyncrasies, Klawans would probably regard as complications intended to reinvigorate well-worn comic formulae. He doesn’t by any means underestimate the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded convention’ that Sturges acquired at a young age through his exposure to ‘boulevardier sophistication and bohemian élan’. But his aim is to identify in the films a counteracting ‘democratic impulse’: a belief that the ‘gaiety of invention’ afforded by language can serve as a vital resource for those who have to ‘get by in a world that on average is absurd and at worst feels like a trap’.
 
There​ is a moral, social and perhaps even political point to the gaiety. The complication Klawans has mined to greatest effect is the sense of foreboding that lies just below the surface even of films as jocular as The Lady Eve, a whip-smart variation on the Genesis myth which merits a chapter in Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family mansion in Connecticut. Sturges, familiar as few other Hollywood directors were with such establishments, loaned the production his own silverware. Klawans is particularly good at identifying the mean streak in Hopsy which complicates another of Sturges’s characteristic happy-ever-after (or is it?) endings. Where such pursuits of bleakness are concerned, however, the place to start is Sullivan’s Travels, still his best-known film, and one which explicitly addresses the plight of those for whom the world feels like a trap.
 
The screenplay for Sullivan’s Travels was the first Sturges had written in the full knowledge that he would also direct, and the film wastes no time in announcing itself as a de luxe production. The camera pulls back from the Paramount logo to reveal that it is in fact the seal on a large package. A woman’s hands enter the frame. She removes the wrapping from the package. Inside is a large, gilt-edged book. Sullivan’s Travels, we read, ‘by Preston Sturges’. The woman’s hand turns the pages of a credits sequence which concludes with a high-flown dedication to ‘the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little’. This pronouncement, too, must surely be ‘by Preston Sturges’. Who else?
 
Enter our hero, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), acclaimed director of hit comedies and musicals, who’s about to tell the studio bosses that he’s done with the motley mountebank malarkey. He wants instead to make a film of a grittily realist social protest novel titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, by Sinclair Beckstein (Sinclair Lewis meets John Steinbeck). When the bosses point out that he has no relevant personal experience on which to base such an adaptation, he declares that he will go on the tramp until he does.
 
It’s an intriguing premise. Hollywood’s standard three-act structure requires that Sullivan’s odyssey should unfold in stages. In Act 1, the bosses, knowing a publicity coup when they see one, equip him with a tramp’s outfit and a back-up ‘land yacht’ crammed with studio personnel. Escaping the clutches of the land yacht, he enjoys an adventure or two before ending up back in Hollywood, where a woman he meets in a diner buys him a cup of coffee. In Act 2, the woman, known simply as The Girl (Veronica Lake), insists on accompanying him – ‘I know fifty times as much about trouble as you ever will’ – on his next, somewhat steeper, descent into the lower depths. In Act 3, Sullivan, concluding that he will never witness enough poverty to be able to make a decent film about it, returns alone to shantytown to distribute compensatory five-dollar bills, and is duly mugged. Assorted further mishaps earn him a spell on a brutal prison farm during which an audience’s response to a Disney cartoon teaches him the value of shared laughter. Engineering his own release from the prison farm in a further gratifying blaze of publicity, he announces to his bosses and The Girl that he no longer has any intention of making the ‘tragedy’ they now expect him to make. Turns out that ‘there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have?’ His final word, over a montage of laughing faces, is a limp ‘Boy!’
 
Klawans readily acknowledges the feebleness of this ending. There surely has to be more to the film than that. But what, exactly, if not social realism? Disobligingly, Sturges doubled down on Sullivan’s underwhelming ‘Boy!’ in the autobiography. ‘After I saw a couple of pictures put out by some of my fellow comedy-directors which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favour of the message, I wrote Sullivan’s Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish; to leave the preaching to the preachers.’ If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
 
The real problem, for a film that champions art over life (or at least Walt Disney over Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck), is that its comic scenes are, as Klawans also acknowledges, so much worse than its ventures into documentary realism. So bad are the three knockabout sequences which chronicle the first stage of Sullivan’s travels, in fact, that he can only describe them as parodies of the comic genres which would have been the stock-in-trade of a successful journeyman director like Sullivan. Unhappy at being trailed by the land yacht, Sullivan hops a ride with a farm boy in a makeshift hot rod. A headlong pursuit ensues, as Sturges cuts frenziedly back and forth between the hot rod and three separate interiors within the wildly bucketing vehicle chasing him. Six separate shots show the Black chef on board (Charles Moore) flung violently from one end of the galley to the other – eggs fly off the tray he totes – and on one occasion through its roof. A seventh finds him on the floor, as though in some other, oddly restful space and time, cradling a bowl of pancake batter which has apparently mixed itself in the interim without any indication of spillage. There he sits, having just removed his head from the bowl, an apparition in whiteface. And there he stands, a few minutes later, after the yacht has come to a halt, as the crew assembles to wave Sullivan off on his henceforth solo adventure. It’s clear from the last and significantly closer shot in which the chef features in this scene that the batter has been reapplied, since it now drips from his nose and chin. Sturges has junked the logic of the pursuit sequence in order to shoehorn in a conceit. Is this parody? Or did his facetiousness get the better of him?
 
In Acts 2 and 3, Sturges goes out of his way to broaden Sullivan’s horizons. Before Sullivan can ‘embrace his identity as a privileged director of comedies’, Klawans remarks, he will have to experience as well as witness extreme deprivation, and learn that he can’t end it. On the prison farm he gets a beating, and is confined to a coffin-like sweatbox for a day. But he’s allowed to accompany the rest of the convicts when they’re taken to a nearby church to join its African American congregation for a showing of a Disney cartoon featuring Pluto the dog. The minister (Jess Lee Brooks) exhorts his congregants to welcome the ‘guests’ who will shortly join them, guests ‘less fortunate than ourselves’. He then leads them in a rendition of ‘Go Down, Moses’ as the convicts shuffle in. During the film show, Sullivan is gradually, reluctantly, caught up in the waves of laughter which surround him on all sides. The function of this rite of passage, which takes place in a liminal space set apart from life as it is customarily lived (by Hollywood’s mostly white audience), is to reassert a common human bond by dissolving social, cultural and racial identity.
 
The result, as Klawans rightly remarks, is ‘a scene of Black church life so dignified and respectful’ as to be ‘almost unassimilable’ within classical American cinema: respectful enough, in fact, to merit an immediate thank-you letter on the film’s release from Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. We need to pause here. The letter isn’t quite the anti-racism kitemark it has sometimes been taken to be. White, who developed a lively interest in Hollywood’s representation of African American culture, was at that point in the middle of a charm offensive (a method he much preferred to protest or boycotts). He was soon to champion The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a Western which also features an eloquent Black pastor, on account of its condemnation of lynching. Sturges may have got lucky. When White left the country to take up a post as a foreign correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the whiteface gag.
 
Still, the scene in the church is strangely compelling – right up until the moment when Sullivan starts to laugh at Pluto along with everyone else, and we realise that the entire elaborate event has been staged so that this charmless halfwit can give himself permission to re-embrace his identity as ‘a privileged director of comedies’. Klawans offers a more generous interpretation. Sullivan, he says, ‘sits in the church not as a victim but as a witness’, at long last ‘one among the multitudes’. Maybe. But the underlying question remains. Why has Sturges had to outsource the hard work of Sullivan’s moral transformation to an initiative taken by an African American preacher?
 
The reason, I think, is that in Act 2 his comic invention fails him. Sturges the writer has supplied Sullivan with a female companion whom Sturges the director allows to go to waste. The screenplay proposes Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) as one of the films that could possibly be shown in the church. Chaplin apparently refused permission. But he left his imprint on the film. The heroine of The Gold Rush, like the heroine of Sullivan’s Travels, is known only as The Girl. Sturges was determined, despite strong opposition from the studio, to cast Veronica Lake in the role. He liked the fact that Lake stood five foot two inches in her socks. The key exhibit is the lengthy interview she gave to Life magazine in May 1943. Sturges, she said, had ‘analysed’ her size, explaining to her that, like Chaplin (5’4”) and Mary Pickford (5’1”), she belonged to a ‘motion-picture race of Little People’ whose members for some reason assume a sort of luminous vivacity in front of the camera. In Act 2, clothed in loose-fitting jacket and baggy trousers (she was in any case pregnant at the time), Lake becomes Charlie the Tramp’s blonde female reincarnation. It could be that Sturges wanted at once to allude to and to channel a filmmaker who – even (or especially) in his depictions of poverty – knew how to make people laugh and move them at the same time. If so, he failed. The Girl, for all her claim to know more about trouble than Sullivan does, is never a figure to be reckoned with. In Act 3, she disappears from the film altogether, to re-emerge at its end as simpering arm candy. Sullivan’s Travels voices intelligent disquiet about Hollywood hustle, without being able to envisage anything better.

 
Sturges,​ at any rate, reverted to a strict adherence to genre. The Palm Beach Story, a screwball comedy, was apparently conceived as an illustration of his theory of ‘the aristocracy of beauty’. A woman leaves the dull and ineffectual husband she is still strongly attracted to because, as Klawans puts it a little drily, she ‘feels that her abilities are greater than the economic value assigned to her by marriage’. ‘You have no idea,’ Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) declares to her husband, Tom (Joel McCrea), ‘what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything.’ The film’s original title, swiftly rejected by the censors, had been ‘Is Marriage Necessary?’ The things Gerry wishes to do without doing anything are to be done in the millionaires’ playground of Palm Beach. Like those precursor aristocrats of beauty, Mary Desti and Isadora Duncan, Gerry will need to find some amenable sponsors if she is to sustain her bid for freedom. Fortunately, the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a lugubrious sausage magnate, is on hand to clear the improvident couple of debt; and the journey from New York to Palm Beach yields a multi-purpose Florida meal ticket in the shape of the unimaginably rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallée).
 
Arriving penniless at Penn Station, Gerry blags her way onto the train by enticing the elderly millionaires of the Ale and Quail Club to adopt her as their ‘mascot’. The Ale and Quailers have hired a whole carriage, with a view to a gigantic piss-up. Sturges is certainly pleased to see them, because they waste no time at all in supplying the film with its quota of broken glass. A pair of boobies take aim with their shotguns at a handful of crackers tossed for them by the Black barman (Charles Moore, once again), and succeed only in blowing out several windows. This is perhaps the blithest of all Sturges’s blithe shatterings. Hell, they own the joint for the duration of the journey and they can do whatever they bloody well like with the furniture. The barman dives for cover as they turn their fire on the rows of bottles behind him.
 
Klawans doesn’t quite know what to make of such concentrations of violent optimism. The tone of his argument falters noticeably as he gets to grips with what happens next. ‘Then again, maybe some viewers, perhaps including Sturges himself, felt the rumpus at this point was still funny but had taken an ugly turn. All I know is that Gerry is soon fleeing in fear from the club’s members, who eventually reconstitute themselves as a drunken posse and pursue her with shotguns and baying dogs.’ He’s exaggerating, I think. For one thing, it would be hard to imagine less priapic pursuers than this sorry bunch (Sturges cut from the script most of the only scene in which any of them even goes so far as to flirt mildly with her). When they do track Gerry down to a Pullman car, it’s their dogs who cause the trouble by barking up the wrong tree: the bunk occupied by John D. Hackensacker III. Rather than frightening her, the Ale and Quailers make her realise how much she misses Tom. Klawans, however, has found something a good deal uglier still in their boorishness. The posse, he suggests, could be understood as a ‘parody of a lynch mob’. Immaculate doe-eyed Claudette Colbert as a species of strange fruit? It might be kinder to Sturges to suppose that he never meant to go there. I’d be inclined to say that he found too much to enjoy in displays of entitlement, however boorish, to call a halt to the mayhem.
 

The Palm Beach Story was released in December 1942. The previous August, American forces had launched their first major offensive action of the war at Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands. The action dragged on until February 1943, with the Marine Corps taking heavy casualties throughout. In May, Sturges began work on the screenplay for what would become Hail the Conquering Hero, which features a detachment of marines on home leave from Guadalcanal. In a waterfront saloon in San Diego, the marines encounter Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), who buys them a drink. Assessed as unfit for military service on account of his chronic hayfever, Woodrow cannot bring himself to return to the small town of Oakridge where his mother still lives. The marines resolve to escort him home; they will equip him with the rack of medals necessary to ensure a hero’s welcome, and fake some rousing eyewitness testimony to feats of derring-do.
 
The frenzy of the welcome creates a perfect storm of complicity: everyone, marines included, wants to believe in Woodrow’s heroism. Except for Woodrow. The drama lies in his mounting embarrassment, regret, rage and terror at the role he has been chosen to play. For this is a film explicitly about entitlement – or the lack of it. It succeeds because Guadalcanal has forced Sturges to think more incisively about the perception of war than he ever did about the perception of poverty. Bugsy, a marine whose behaviour shows clear signs of PTSD, ‘is startling in a film of 1944’, Brian Henderson remarks, ‘and remarkable in a comedy at any time’. Bugsy is played by a boxer called Freddie Steele. Klawans points out that there is a significant gap between Steele’s affectless delivery and the performances of the other actors, who find ways fully to inhabit the words they speak.
 
In this respect, Hail the Conquering Hero bears comparison with William Wyler’s magnificent The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Wyler, a close friend of Sturges, cast a wounded veteran, Harold Russell, in the role of a returning amputee. But this demand for authenticity doesn’t make for an updated version – O Brother Marine, Where Art Thou? – of the book Sullivan had once set out to film. Instead, it produces a new and more complex narrative rhythm. Sturges had never much favoured the kind of establishing long shot which creates context. Here, he moves the camera yet further forward into scenes thronged with characters whose complex interrelationship becomes, as Henderson puts it, the film’s mise-en-scène. The pace is breakneck, even by his standards. But it nonetheless allows for the stasis abruptly induced by the sort of stand-off in which neither side yields an inch, and for digression. We might think that the deftly understated scene in which the town’s blowhard mayor drafts a speech celebrating his imminent re-election has little or nothing to do with Woodrow’s travails; except that he, too, is laying claim to a title he hasn’t earned. In Hail the Conquering Hero, the film Sturges thought had ‘less wrong with it’ than any of his others, no one gets to embrace privilege. It took him a long time to write for film, and longer to direct what he had written; and yet longer still to get over himself. But he did.
 
An Elite Worth Joining. By David Trotter.  London Review Of Books, April 13, 2023

In 1941, when Preston Sturges, the master of the screwball comedy, won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, he stumbled onstage and attempted a joke. Sturges, who won for “The Great McGinty”—a satire about a poor man, in an unnamed American city, who fails upward until he becomes governor—wasn’t fond of institutions and their puffed-up accolades, and his speech, which ridiculed the ceremony, was particularly on brand. “Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning an Oscar,” he said, “that he was unable to come here tonight, and asked me to accept in his stead.” The room went quiet, Sturges recalled, and he slunk back to his table. His gag had bombed.
 
Or had it? In truth, everyone in the room likely knew who Sturges was. By the time he made “The Great McGinty,” he was one of the highest-paid men in Hollywood, pulling in ludicrous sums for a single screenplay. His contract with Paramount insured that he could direct his own scripts, minting him as one of cinema’s first major auteurs. In 1940, he had released two films (“McGinty” and “Christmas in July”), shot another (“The Lady Eve”), and opened the Players Club, a rowdy, two-story restaurant and night club on Sunset Boulevard, where he held court among industry nabobs. If Sturges’s speech was coolly received, it was not, as he suggested, because “nobody knew what I looked like.” The more probable reason is that, in a room packed with vain celebrities, nobody found it even slightly amusing that a person, when offered a moment of glory, might pretend to be someone else.
 
But Sturges was a fan of false fronts. He believed that how someone presented himself—his actions, his appearance, whatever name he chose on a given day—was as revelatory as any “true self” within. He was not a director who sought to probe the depths of humanity. The exquisite irony of being alive, he thought, was that, despite our genuine desires, we still had to walk around in the meat suits of our bodies, trying to get by. There was an essential tension between who we believed we were and the person others saw, and this tension lent life its absurdity, its richness, and its potential for surprise.
 
Take “The Lady Eve,” perhaps Sturges’s most beloved film, in which Henry Fonda plays Charles (Hopsie) Pike, a lanky heir to an ale fortune who dabbles as a snake expert. While travelling on a cruise ship, Hopsie falls for a con woman named Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck). After realizing that Jean has been deceiving him, he sulks off to his Connecticut manor, where he encounters Jean again, though this time she has disguised herself as Lady Eve Sidwich, a louche aristocrat. The zany setup involves several layers of self-deception: There is the idle rich boy who thinks he’s a bona-fide scientist (he is not) and the grifter who thinks she’s pulling off a brilliant ruse by slapping on some diamonds (she is not). Jean believes herself too pragmatic to fall in love, and Hopsie believes himself too clever to fall into a woman’s trap. (They’re both wrong.) Although Jean can’t see herself clearly, she has a hawklike ability to spot the delusions of others. She knows how to pick a vulnerable mark precisely because she shares Sturges’s eye for people putting on an act.
 
An early scene makes this especially vivid. In the ship’s dining room, Jean, who has not yet spoken to Hopsie, spies on him with a mirror from her evening bag. A carrousel of young women are trying to attract the bachelor, who sits alone, reading a tome titled “Are Snakes Necessary?” Stanwyck’s commentary on the spectacle—a spin on a technique that Sturges called “narratage,” in which a character delivers a monologue during a montage or a flashback—is wry and chatty, as though she were a mouthpiece for the audience. (You can draw a straight line from Jean Harrington to “Fleabag.”) As one glossy-haired débutante decides whether to make her approach, Jean digs in: “You see those nice store teeth, all beaming at you? Oh, she recognizes you! She’s up! She’s down! She can’t make up her mind! She’s up again! She recognizes you! She’s coming over to speak to you! The suspense is killing me!” The repetition, paired with a certain ditziness of tone, captures the silly, often disingenuous dance of flirtation, its choreographed guile. Of course, Jean is trying to seduce Hopsie, too; she’s both inside the scene and critiquing it, a heckler trapped onstage. Sturges passes no judgment on this fact. It’s enough, for him, that it’s funny.
 
Few genres are more desperately tied to the tracks of their times than comedy. It’s still enjoyable to see Abbott and Costello joust over a linguistic misunderstanding, but an act such as “Who’s on First?” was much funnier in 1938, when audiences knew that it was mocking the nicknames of popular baseball players. Humor tends to wilt through the decades; what was once a bite becomes a sloppy kiss. Not so with Sturges. In 1990, the Times critic Vincent Canby, writing about a New York showcase of the director’s work, argued that Sturges’s films not only balk at narrative convention but buck expectations so completely that each viewing feels like a radically different experience. “When, at last, a movie fails to change, one may be sure the movie is dead, ready for chilly embalming at the hands of academe,” Canby wrote. “This retrospective demonstrates that anyone who attempts to embalm Sturges does so at risk.”
 
Of course, the embalming had to come eventually. In “Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges” (Columbia), the veteran film critic Stuart Klawans performs the kinds of close, obsessive readings that one rarely encounters outside a graduate seminar. By analyzing Sturges’s every move, Klawans hopes to pin the director down—to “read” his films as if they were “reasoned arguments about subjects of real concern.” In the book’s opening pages, Klawans informs us that he will not be offering “yet another overview of Sturges’s life.” There are plenty of other books for that, including studious biographies by Diane Jacobs and by James Curtis, as well as Sturges’s unfinished memoir, which his fourth and final wife, Sandy Sturges, cobbled together for publication in 1990, thirty-one years after Sturges died.
 
Still, the broad strokes are worth noting. Preston Sturges was born in Chicago in 1898, to a travelling-salesman father and a mother named Mary Dempsey. Dempsey was a creative type, the sort of searcher who, in the Gilded Age, was known as an adventuress. When Sturges was a toddler, Dempsey tried to become a singer in France, but her career fizzled, her marriage ended, and she returned to the U.S. to wed Solomon Sturges, a buttoned-up financier who treated Preston as his own child. Dempsey refused to stop wandering, however. She went back to Europe, changed her name to Mary d’Esti, took an interest in witchcraft, and began palling around with the modern dancer Isadora Duncan. She went by many names and told many fabulous lies. She said that she had been fifteen when Sturges was born, that she had attended medical school, that she was descended from Italian royalty. Sturges later wrote, “My mother was in no sense a liar, nor even intentionally unacquainted with the truth. . . . She was, however, endowed with such a rich and powerful imagination that anything she had said three times, she believed fervently. Often, twice was enough.”
 
D’Esti schlepped Sturges around like a steamer trunk, but she regularly shipped him back to America, where he stayed with his stepfather for months at a time. As a result, Sturges’s childhood was marked by whiplash: between home and Europe, between a rigid capitalist ethic and a sybaritic salon culture. It is not difficult to see how this created a bemused sense of dissociation, along with a healthy skepticism of his parents’ best intentions. His mother wanted him to be sophisticated, but in practice this meant dragging him to the opera and alienating him from his peers. His stepfather wanted him to go into finance—Sturges worked for several New York stockbrokers as a teen—but he didn’t care for the field, and he joined the Army during the First World War.
 
A turning point came in 1927, when Sturges was in his late twenties. He was working for his mother’s perfume business in New York, and d’Esti and Duncan were travelling in Nice. Duncan decided to join a dashing French auto mechanic for a car ride, and she insisted on wearing a red silken scarf that d’Esti had given her. According to Sturges’s memoir, Duncan called out “Mes amis, je vais à la gloire”—“My friends, I am off to glory”—before the car peeled out. Her scarf, flapping in the breeze, became caught in the car’s front wheel, snapping her neck and killing her. The accident devastated Sturges’s mother—she died three years later, still distraught—but subtly imprinted on Sturges as a prime example of how an action meant to be glamorous could, instead, render a scene darkly absurd. That year, he began dating an actress who confessed that she had only pretended to find him charming, and that she was using him to test her ideas for a play. Sturges, as revenge, decided to write one himself. He finished it in just a few months; then he wrote another, “Strictly Dishonorable,” in less than a week. It ran on Broadway for a year.
 
 
By 1932, Sturges was living in Los Angeles and being paid exorbitant fees to write comic screenplays. But, when directors adapted his work, something was getting lost. They would play it too straight, or move too quickly through kooky side plots, though Sturges felt that much of a film’s energy could spring from a bit player with a handful of lines. In 1939, he sold “The Great McGinty” to a Paramount producer for ten dollars, with the stipulation that Sturges oversee the project himself. This marked the birth of the writer-director as a concept, and the start of one of the hottest streaks in film history. Sturges churned out seven pictures for Paramount in four years, including classics such as “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek,” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.”
 
 
Klawans, like many before him, notes the echoes of Sturges’s life in his work: the juxtaposition of bohemians and stern squares, the fluency in both American vernacular and European argot, the linking of slapstick and hypocrisy. But he also wants to make this reading “wobble a bit,” and he peers between every snappy line for cultural references, Biblical allegories, political sympathies, and philosophies about love and suffering. A Sturges film, Klawans believes, is more than just its witty banter: “One of the chief distractions from thinking your way through the films is their most universally admired trait: the dialogue.”
 
This is a compelling idea, but it misses what makes Sturges’s films so fascinating. His rat-a-tat scripts aren’t running cover for some hidden meaning; they are the meaning. His characters make sense because they slip the yoke of explanation. In “The Palm Beach Story” (1942), Sturges’s effervescent comedy of remarriage, Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) is the broke wife of a broke inventor named Tom (Joel McCrea). One day, a stranger touring her New York apartment—a bespectacled ground-meat magnate who calls himself the Wienie King—hands her enough money for rent, a new dress, and a drunken dinner. In most films, this would mark the ending: the couple is spared eviction and lives happily ever after. Sturges, though, is just getting started. The following sequence—in which Gerry wakes up the next morning, decides to leave Tom, and strikes out for Florida in search of a wealthier mate—so thoroughly skirts the usual conventions of plot (internal motivation, cause and effect) that viewers are left grasping. Why would Gerry leave her husband just when their prospects have brightened? Why does she think Florida, of all places, will solve her problems? Yet the result conjures the mysteries of real life, in which, as Tom notes, “the way you are is the way you have to be.”

 
That belief pervades one of Sturges’s final films, “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), starring Rex Harrison as Sir Alfred de Carter, a natty orchestra conductor who believes that his wife (Linda Darnell) is having an affair. While conducting a symphony in three movements, de Carter has three visions of catching his wife in the act, including one in which he uses a voice recorder to entrap her lover before stabbing his wife to death. In a raucous set piece, de Carter, trying to pull off one of the schemes, fails so outrageously that he destroys his apartment. He repeatedly trips over his phone cord, he can’t fit his hands into gloves, he can’t stop sneezing, he breaks a chair attempting to pull the recorder off a shelf. When he finally manages to retrieve the device, he finds the instructions impenetrable. (“So Simple It Operates Itself!” the directions claim.) Klawans aptly describes this scene as “a solid fifteen minutes of slapstick indignity”—it goes on for so long, and Harrison is so pathetic in it, that it becomes almost moving. In de Carter’s erudite, arrogant mind, he is a genius who can get away with murder. In reality, he is clumsy and useless. It is not our private yearnings but our public follies that finally define us.
 
Klawans makes a case for Sturges as a topnotch visual director, a quality obscured, he thinks, by Sturges’s facility on the page. The author spends many chapters poring over two-shots and camera angles, music cues and credit sequences, the “breakneck tempo” that became a “defining trait of his style.” The result honors the full, thrilling scope of Sturges’s craft, though one senses that any magic in the frame flowed from the magic of the scripts. “Directing was easy for me, because I was a writer-director,” Sturges wrote in his memoir. “It was probably harder for a regular director,” who “had to read the script the night before shooting started and do a little homework.” Sturges was being glib, of course; he knew that there was more to directing than memorizing the screenplay. But he did believe that the profession was becoming too precious, and he made an entire film lampooning the self-regard that he saw spreading among his peers.
 
“Sullivan’s Travels,” my favorite Sturges work, follows Joe Sullivan (Joel McCrea), the writer and director of light, hugely popular comedies such as “Hey Hey in the Hayloft” and “Ants in Your Plants of 1939.” Sullivan is famous, beloved, and very wealthy, but he also wants to be serious, and he decides that his next film will be a socially conscious drama about poverty called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (The fake movie was turned into a real one by Joel and Ethan Coen, Sturges superfans.) Sullivan’s butler tells him that this is a terrible idea—the poor don’t want to see films about their troubles, and the rich will buy tickets only out of guilt—but Sullivan pursues the project with brio. As research, he pretends to live as a pauper, and a studio bus follows him as he tramps across the country, carrying a bindle. He eventually lands in a work camp full of downtrodden men, whose only joy is watching Warner Bros. cartoons in a small church. With a shock, he realizes that he was wrong: comedy is cathartic in a way that drama can never be. As Sturges wrote, “I saw a couple of pictures put out by some of my fellow comedy-directors which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message. I wrote ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish; to leave the preaching to the preachers.”
 
If Klawans stumbles, it’s because, for all his trenchant analysis, he veers too often into deep-dish territory. There is a moral impulse to put Sturges in context, to show how the church scenes in “Sullivan’s Travels” relate to the religious fervor of the day, or to reveal how the work-camp scene comments on the Roosevelt Administration. These readings aren’t wrong, but they favor the message over the fun. In fact, upon rewatching Sturges, one realizes that most movies today do the same. Oscars are still awarded largely to solemn, neatly packaged studies of social issues; blockbusters, straining to cater to everyone, forgo invention, idiosyncrasy, and the tang of irony. Even Sturges felt the market contracting for sophisticated, elegant comedies: “Efforts to make all motion picture plays suitable to all ages from the cradle to the grave have so emasculated, Comstocked and bowdlerized this wonderful form of theatre that many adults have been driven away from it entirely.” We live in an age of slickness and hypocrisy, fake news and extreme wealth. Sturges would likely look around and see a lot of fodder for a good script.
 
Not that he lacked material. In 1944, Sturges launched a production studio with the volatile billionaire Howard Hughes. The venture imploded, and Sturges became a sort of beleaguered journeyman, releasing a few poorly received American films and one stinker of a farce in France. The I.R.S. put a lien on his assets—the Players Club hadn’t paid taxes in years—and Sturges sank deep into debt. In 1956, he moved into the Algonquin Hotel after agreeing to stage a play called “The Golden Fleecing,” but he was fired when one of the financiers, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, allegedly tried to helm the production himself. It was the kind of dénouement that Sturges would revel in: a once powerful Hollywood icon, by dint of his own actions, ends up jobless, on the other side of the country, and at the mercy of another director’s hubris. But Sturges didn’t take it too seriously. He scrounged up a book contract and began his final act of self-mythology, a memoir he never got to finish. The working title was “The Events Leading Up to My Death.” You have to laugh. 

 

The Profound Surfaces of Preston Sturges. By Rachel Syme. The New Yorker, April 3, 2023. 

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948―The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them―all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs.
 
In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads―discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight―and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers―and funnier than ever.
 
Crooked but Never Common. John Bleasdale talks with Stuart Klawans. Writers on Film, March 15, 2023.  

This incisive, compelling, and spirited analysis of the screwball maestro’s life and oeuvre illuminates the art of an overlooked genius.

 One advantage to writing a book about Preston Sturges is that you have lots of great quotes to choose from for a title. Stuart Klawans picked one from The Lady Eve (1941) for Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, his incisive, compelling, and spirited analysis of the screwball maestro’s life and oeuvre. He also uses one for every chapter heading (for The Lady Eve, his favorite film by the director, he goes with “I’m Not a Poet, I’m an Ophiologist”). As he acknowledges in the book’s introduction, “The good news when you write about Sturges: your book is full of marvelous lines. The bad news: they’re all his.” The modesty is unwarranted — that line is worthy of his subject.

 But Sturges’s “universally admired” penchant for dialogue, Klawans contends, can be a distraction from his full accomplishment as “the first person in Hollywood’s sound era to direct movies, great ones, from scripts he’d written himself.” Orson Welles comes in second as his debut Citizen Kane (1941) was released in the year following Sturges’s first feature, The Great McGinty (1940). And like Welles, Klawans contends, Sturges’s accomplishment was not limited to words. His vision was fully cinematic; he was, to use a word Sturges disparaged almost to the end, an artist.

 To make his case Klawans analyzes 10 of Sturges’s films, some of which are among the greatest romantic comedies of all time. With thorough but blithely applied research he traces their development and their connections to Sturges’s life, arguing that his subject is not just a master of madcap comedy, but also a filmmaker who confronted profound themes. These include, according to Klawans,

  “Cynicism about social and political arrangements, yearning for and disillusionment with romantic love, defiance of prudery, enthusiasm for self-invention (especially by women who have little other choice), and horror at the thought of living out a perpetual, unvarying cycle.”

 Take The Great McGinty, which is discussed in the chapter “Ya Can’t Get Away from Arithmetic,” the title coming from a line barked out by a corrupt ward healer about payments for repeat voting (residents of The Villages take note). Following the circular structure that would become a mainstay of his style, the film begins in a South American dive where a burly barkeep, Dan McGinty (if that’s his real name), tells the story of his life.

 He starts out as a tramp on a breadline and through the intercession of “The Boss” (Akim Tamiroff), a genially bullying mob kingpin, rises through the corrupt political ranks to become governor. But a bogus marriage of convenience (or inconvenience — the first of many in Sturges’s canon) turns into true love and ill-considered idealism, resulting in his downfall. This cockeyed version of the American dream with a low-rent Gatsby would recur in several of Sturges’s films — sometimes in female form.

 McGinty and The Boss themselves return for the frenetic opening frame tale of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) as the grifting governor and his arm-twisting aide are called in to bend the rules for a worthy cause. Set in a sleepy snake-pit of a small town, the film follows the misadventures of one of Sturges’s many flawed, feisty, and indomitable female protagonists, teenager Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton). As the name suggests, Sturges indulges here in his penchant for outlandish nomenclature. For some viewers, a little of this goes a long way, but as for me, when the tongue-tied Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) applies for a marriage certificate under the assumed name of Private Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki and identifies his place of residence as “Camp Sm-Smum,” I laughed so hard it frightened my cat.

 The reason for this imposture, a crime that snowballs into others including attempted bank robbery, is to protect the honor of Trudy, who had returned from a dance for departing GIs amnesiac, possibly married, and, as it turns out, pregnant. But the titular “miracle” saves them, a Yuletide surprise (James Agee calls it “Bethlemayhem” in his review) and a twist that Sturges could only have intended sardonically. As Klawans observes, “True to its allusions to the Nativity, the film is a redemption narrative, in which a handful of people are freed from the deformations that have been worked into them by living in a tightly packed version of America.”

 Judging from this assessment, could Sturges have been a progressive in the mode of his “funhouse double” (as Klawans calls him) Orson Welles? Was he perhaps even one of Hollywood’s pioneering feminists? As Klawans writes, he “invent[ed] some of the smartest, strongest-willed, most cheerfully dishonest heroines in screen history.” And was he indeed an artist?

 In fact, though, he was at best apolitical and at heart an anti-New Deal, conservative elitist. Furthermore, in his private life he was a notorious womanizer and a wife-beater. And, of course, he recoiled from any suggestion that he was an artist. But in his last Hollywood film. Unfaithfully Yours (1948) he confronted the latter two truths about himself — it is his most autobiographically faithful. [Spoilers forthcoming] In it an orchestra conductor played by Rex Harrison does not beat his wife, whom he suspects of adultery, though he comes close to it.

 Instead he fantasizes about murdering her while conducting the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide. When that proves unsatisfying (though Harrison wields a razor with convincing glee as he slashes her throat) he fantasizes about humiliating her and buying her off with a $100,000 check to the tune of Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture. That doesn’t do the trick so he daydreams about playing Russian roulette (the music he is conducting is Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini) with her suspected paramour, again to no avail.

 After the concert he returns home and decides to enact, for real, the clever Hitchcockian scheme conjured up in the first fantasy. It does not go well and degenerates into repeated pratfalls and encounters with perverse physical objects until, at last, his murderous misogyny self-destructs.

 So did the fortunes of the movie. In a bitter twist, just before it was to come out, an actress with whom Harrison was adulterously involved committed suicide. The studio waited several months to release the film to avoid a scandal, but it flopped anyway. Nonetheless Klawans sees it as one of Sturges’s best (I agree) and compares it to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). “All this,” he writes of the two films, “to lay bare the anxieties and fantasies, the desire for control and rage at lack of control, of an artist behind the camera who needs to confess his feelings about women.”

Book Review: Film Director Preston Sturges — The Reluctant Auteur. By Peter Keough. The Arts Fuse, February 6, 2023.

“While Klawans routinely sings the praises of Sturges, he also expresses an evenhanded awareness of certain shortcomings, making this critical analysis from Columbia University Press a perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation.”
 
Lest there be any doubt about Stuart Klawans’s regard for the subject of his book Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, the longtime critic opens his introduction by boldly stating the esteemed writer/director “changed film history, as the first person in Hollywood’s sound era to direct movies, great ones, from scripts he’d written himself.” But while Klawans routinely sings the praises of Sturges, voicing his pleasantly unabashed admiration for the filmmaker within detailed dissections of ten specific films from 1939 to 1948, he also expresses an evenhanded awareness of certain shortcomings, making this critical analysis from Columbia University Press a perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation of “a dazzling figure who promised to bring the movies into a new era of sophistication.” 
 
Klawans notes, for instance, Sturges’s singularity within the constructs of the classic American film industry, where a team of screenwriters on any given picture was the norm. For Klawans, Sturges broke this mold and it was with the director’s 1940 debut, The Great McGinty, that “a Hollywood studio produced a movie dreamed up from scratch and committed to celluloid by a single person, with the attendant possibility of the artist’s feelings being expressed, disguised, or concealed.” To this end, however, this notion of auteurist individuality and creative articulation, Klawans promises his text will “veer from the ‘biographical-psychological interpretation’ of his films,” citing a term by editor Brian Henderson. Still, although he early on promotes the works of prominent Sturges biographers, pointing the reader to more conventional assessments of Sturges’s life story, Klawans does provide background biographical information throughout his own text, doing so with remarkable judgement, only when necessary to the illuminating breakdown of a given film. And this Klawans manages quite capably, juxtaposing the personal and the professional and the work at hand. The balance not only pertains to Sturges himself, but to the broad and corresponding historical context Klawans also provides, interwoven with a judicious allotment and researching depression-era politics and the maneuverings and intricacies of the studio system.
 
Klawans delves into Sturges’s early failures and does not gloss over the more lackluster building blocks that shaped the director’s personality and later work, nor does he ignore Sturges’s eventual downfall. He explores Sturges’s working process and shifting styles, at one point dividing up his acclaimed comedies into subcategories from slapstick and “small-town comedy” to “romantic adventure on the road,” providing, with each chronological step, a shrewd understanding of external forces at play; for example how World War II affected Sturges personally and primed his subsequent work. “So far in this zigzag through Sturges’s films,” Klawans writes near the end of Crooked, but Never Common, “I have dodged the clutches of psycho-biography.” This is a debatable argument, as Sturges’s psychology and biography have surely informed much of the subject matter to this point, but when arriving at 1947’s The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Klawans states he is “in the grasp” of such an inclination. Of this film, a curiosity in Sturges’s filmography (conceived as something of a comeback vehicle for silent comedian Harold Llyod, Klawans reveals Sturges initially planned to revive the career of D.W. Griffith!), Klawans says he must “yield to the superior critic” Manny Farber by similarly questioning Sturges’s faculty for “coherence,” something Klawans has otherwise promoted so vigorously and compellingly before, emphasizing Sturges’s preparation and meticulous creative technique (allowing for some nevertheless evident spontaneity and perhaps even improvisation).
 
With each film discussed, and ultimately as one cohesive study, Klawans delves into several central themes interconnected throughout Sturges’s work, noting how these essential elements expanded and developed as his career progressed, beginning with the “comedies of success” that did a large part to apprise the public and historical perception of Sturges. Klawans draws plot and character parallels while avoiding the more obvious tendency to recount a film’s entire scenario in one segmented portion of a respective feature’s analysis. He breaks up the summary with a review of such repeated characteristics as Sturges’s structural control (a hallmark of his films and a defining feature of Crooked, but Never Common), guided by earlier provisions and guiding each succeeding chapter. Again, though, alongside the laudatory, Klawans also permits equitable criticism, not letting Sturges completely off the hook for what the author notes are occasionally questionable narrative devices or excuses of contrived complications.
 
All the same, merging plot dissection with formal consideration and the inevitable historical context, alternating back and forth between these and other points of argument, Klawans crafts a fascinating survey that agreeably defies a straightforward directorial appraisal. When he says later in his book, during a typically fluctuating discussion of Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), “I’ve cheated a little by jumping ahead,” this should not be considered an admission of guilt. On the contrary; it is hardly a cheat. This unique approach is one of the more appealing features of the book, a creative and engaging way in which to consider each film.

 
Klawans notes in his introduction, as a parenthetical aside, that the “good news when you write about Sturges” is “your book is full of marvelous lines. The bad news: they’re all his.” And to be sure, Klawans allocates rightful attention to Sturges’s dialogue and his knack for clever repartee (downplaying his own witty way with words). But he also highlights the less often remarked upon visual expression of Sturges’s films, noting with Unfaithfully Yours (1948), for example, how Sturges “takes greater delight in visual storytelling and parody than ever before.” The actors integral to the realization of Sturges’s vision are likewise considered, not only the panoply of stars but the multifaceted stock characters who populate his world and are often advanced beyond the standards of their type. Klawans acknowledges prior interpretations of Sturges’s work, common areas of analogy like the Biblical overtones of The Lady Eve (1941), while questioning preconceived notions and allowing justified readings to stand on their own. But if there is a minor objection to Klawans’s otherwise measured assumptions and assessments, it’s his infrequent doubting of public acuity. Praising Sturges’s “impeccable” management of time with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and commenting on the breakneck pacing of The Palm Beach Story (1942), which unfolds in “the blink of an eye–the standard Preston Sturges unit of time,” Klawans seems to suggest that only the attuned critic or scholar could appreciate such hectic dramatics, dismissing the common viewer’s understanding and awareness and writing, “They will have neither the capacity nor the inclination to look back and assess everything that’s happened so far.”
 
According to Klawans, Sturges dedicated his “best-known film,” 1941’s Sullivans Travels, “to the notion that movies are a form of popular entertainment and should not pretend to be anything else” — this opposed to preachy message movies. At the same time, the “principal deception” of Sullivans Travels “is the pretense of self-revelation,” another key theme of Crooked, but Never Common. In this idea of a film’s true purpose and how it reflects a director’s individual disclosure, Frank Capra is an understandably recurrent figure of comparison and contrast, but he is not the only filmmaker Klawans connects to Sturges. In fact, more than anyone, there are recurring links to Orson Welles, whom Klawans dubs Sturges’s “funhouse double,” setting up a relationship that is certainly appropriate and unexpectedly insightful. Klawans concludes his text by connecting Sturges to contemporary filmmakers, asking is “anyone today able to approximate a Sturges film?” It’s an interesting exercise, canvasing but largely rejecting the Coen brothers, David Mamet, Alexander Payne and others before asserting that, of all people, Charlie Kaufman “comes the closest to Sturges’s inventiveness with language and his daring in narrative construction.” Perhaps, but if one thing is clear by the end of Crooked, but Never Common, it’s that Preston Sturges is surely in a class by himself, a uncommon filmmaker, particularly for his era, who is given his due in Klawans’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable examination.
 
An Ardent Appreciation – Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. FilmInt., January 21, 2023.

 

Crooked, but Never Common : The Films of Preston Sturges. By Stuart Klawans. Columbia University Press, 2023

There is a haunting photograph near the end of the new book “Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director,” by Nick Smedley and the filmmaker’s youngest son, Tom. It’s a picture of the then-3-year-old, grief-stricken and sitting in the backyard of his family’s Los Angeles house with his hands covering his face.
 
“There was a lot of debate about whether to include that picture,” Sturges, now 63, said recently. “You see that picture and you’re like, ‘What is this?’”
 
The photo is explained two pages later; it was taken by his mother, Sandy, after she told him his father had died. “She tried to explain to him that daddy was in heaven now, watching down on his family and with them every day, but never to be seen again,” Smedley writes in the book.
 
“It makes me sad now,” Tom Sturges, a former music executive, said with a wistful tone in his voice.
 
He had not seen his father, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for his 1940 directorial debut, “The Great McGinty,” since he was a year old. The family was living in Paris when his mother took him and his older brother, Preston Jr., back to Los Angeles in 1957.
 
“I remember getting cards,” said Sturges. “My mom filled my head with stories about who he was and what he was like. I pursued the myths. I imagined that he would have been a great dad and loving guy. We would’ve sailed boats and played baseball and all that stuff. As I got to find out who he was, that probably wasn’t going to happen.”
 
Brilliant filmmaker
 
Preston Sturges was a brilliant writer-director. Before “The Great McGinty,” he wrote the scripts for such classics as William Wyler’s “The Good Fairy” in 1935, the 1937 screwball comedy “Easy Living” and the haunting 1940 holiday film “Remember the Night.”
 
But his output at Paramount from 1940-44 was perhaps the most extraordinary in film history. Besides “The Great McGinty,” he wrote and directed such comedic masterpieces — sophisticated, fast-talking satires of American manners — as 1940’s “Christmas in July,” 1941’s “The Lady Eve,” 1942’s “Sullivan’s Travels,” 1942’s “The Palm Beach Story,” 1944’s “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and 1944’s “Hail the Conquering Hero.”
 
After he left Paramount in 1944, Sturges would make only four more films before his death at age 60 in 1959. All were box office failures, though 1948’s “Unfaithfully Yours” has gained in reputation and popularity over the decades.
 
“When he was on top, it must have been the greatest 10 years you could possibly have,” said Tom Sturges. “First of all, the creative freedom he figured out and culminates to me with ‘Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,’ where he’s only finished 50 pages of the script when Paramount says, ‘Go.’ So, he’s writing at night and shooting in the day, always about 40 to 50 pages a day. He’s running a restaurant and an engineering company, building a boat and falling in love every other day, I’m sure.”
 
Sturges is thrilled that people are still talking about his father’s films nearly eight decades after they were made. He notes that those movies were ahead of their time when it came to feminism.
 
“The reason for this is because if you look at the roles he gave to these women — Barbara Stanwyck in ‘The Lady Eve’ and ‘Remember the Night,’ Jean Arthur in ‘Easy Living,’ Claudette Colbert in ‘The Palm Beach Story’ — these are woman who have taken control and made it their own,” Sturges said. “Whether they are making millions or swindling somebody or whatever, they are smart, funny and sexy women.”
 
Sturges is definitely the keeper of his father’s flame. His older brother, who is a writer, “still believes he will eclipse my dad,” he says. “I, on the other hand, have accepted the fact that my dad is uneclipsible.”
 
Preston Sturges was his own worst enemy. He drank heavily. He was married four times and often cheated on his spouses, including Sandy. He spent money like it would last forever.
 
Sturges recalled asking his mom, “‘What was the hardest thing about living with Daddy?’ What do you think the answer was? Jealousy. She said if a waiter made her laugh when they were at the restaurant, he could sink into a black rage that could last for days.”
 
Origins of book
 
 
It was Smedley who reached out to Tom Sturges about doing the book. “I said, ‘I think there’s 15 or 17 books on my dad, it’s covered,’” he noted. However, when his mother died in 2006 at age 79, Sturges found a treasure trove of letters, diaries and even his father’s canceled checks.
 
“I said, ‘If you want to write a book about the last 10 years, I’m all in,’” said Sturges. “He’s the historian. I said to him, ‘What I am going to do is write every memory I have that’s come to me via my mom.’”
 
Preston Sturges was riding high at Paramount in 1944 when he left, after the studio re-edited “The Great Moment,” a dramatic film starring Joel McCrea about a Boston dentist who discovered the use of ether as general anesthesia. The picture was not a hit with critics or audiences.
 
“This is when you start to see the stubbornness,” said Tom Sturges.
 
No one could talk his father out of an option in his contract that stated he could exit the studio within 30 days of the release of a movie. His father “left the sanctity of the womb of Paramount where he had been,” Sturges said. “Nobody could control him.”
 
As Sturges described it, his dad left “this beautiful aquarium, jumps into a shark tank and ends up with Howard Hughes. When they formed their picture company, [it was] 51% Howard Hughes, 49% my dad. Bad decision No. 1, holding on to that clause. Bad decision No. 2, 51/49 with Howard Hughes.”
 
Preston Sturges knew the eccentric millionaire because he frequented the filmmaker’s famed Sunset Boulevard restaurant the Players Club. “Howard would come to the restaurant,” Tom Sturges said. “They were just like two moguls, drinking too much, smoking too much, chasing broads.”
 
Their collaboration, 1947’s “The Sin of Harold Diddlebock,” starring silent comic legend Harold Lloyd, was a bust on release. Hughes took it out of circulation, reshot scenes, re-edited it and released it in 1950 as “Mad Wednesday.” No one was mad for it.
 
Darryl F. Zanuck then hired the filmmaker, giving him a hefty salary. “This is terrible, terrible decision No. 3,” noted Tom Sturges. “Darryl Zanuck said, ‘I want you to make your own movies. But I also want all the other people [at the studio] to be able to talk to you about their films.’ In other words, a mentor. And my dad goes, ‘No, I only want to do movies.’ I wish there was a positive word for it, but I think it’s a sort of arrogance.”
 
Preston Sturges’ career was basically over with the release of the 1949 Betty Grable bomb “The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend,” the writer-director’s only movie shot in color.
 
The Players Club was also losing money. So, instead of selling it, Sturges rebuilt it. “He puts a circular stage on top,” lamented his son. “He’s losing money because the menu is so broad. So, he cut down to one [type] of meal per night. Thursday is chicken. Friday it’s fish.”
 
The club closed in 1953 when the IRS put a lien on it and sold off the contents to pay back taxes.
 
Sturges married Sandy, who was 30 years his junior, in 1951. They welcomed Preston Jr. in 1953 and Tom, who was born in 1956 in Paris, where the family was then living. There were opportunities, but Sturges Sr. seemed to sabotage them, including doing a movie based on George Bernard Shaw’s “The Millionairess,” starring Katharine Hepburn.
 
“Apparently, she smelled alcohol,” said his son. “That turned her off. He had a beautiful thing going and had too much to drink.”
 
He wrote a lot of scripts; deals fell apart. Preston Sturges did manage to write and direct one last film, “The French, They Are a Funny Race,” which was released in the U.S. in 1957 to bad reviews. “It’s not a good movie,” said his son. His father also had a small role as an actor in the lightweight 1958 Bob Hope comedy “Paris Holiday.”
 
He tried his luck with the theater, but he ran into difficulties directing the Broadway play “The Golden Fleecing” in 1959. “The production was already falling apart under Sturges’ insensitive and inept supervision,” Smedley writes. “He had fallen out with his lead even before rehearsals had started. He had alienated the author with sarcastic references, he had argued with his producers.”
 
Sturges and Sandy never saw each other again after she left in 1957, though they never fell out of love — even when he cheated on her — and constantly wrote letters.
 
“Once they were gone, Sturges never had enough money to bring them back, nor to go over himself on visits,” Smedley writes of the filmmaker’s family. “Even when he was in New York, it was still too costly to engineer a family reunion.”
 
Sandy Sturges wrote a letter in 1958 begging her husband to return to Los Angeles. “Come home and have another baby,” noted Tom Sturges. “Let’s have another child. You can name him anything you like.”
 
Preston Sturges was writing his autobiography at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City when he died of a heart attack. Sandy Sturges took his unfinished work and edited it as “Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges.”
 
After completing his book, Tom Sturges noted that the lifelong search for his father was over. “I’m done,” he said. “I called my wife when I was getting ready to come home the other day and said, ‘I have learned everything I could possible learn.”’
 
The son of famed director Preston Sturges searches for the dad he never knew. By Susan King. Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2019.
 

In a revealing new biography, Tom Sturges looks back on the life of his writer-director father despite barely knowing him.
 
“If ever a plot needed a twist, this one does.” That’s one of the most arch, and celebrated lines in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. It’s a great comic story that’s both about storytelling, and about comedy itself – that precious quality of laughter, which “isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan”. Recently, Tom Sturges, the writer-director’s youngest son, discovered that his own father’s life story was in need of a plot twist. The result is a new book, co-authored by Tom, called Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director.
 
Preston is best known now for the dazzling, witty and astute films that he wrote and directed in the early 1940s, including the wonderful Sullivan’s Travels, which satirises Hollywood at the same time as dredging the hardships of the Great Depression, and two ultra-sophisticated screwball comedies, The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. But there was far more to his career, and his relentless inventiveness, than that. After his mother died in 2006, Tom discovered that she had kept all her correspondence with his father, as well as his papers, journals and diaries. The notebooks are fascinating: full of story scenarios, often just a line long, and ideas for inventions wise and wacky, from nicotine tablets to help smokers quit to tiny TV screens attached to spectacles.
 
It led to Tom collaborating on a book with Nick Smedley, a British author. Smedley has written a biography that concentrates, in revelatory detail, on Preston’s latter years, and Tom has included a glimpse of those notebooks, and descriptive “interludes” that explain a little more about his father’s personal life. These are often breathtakingly raw. “There’s no point in hiding anything. It’s not like he pretended to be somebody else,” he says. There’s jealousy and alcoholism in this story, but also an undimmed ambition, and the same chutzpah that had carried him through the early successes of his career.
 
Preston made an explosively successful start in pictures. “He was a playwright in 1929. Movies were barely talking, but he jumped into the new technology. ‘I’m going to Hollywood, this is gonna be great,’” says his son. In Hollywood, his first solo credited screenplay was The Power and the Glory in 1933, a melodrama starring Spencer Tracy that tells the tragic life story of a great industrialist in flashback – which is often cited as an inspiration for Citizen Kane. Preston became one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters in the 1930s, but he wanted to direct as well as write. So he took a script he had written called The Biography of a Bum and presented it to his bosses at Paramount.
 
“He said: ‘Listen, I wrote the script on my own at home. So it’s not yours. But I’ll sell it to you for $1 if you let me direct it.’ And Paramount came back and said: ‘You know what? $1 just doesn’t sound right. How about $10?’” That script became 1940’s The Great McGinty, his directorial debut, about a tramp dragged into a voter fraud racket, casting his ballot 37 times in one day, who ends up being elected the state governor.
 
As a writer-director, Preston embodied what we think of now as an auteur. But the control he sought over his films was sometimes extraordinary. As Tom recalls, he demanded a clause in his contracts that said he could opt out 30 days after the release of his films. “He insisted on this because he didn’t like the way they marketed one of his films. And he wanted to be able to enforce this if they didn’t live up to his standards.”

 
Many of Preston’s films deal with the rise and fall of fortune, as well as great extremes of wealth and poverty. By 1948, he was on a winning streak, the third highest-paid person in America, but he had always had run-ins with both the studios and the censors. In 1949 he released a flop, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, and it looked as if his film career was all but over. “When he was on his ass, and he’s trying to forge a comeback, he sees TV is the future,” Tom says. After another decade spent fighting to get more films, TV shows and plays made, and only occasionally succeeding, he died in 1959, aged 60. Tom, the youngest of his three sons, was only three years old.
 
“I spent my whole life trying to figure out who my dad is, you know, with very few clues,” says Tom. “It’s hard to get parental information from Sullivan’s Travels. But I tried to glean from his work what his thoughts were. Part of this whole adventure is my search for my dad. For me, I got a lot of those answers in this book.”
 
As the book reveals, Preston’s life was anything but conventional, right from his childhood, although it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see the influence of his early years on his career. Preston was only educated up to the eighth grade, and he was raised mostly by his mother, whose great friend was the modernist dancer Isadora Duncan. They met in a pharmacy in Paris, just before the turn of the century, when he was a baby and ill with pneumonia.
 
“Duncan’s right there in the pharmacy and she goes: ‘I know what to do: give him a spoonful of champagne every hour,’” recalls Tom. “And sure enough, within five or six hours, five or six spoonfuls of champagne, he was feeling much, much better.” After that, the two women were inseparable. Painfully, in 1914, his mother left Preston in America to follow Duncan back to Europe. As Tom tells it, Duncan was taking the German girls in her troupe back home and the family were waving her off at the docks, when she called to Preston’s mother and said: “You must come with us.”
 
Tom continues: “My father said: ‘Don’t tell me you’re thinking of getting on. You have no money. You have no luggage. I’m 16 and there’s a war going on.’ She says: ‘You’ll be fine,’ and runs up the gangplank.” He didn’t see her for two years.

 
“If you look at most of the films, the central character is a woman: smart, funny, quick on her feet, able to change things around at the last second,” says Tom. “Look at Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. She’s the locomotive. All the men are jumping on and off, but it’s all about her. The same with The Palm Beach Story … I think all those ladies are his mother.” Years later, in the late 1950s, Preston would make a similar choice, staying behind in Paris when his wife took his children home to the US. The marriage soon ended, and Tom never saw his father again.
 
“There’s a letter from two weeks before my dad died,” says Tom. “My mom is saying: ‘Come back to us, your sons want a little brother, and you can name them anything you like. You can come here, where your name still means something.’” Why didn’t he get on that plane? “Maybe it was his absolute stubbornness, which was very good early in his career. But when you get older, and you need to compromise, it doesn’t work as well.”
 
The book, and Tom’s memories of his father, go a long way to explaining what made Preston’s films so unusual. Between their sophisticated use of language, and their acute sense of tearing apart a world just to build it back up again, they always demand repeat viewings. “To be a great storyteller,” says Tom, “you have to be able to see the great story as it unfolds before you. He took reality as he knew it and tried to turn that into the story that he wanted to tell.
 
“There’s not one joke in a Preston Sturges film,” says Tom. “They were just people speaking their
truth. His belief as I understood it was that the truth is funnier than anything else.”
 
'Truth is funnier than anything': the life of Preston Sturges told by his son. By Pamela Hutchinson. The Guardian, September 18, 2019

It was a sprint worthy of his greatest farces: between 1937 and 1944, Preston Sturges made some of the funniest films Hollywood ever produced, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Then suddenly, as if his frantic, frenzied comedies had exhausted not only himself but his form, Sturges ran out of steam. Blending the comical and serious, farcical and cerebral, high and low, Sturges found catalytic energy in mixing formulas like a madcap scientist; as if he had released actual kinetic energy, he went ricocheting through Hollywood cinema, until he fell to earth with a thud. Happily, the BFI season celebrating Sturges offers audiences the chance to rediscover golden-era Hollywood’s minister of misrule.

 Amid a generation of the finest writers in screen history, including Ben Hecht, George S Kaufman, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Anita Loos, Sturges was distinguished by his willingness to push the story, or the joke, as far as it needed to go, and the fun he had shuffling through genres and registers, like a cardsharp riffling the deck. Taking comic language seriously, Sturges was a master of exposition, using what he called “hooks” in dialogue to give his character, “like a trapeze artist, something to swing from on his way to another point of view”. The pendulum swing between perspectives was Sturges’s specialty, resulting in a volatile density of language, reminding us that “ludic” and “ludicrous” share the same root. His comedy relies less on one-liners than on the cumulative effect of repartee, and the accelerating sense that everything might go entirely off the rails, a mounting unease entangled with his films’ satirical sense of mischief.

 Genre conventions safeguard the viewer, who stays confident the hero will survive, right will prevail, rules will be followed. Sturges offers no such assurances. His films often begin with endings. They also resist endings – or, put another way, gleefully carry on ending, piling up closures. One of his last films, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), opens with a re-edit of the final reel from Harold Lloyd’s 1925 silent film The Freshman before turning into its sequel. Easy Living is surely one of the few films to introduce its heroine by dropping a fur coat on her head; and at the end of the film, the same coat is dropped on a different girl’s head, as Sturges breezily implies he could have told a different story. The Palm Beach Story ends by refusing to explain its opening sequence; the hero simply declares: “Of course, that’s another plot entirely.” Arbitrariness is one of Sturges’s favourite themes, equally shaping his characters, plots and the boundaries of his films.

 Always ahead of his time, Sturges anticipated the games of cinematic postmodernism before modernism had even found its feet, while his satirical targets remain as current as ever: economic and political corruption, the contingency of success, the delusions of meritocracy, the jaundiced sense that the US is a lottery that’s either rigged or random. In Christmas in July (1940), about a working man who mistakenly believes he has won a big-ticket contest, Sturges offers an acidic jibe at false consciousness: “I’m not a failure,” insists a corporate middle manager. “I’m a success … No system could be right where only half of 1% were successes and all the rest were failures.” Preoccupied by questions of inequality, success, power, money, chance and luck, Sturges’s films could not be more timely.

 Summoned to Hollywood in the wake of a hit play, Sturges commanded astronomical fees in an age when most scriptwriters were treated like hacks. Always fighting to control his own scripts, he eventually became Hollywood’s first writer-director. His debut independently written feature was The Power and the Glory (1933), a dark little fable about ambition and betrayal, using narrative voiceover to bind discontinuous chronology and competing perspectives, breaking the rules from the start. Orson Welles said part of his preparation for making Citizen Kane was intently studying The Power and the Glory, a film also likened, not unjustly, to the work of Eugene O’Neill, if O’Neill had ever written anything so concise.

 It was 1937 before Sturges wrote his first full-length comedy, Easy Living, finding his metier in an acerbic satire of the filthy rich. After the fur coat lands on her head, our heroine turns around and, seeing a man in a turban behind her, demands an explanation: “Say, what’s the big idea?” Looking up from his book, he solemnly replies: “Kismet.” With that joke, Sturges announced that his comedies would play with big ideas: Easy Living is indeed about kismet, spinning the wheel of fortune to skewer the Puritan work ethic, sending up the myths that discern morality in the caprices of American society. Easy Living is an archetypal screwball comedy, a genre that flourished in Hollywood from 1934 to 1944 and derived its energy from setting oppositions (male-female, rich‑poor, fast-slow, honest-crooked, innocent-experienced, and many more) into conflict. Embracing speed like a religion, screwball found in Sturges, who loved the exhilaration of movement, its greatest practitioner. He would never make a film without some element of screwball again. His next major feature was the underrated Remember the Night (1940), an eccentric mix of screwball and melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck, whom Sturges liked so much he wrote The Lady Eve for her a year later. Somewhat resembling It’s a Wonderful Life, Remember the Night offers a similar blend of redemptive Christmas-time Americana grounded in a darker story about moral relativism. It was, Sturges said, a film in which “love reformed her and corrupted him, which gave us the finely balanced moral that one man’s meat is another man’s poison”. Unlike most American film-makers, Sturges never confused morality with moralising.

 

Easy Living is about kismet, spinning the wheel of fortune to skewer the Puritan work ethic. After years of lobbying to direct, he agreed to forego his usual hefty fee in order to direct his next film, The Great McGinty. In it, a bum joins forces with a corrupt boss and eventually becomes a state governor. When he tries to go straight for love, his life is ruined; if he had stayed crooked, he would still have been governor. The film, which won Sturges the first Academy Award for an original screenplay, shows why André Bazin called him the “anti-Capra”. Mr Smith Goes to Washington had recently promised that Washington could be redeemed by one honest man. The Great McGinty burlesqued that very idea, declaring the entire political system unconditionally rotten. McGinty was also the first film to establish Sturges’s unofficial stock troupe, a group of character actors with whom he worked repeatedly, giving continuity and texture to his filmic world, while also creating the possibility of traversing it, as the governor and the boss from The Great McGinty reappear later in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The borders of Sturges’s films are always porous.

 Sturges’s annus mirabilis was 1941, the year of both The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels, his two finest films. In The Lady Eve, Sturges enjoyed the most formidable screen pairing of his career with Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, matched with his most sophisticated, layered, hilarious script. Lampooning original sin, The Lady Eve flung a defence of sexual maturity in the teeth of the Hays Code of censorship. Riffing on the Garden of Eden, Sturges reverses the morality of the fall: the puritanical character played by Fonda falls for Stanwyck’s con artist, figuratively and literally. Fonda takes one pratfall after another (Sturges refused stuntmen), until his character finally grows up, accepting the shady past of the woman he loves. Like most plots revolving around masquerade, the story’s resolution entails the symbolic acceptance of a lover’s true self, but love is never an answer in Sturges; at best it is a good question.

 Ten months later, in Sullivan’s Travels, Sturges made his generic versatility the moral of the story. Careering wildly between screwball and melodrama, satire and social protest, even language and silence, the film mocks Hollywood’s sentimentality about suffering. Although its title might seem a throwaway gag about Gulliver’s Travels, Sullivan’s Travels asks Swiftian questions about whether power derives from physical force or moral rectitude, as a giant (in this case a film director) finds himself among the little people, who manage to capture him. By the film’s end, Sturges has linked comedy with freedom, offering a remarkable defence of escapism and a robust celebration of the ameliorative powers of comedy. The film director John L Sullivan begins his adventures by demanding, “What’s the matter with Capra?”; by the end, Sturges has suggested several answers, including Capra’s faith in naïveté. Sturges never assumes the ordinary guy is morally superior; the poor are just as likely to be venal as the rich, who are in turn perfectly capable of virtue. And there are always jokes on the edge of the frame: in one extraordinary shot, Sully and the girl he encounters, who have been drifting as tramps through the grim reality of depression-era America in a 10-minute silent montage, are walking down a moonlit road. Suddenly in the frame behind them is a pair of hanging legs, dangling from one of the trees. Is it a suicide? (Later plot twists might suggest a lynching.) The film keeps moving; the characters don’t notice the body, and neither have most of Sturges’s viewers. The moment has garnered almost no commentary, a moonlit scene with a body dangling from a tree in the background is the purest gallows humour.

 After defending escapism, Sturges threw himself into it with an effervescent comedy, The Palm Beach Story, in which Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea play Tom and Gerry (get it?), a couple who fight, separate and reunite, thanks to a Shakespearean solution set up by the opening credits, an extraordinary sequence that again Sturges refuses to explain. Both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, his last great films, released in 1944, lambast the false pieties of patriotic wartime. Essentially one long elaborate setup for a single punchline (the eponymous miracle, which causes Hitler to demand a recount), Morgan’s Creek is one of the most subversive films produced during the heyday of the Hays Code, satirising attitudes towards unwed motherhood, teen pregnancy, patriotism, the glorification of war, and small-town America. Then came Hail the Conquering Hero, another sweeping broadside at the sacred cows of heroism, civic pride and the nobility of war. Both were huge hits, nominated for Oscars, and then Sturges suffered a series of abrupt reversals of fortune worthy of his own plots. His next film, The Great Moment, edited against his wishes, was his first pratfall. Several failures followed; Sturges made one last notable but problematic film, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), structured around a conductor whose fantasies of murdering his wife are shaped by the musical pieces he is performing. The film effectively ended his career.

 In his unfinished 1959 autobiography (provisionally entitled The Events Leading Up to My Death), Sturges wrote: “I know that my life, even in these disagreeably trying times, is complete … Is it because my hopes and disappointments and renewed hopes and ideas and inventions go all the way, the full swing of the pendulum?” The full swing of the pendulum would always be as close as Sturges came to completion. After remarking that his reflections, along with his dinner, have given him indigestion, Sturges says he’ll “ingest a little Maalox … and hope to God I don’t croak.” Sturges died of a heart attack 20 minutes later. It’s a grimly satisfying joke – the king of acidic comedy felled by antacid – and no one would have appreciated it more than Sturges.

 Preston Sturges: how a master of daftness conquered Hollywood. By Sarah Churchwell. The Guardian, February 12, 2016

Of all the stupid vanities in a business that specializes in stupid vanities, the possessory credit takes the cake. That credit is the one that appears at the top of a film saying, “A film by _______,” the blank then implausibly being filled by the name of a single person, the director.
 
Let’s not get into how many other people—starting with the writer and continuing in essential ways through the cast, cinematographer, editor, and composer—influence the quality of a film. (Try to imagine the original choice of Shirley Temple instead of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz or Mae West rather than Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to understand how dependent a film’s tone is on the contributions of all its elements.)
The possessory credit is silly for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s redundant: we’ll see whom the film is by when we get to the other credits. But if anyone deserves this credit, it would have to be someone who has created a world in which the speech and actions and people, in which the tone and tenor of events, are as obviously the creation of one artist as a passage of Twain’s is obviously a passage of Twain’s and not of Charlotte Brontë’s, as a Renoir is never confused with a Picasso.
 
It is safe to say that no one ever mistook a film by Preston Sturges for a film by anyone else. This is not something you can say of most directors, including many fine ones: George Cukor, William Wyler, John Huston. While one might expect that it was George Cukor who directed Roman Holiday instead of William Wyler, one could never imagine anyone but Sturges behind any of the manic yet buttery pictures that bear his name.
 
Though the events in his films often border on the unreal, ironically his world resembles ours more than most movies do, because the Sturges universe is so ungentrified. The characters in a Sturges film are slickers and hicks, frantic, contemplative, melancholy, literate, sub-intelligent, vain, self-doubting, sentimental, cynical, hushed, and shouting. A hallmark of most artists is the consistency of their world—one thinks of the delicacy in René Clair’s work, the droll, intoxicating understatement of Lubitsch, the painful clamor of Jerry Lewis. But the Sturges world seems the product of a multiple-personality disorder. (Sturges used to dictate his scripts aloud to a secretary as he wrote them, and when he did, he convincingly played all the parts.) I can think of no other artist who keeps the delicate and the explosive so close together.
 
This collision of tones perhaps took its cue from his life. He was born in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. His mother, Mary, divorced Preston’s father when Preston was not quite three and moved with her son to Paris. On her first day there she met the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan. Though Sturges would at times resent his mother’s fast friendship with Duncan, he owed the Duncan family an enormous debt. Almost as soon as they arrived in Paris, Sturges, always susceptible to respiratory trouble, came down with a pneumonia that no doctor could tame. Isadora Duncan’s mother arrived with a bottle of champagne, from which she fed him lifesaving spoonfuls until he was restored. “Champagne and Pneumonia”—it could be the title of a Sturges movie. It also aptly calls up the conflicting elements at work in his films: the effervescent and the feverish.
 
He did not come to Hollywood the way people come to Hollywood today, fresh out of film school, eager to crib shots they like from other movies. According to his biographer Diane Jacobs, he’d been a stage manager, a flier in the air service, a songwriter, and the manager of his mother’s cosmetics concern, where he invented a highly successful kissproof lipstick. (“Kissproof” also sounds like a Sturges title.) He’d written a Broadway hit, Strictly Dishonorable, followed by three flops. By the time he came to Hollywood, in the 30s, he had a good sense of himself and was quickly under contract as a writer at Universal, making a thousand dollars a week. One of his films, The Power and the Glory, had a structure and subject that were reproduced a few years later by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. (If you had to have your ideas lifted, there was no finer pickpocket than Orson Welles.) It may have been his success in business, or his age, or the example of independence set by his mother, but by the end of the 30s he had gotten himself a job directing his own script, becoming one of the first credited writer-directors of the talking age. He did this with either the shrewdness of a businessman or the desperation of a writer: he sold Paramount his script of The Vagrant for $10 with the stipulation that he direct it.
 
The film became The Great McGinty, a more positive title than The Vagrant, until you see the movie and learn the irony of it. It launched Sturges’s remarkable run of seven pictures in four years, the others being: Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. (There was a flop in there, too, something called The Great Moment, about the discovery of anesthesia. It sounds like the kind of serious picture Sullivan wants to make in Sullivan’s Travels.)

These are the touchstones of the Sturges reputation, and if you watch them close together, as I did recently, you may be struck by something I’d never noticed when I saw the pictures in isolation. His films, with all their excesses (possibly because of their excesses), offer a truer idea of American life than the films of any other director of his time. Each of the seven films stands as an insouciant rebuke to the mythic America of John Ford, the inspirational America of Frank Capra, and the cozy America of MGM’s Andy Hardy series. If those movies were a warm hug to their audience, the Sturges pictures were a jab in the ribs, a sexy joke whispered in church—a wink, a kiss, and a hiccup. His pictures of life in this country are a lot like life in this country: messy, noisy, sometimes tough to take, sometimes hard to beat.
 
While he does examine issues that are important to what it means to be an American—giving comic (and other) consideration to questions of ambition, money, heroism, and morality—he examines them with a flashing wit and a poet’s gift for slang that offers American English at its most entertaining.
 
Not only is his dialogue spoken, as Henry Higgins says so nicely in My Fair Lady, with the speed of summer lightning, but, under his direction, the actors weave in and out of each other’s lines with such fluid ease that the spoken word achieves the euphonious quality of the sung. His Girl Friday—Howard Hawks’s film of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page—is often cited as the nonpareil of this sort of rapid overtalking. But the speed of His Girl Friday is dictated by the events of the story, a hyper newspaper comedy. In Sturges’s world, it seems to be merely a reflection of human nature: husbands interrupt their wives, children talk over their parents, secretaries sass their bosses, and every workingperson—cabdriver, bartender, switchboard operator—has an opinion about what’s going on, and they say it. Because the Sturges films are not sentimental about America, free speech is dealt with as it is in real American life: people ignore it, make fun of it, or talk over it, and then get back to trying to make a buck.
 
The dialogue, with its melting pot of malapropisms, slang, and pretension, links the films inextricably with America. While The Philadelphia Story, for example, could just as easily have been set in London and played by Vivien Leigh and David Niven, none of the Sturges Seven could be imagined beyond our borders. Having lived abroad, Sturges may have had a sharper ear for what makes American English unique, but because he was American he didn’t have to sweat to make it work. Unlike émigré writers like Billy Wilder, where the effort to avoid any tinge of the foreign led to a heavy reliance on contemporary American slang, Sturges wasn’t afraid to have his characters sound either comically grandiose—the priceless Raymond Walburn as Mayor Everett D. Noble (that perfectly placed D!) in Hail the Conquering Hero or earlier as Dr. Maxford in Christmas in July—or faux poetic (Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels). There is ample use of slang in his pictures, but it’s only one arrow in his quiver.
 
Though he had been a playwright, his scripts have none of the speechy dust of the theater. He could be epigrammatic: “Nothing is permanent in this world, except Roosevelt,” says Mary Astor in The Palm Beach Story. Later in the movie, her brother, played with endearing delicacy by Rudy Vallee, ruefully states a fact known to all meek men: “One of the tragedies of this life [is] that the men who are most in need of beating up are always enormous.”

 
Sometimes the jokes are not delicate but are funny instead for their bluntness, as when an exasperated William Demarest says to his teenage daughter (wryly played by Diana Lynn) in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, “Listen, zipper-puss! Some day they’re just gonna find your hair-ribbon and an axe someplace.” In Sullivan’s Travels there is this exchange between Sullivan, the movie director, and a studio executive, who is urging him to think of the moviegoer in Pittsburgh as he contemplates his choice of material:
 
sullivan: Aw, what do they know in Pittsburgh …
 
executive: They know what they like.
 
sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh!
 
But more than the language, the most persuasively American quality of his movies is his use of foreigners. His leads were played by stars who would have fit in any number of mainstream Hollywood movies: Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea. But he created a unique stock company of supporting players who proved what is so often said but little shown about America: that we are a country of immigrants. His stories are filled not merely with Hollywood’s idea of ethnic characters—the black cook and the English butler—but with people from every corner of the world, including Jews who do the unheard-of thing and sound like Jews. The range of accents in his films sounds like the dining room at the U.N. Without ever directly preaching the glories of American values, Sturges offers us a screen full of Jews and Germans, English and Irish, Russians and Italians, bantering, flirting, sniping or swiping at each other; this said something about America that beat the message of any war-bond rally.
 
But his America is no shining city on a hill, no chorus of dissonant voices who find harmony when singing as one. It is shown for what we know it to be: a carnival of bull and glory, with a bag full of money or a broken neck waiting just around the corner. Virtue is punished (The Great McGinty) as often as it is rewarded (Hail the Conquering Hero), and a passionate belief in one’s ideas (Christmas in July) doesn’t help as much as blind good luck.

 
Amazingly, he presented this satiric idea of an imperfect America at what may have been the peak of the nation’s patriotism. Other movies of the era made buffoonish Germans, Italians, or Japanese the butt of their jokes. But at a time when the free world was under the gravest assault and America stood apart as a saving hope, Sturges made fun of the major American institutions of the day: the press, politics, and the military. American audiences, no doubt grateful to a filmmaker who knew that laughing at their country didn’t preclude loving it, lapped the films up.
 
Was the popularity of this counter-thinking an astute reading of the national mood or, like many a Sturges plot turn, just a bit of sunny luck? Whatever it was, it didn’t hold. By turns manic and morose himself, Sturges could be contemptuous of people he deemed less gifted than himself—this largely involved the executive ranks, but he could take down actors too. He could be imperious and autocratic on the set. He would, if he had to, reduce his actors to tears until he achieved what he wanted. At one point, he so aggravated Eddie Bracken, who despite his screen image as a nebbish was an accomplished amateur boxer, that Bracken almost attacked him. (Sturges relented.) But the actors, as a rule, admired and forgave him. For all their reputations as temperamental and needy, actors are glad to be pushed if the results show up on the screen.
 
Studio executives, for all their reputations as cold-blooded businessmen, can be infinitely more thin-skinned and vain than their stars. They nurse their grudges and remember every slight. Those were, after all, the years of the Dream Factory, and we know how factory owners treat their workers. And for all his success, to the bosses at Paramount, Sturges was just another man on the assembly line. He chafed under their constant stream of memos and suggestions. There were endless complaints about cost and arguments over casting, and the films were sometimes recut against his wishes.
 
His main adversary was the executive Buddy DeSylva. DeSylva may have felt even more entitled than the normal executive to challenge Sturges’s creative decisions because DeSylva himself was a writer: he had been a highly successful songwriter in the 20s and 30s. Good News, the quintessential 20s show, was his, and he wrote several hit songs like “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” and “Button Up Your Overcoat.” With Johnny Mercer and Glenn Wallichs, he co-founded Capital Records. He questioned Sturges’s every instinct. When Sturges wanted Veronica Lake for Sullivan’s Travels, DeSylva was against it. (Sturges fought him and won; Lake has never been better.) When Sturges wanted Rudy Vallee for The Palm Beach Story, DeSylva said no. (Sturges fought him and won; Vallee gives a performance of imperishable charm.) So when Sturges wanted to cast the nearly unknown Ella Raines in Hail the Conquering Hero, once again DeSylva said no. Given DeSylva’s track record, this almost served as proof of Ella Raines’s talent.

 

Yet, for once it seemed Sturges’s instinct had failed him: the early footage of Raines, by all accounts including her own, was worrying. She was stiff and ill at ease. She later confessed that she just froze. Sturges didn’t lose faith, but DeSylva pounced.
 
This time, however, DeSylva didn’t do the dirty work himself. He sent an executive named Henry Ginsberg, known, according to Diane Jacobs, as Paramount’s “hatchet man,” though, even with the economies of wartime, I can’t believe Paramount limited itself to just one. Either way, on the fourth day of shooting, Mr. Ginsberg told Sturges that Ella Raines was being replaced by a contract player.
 
As usual, Sturges fought, and as usual, he won—Raines remained in the picture. Her performance, if not star-making, has a winning quality of quiet confusion, warmed with a humorous intelligence. But this time being right didn’t make matters right. “Whatever [Sturges] said that day [during their fight] was so traumatic that it in effect ended Preston’s career at Paramount,” Jacobs writes. The executives resented what they saw as his ungracious intransigence, and he resented their undermining lack of faith. It was a Mutual Aggravation Society. So at the height of his success, Sturges left Paramount, in search of a freer and more welcoming home base.
 
He never found it. Whatever combination of alchemy, talent, and luck had existed to make those years so fruitful, the next 16 would be a series of humiliating setbacks. His public fell off and the critics found valleys where once they’d seen only peaks. His confidence was shaken. And a style like his cannot survive self-doubt: the success of the work is tied to his ability to sustain a tone, so much trickier than merely sustaining a plot.
 
And sustaining a tone was difficult for him even at the top of his game. It must be said that even the seven wonders of the Sturges canon have their problems, and the problems can always be traced to an instability of tone. Not one of these movies is a perfect picture, the way The Shop Around the Corner is perfect, or The Wizard of Oz or Zelig or The Godfather is perfect. Each of those films clears its throat and sings its song, and there is never a moment when you tilt your head and wonder, What was that?
 
But there is always that moment in a Sturges movie. It comes when the champagne of his dialogue is flattened by the pneumonia of his slapstick.

Sometimes his slapstick doesn’t work because of poor execution or a lack of convincing motivation (Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake and then the butlers falling into the pool in Sullivan’s Travels). Sometimes the heavy-handed way he frames and shoots these sequences, often at odds with his otherwise flowing and graceful photography, kills the fun. Other times, our laughter dies from a sense that the slapstick isn’t true: there are times when someone falls too fast, as if the film is sped up (Henry Fonda going over the couch in The Lady Eve). His slapstick lacks the loopy inevitability of Lucy’s getting drunk on Vitameatavegamin or the hypnotizingly hilarious boxing match in City Lights.
 
A fact worth repeating: he made seven films in four years. Perhaps the race to get them done explains the sometimes jarring tonal shifts. One wonders, had he spent a little more time on each film, if they might have achieved a more balanced and integrated tone. And yet, who knows if it wasn’t the speed with which the films were made that infused them with their appealing pep and lack of pretension? God knows, I’d rather see The Lady Eve twice than Vincente Minnelli’s labored The Pirate once. Sturges had much more time to write and prepare Unfaithfully Yours, a later comedy, and it has all the usual merits and flaws.
 
Sturges was an American original, which is a dangerous thing to be. While America itself is an original idea, and while America claims always to value the individual over the state, what America likes best is something that can be reproduced the maximum number of times as cheaply as possible with the least amount of interference from its creator. It is a commercial culture above all else, and nothing threatens it more than an individual who is irreplaceable.
 
And so he was replaced. In less than a decade, he went from being the third-highest-paid person in the United States to a state of near bankruptcy. Betty Hutton, from whom he got the performance of her career in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and who became a star because of it, wouldn’t appear in his new film unless her husband, a choreographer, directed it. (Paramount refused and the film died.) He looked for creative and financial independence and found what many find when they look for those things: a very deep, dark hole.
 
But he did not give up. He worked on plays and television ideas and new filmscripts. He married for the fourth time and had two more boys to go with his son from another marriage. It looked like his luck was going to change. But in a jarring breach of tone that matched the ones from his films, just as things seemed to be turning around, he had a heart attack in his room at the Algonquin Hotel. Doctors tried to revive him with a shot of adrenaline, but they could not.
 
After all the original and amusing entertainment he gave us, one wishes a better ending for him, a Sturges ending, where the implausible becomes fact. If that had happened, the doctor who came would not have had a syringe and adrenaline but a silver spoon and a bottle of champagne. And all through the nursing of the patient he would have said droll and snappy things—in English but with an accent from somewhere else.
 
The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges. By Donald McGrath. Vanity Fair, April 1 2010. 

 More here : Sturges, Preston. By Jonas Varsted Kirkegaard. Great Directors, Senses of Cinema,   July 2004