Preston Sturges #2: "Christmas in July" (1940)

Beginning with a crackling opening scene between a young couple on a rooftop, it’s clear that “Christmas in July” is a Preston Sturges film. In fact, the way the two casually yet forcefully gnaw at each other’s every word (with the young man’s intellectual bullying taking center stage), you’d think this was “The Social Network”.

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He is Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), a white-collar clerk suffering in the confines of his low-end job and she is Betty Casey (Ellen Drew), the girl just trying to keep up. After entering the Maxford Coffee slogan content, which pays $25,000 to the winner, Jimmy’s puzzling pun of an entry has him convinced he’s winning it.

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When an unintentionally elaborate prank gives him the grand prize money, Jimmy finds his ideas, once fallen on deaf ears, now brilliant pieces of copy. After just a few hours, he’s even given an office with his name on the door.

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Sturges is so comfortable with this kind of rapidly paced, big business satire (the executives of the various fictional coffee corporations are particularly dim-witted), but the real ingenuity comes with the director’s finely-tuned monologues on class structure, which bravely skirt the edge between cynicism and optimism in the climate of Depression era America.

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And that’s the difference between a Frank Capra film and Preston Sturges one. The former made some fine socially relevant entertainments – “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take it With You,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” – but Capra’s view of big city corruption meets small town all-American spirit is naively idealistic. Sturges’ films, on the other hand, are far more wily and manic and suggestive in their skepticism.

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In “Christmas in July,” perhaps the ultimate Sturges film in terms of a retrospective culmination of everything that makes up the director’s filmography, he crafts a funny, droll yet contemplative farce about lower-class values and opportunity and he does so at a brisk 67 minutes, which includes his trademark touch of irony to close the show. [B+]