Social Commentary of Preston Sturges' Comedies

Preston Sturges was known as a director of comedies, but he was very serious about the social commentary he included in these films. He directed the majority of his films in the 1940s, and at that time he had to work under the strictures of the Motion Picture Code which determined what could and could not be included as subject matter for films and how certain subjects could and could not be treated. Sturges showed the ability to skirt the edges of this code in his comedies, and indeed it can be argued that the creativity he showed in on the one hand following the Code sufficiently to get his films passed while at the same time challenging many of its basic assumptions in the subject matter and details of his films made his films more interesting, more creative, and more lasting than if he had been given free rein. Of course, this cannot be demonstrated for sure because we do not know what he would have done if he had had free rein, but we can see how he skirted the strictures of the Code and produced comedies with strong social content as a result.

The Motion Picture Production Code was first developed in 1930 in response to audience concerns about sex and violence in the movies, the two complaints that continue in some form to this day. Originally, the code was part of the Hays Office, which passed on films in a rather haphazard manner, though the Code was enforced more rigorously after 1934. In that year, Joseph Breen

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. . not to preach. The real challenge of the film comes in its structure, for this is a satirical retelling of the nativity with a young woman who goes to a party, drinks too much, gets hit on the head, and finds herself pregnant by a man she married but whose name she cannot remember. She only seems to remember that someone said at the justice of the peace's house, "Don't give your right name," and the only name she remembers is private Ratzywatzky. The absent "husband" never appears in the film, and instead the plot works out as if she were an unwed mother in need of a father for her child--she actually ends by having sextuplets--and finds one in the young man who has long been her friend and admirer. The conduct that gets her into this fix is not admirable on her part or that of the missing father, yet the film seems if not to advocate it, at least does not completely condemn it. Even the governor calls his congratulations, a somewhat ambiguous approval given that the governor is the same McGinty from Sturges's earlier The Great McGinty, a political leader last seen disappearing into the safety of Mexico. One of Sturges's last films in the 1940s is one of his most challenging in the way it winds and twists through what

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