From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Funny Money
Preston Sturges's romantic comedies don't shy away from the subject of finances.
Among contemporary romantic comedies, "When Harry Met Sally" is hard to top. It's warm without stomping on the heartstrings, and the banter is unusually insightful. But does anyone remember what these characters do for a living? (Harry is a political consultant; Sally, a reporter.) With all their whimsical talk about days-of-the-week underpants and high maintenance mates, their working lives are dismissed in a couple of throwaway lines. And nobody ever worries about money. Do these characters resemble anyone you know? Don't your friends talk about frustrating jobs, wayward investments and the cost of real estate? Don't these things affect the relations between men and women? Money is supposedly the No. 1 thing that couples fight about, but you'd never know it from these movies.
Romantic comedies weren't always so walled off from reality. In the 1940s there was a capitalist comic, a filmmaker fascinated by how dollars could be turned into laughs instead of the reverse. He was Preston Sturges, and a new seven-disc boxed set of his films, four of which are being released on DVD for the first time, provides an excellent tutorial in how money can complicate the romantic comedy formula. What if boy meets girl but loses fortune? What if girl disapproves of the way boy made his dough? What if girl gets tired of paying rent for boy?
Today's romantic comedies seem to fall into two groups. Movies like those of Nora Ephron (she co-wrote "When Harry Met Sally" and wrote and directed "Sleepless in Seattle") target the Pottery Barn bourgeoisie that is as interested in the movie's decor as its stars. Similarly, the 2003 film "Something's Gotta Give," written and directed by the Ephron clone Nancy Meyers, featured a weak script but a beautiful kitchen. In these movies, affluence merely reinforces the cozy feeling for the audience.
The other standard-issue romantic comedy, the Cinderella movie, panders to working-class women who dream of being swooped up by wealthy men who will carry them up the class ladder. "Maid in Manhattan" (2002) is one of the cheesier examples of the form. "Pretty Woman" (1990) is the classic. The female leads in these films have endearing tics but never any moral complexity or actual failings. Money, in this case, is simple fantasy. It might as well be Oz.
Contrast "Pretty Woman" with "The Great McGinty" (1940), which earned Sturges the first Oscar ever awarded for Best Original Screenplay. In "McGinty," a streetwise bum gets rich when he stumbles into a gleefully corrupt career as a politician. To create a stable image for the voters, though, McGinty cooks up a sham marriage. His problem comes when he falls in love with his own wife, who disapproves of his corruption. So will it be love or money? McGinty winds up with neither.
"Pretty Woman" follows a similar conflict to a much less interesting conclusion. The hooker played by Julia Roberts is presented as ethically chaste. She takes a strong stance against drugs, for instance, and she is repeatedly presented as a victim--of mean judgmental people who keep treating her like a prostitute. Richard Gere, meanwhile, plays the heartless corporate takeover artist whose buyouts lead to layoffs. Their mutual affinity for putting business ahead of emotion draws them together, but much like McGinty, the Gere character reverses course and gives up his corporate sharking for her. By the end of the film, though, boy and girl wind up with everything: wealth, love and moral rectitude, and the audience is sent out on a wave of smugness.
Sturges's characters scramble to find a fortune and a partner at the same time. Either the man or the woman can be rich or poor; either of them can be a schemer with impure motives. In the funniest Sturges movie, "The Lady Eve" (1941), a brewery heir (Henry Fonda) who is suspicious of gold diggers is targeted by a fast-talking cardsharp (Barbara Stanwyck) whose ideal mate is "a little short guy with lots of money." They build to a love affair--"When Wary Met Salty"?--but he sends her packing when he discovers her history of cons. She lusts for revenge. "I need him like the ax needs the turkey," she says.
You will search "Monster in Law" (2005) in vain for a line that caustic from the dull innocent played by Jennifer Lopez, a peppy dog walker and receptionist who wants to be a fashion designer. There is no hint that she is after anything but love from her intended, a doctor who is so blandly wealthy and handsome that he seems to have stepped in from "General Hospital."
In Sturges's "Christmas in July" (1940), a young clerk tells his girl he is too poor to marry her. "Two can live as cheaply as one," she says. He fires back, "Everything that means happiness costs money." Maybe smiles and sunsets are free, but just about everything else costs something. Similarly, in "The Palm Beach Story" (1942), a Park Avenue couple pull apart because the woman is tired of her husband's struggles as an inventor. "I'm very tired of being broke, darling," she says, heading out for a quickie divorce. "Men don't get smarter as they grow older" is her assessment of him. On the train to Palm Beach, she meets one of the world's richest men, and he is so gently likable that it isn't clear which of the two she should choose.
A similar mission is undertaken by the Reese Witherspoon character in "Sweet Home Alabama" (2002), about a trashy Alabama girl who has reinvented herself as a New York designer who dates a dull Kennedy-esque young political scion. She is trying to finalize her divorce from the estranged redneck husband (Josh Lucas) she left back home. As in "The Palm Beach Story," Ms. Witherspoon's character is choosing between a plutocrat and a (seeming) pauper, and in both cases the poorer man's fortunes will be looking up considerably by the end. But in "Alabama" there is no implication that money is a motive for her; the movie simply fills up the cracker barrel with hick jokes as she picks her way through the mud and the honkytonks. Mr. Lucas's character is undesirable merely for style reasons, not financial ones.
Were '40s filmgoers more sophisticated? Not necessarily--even in Sturges's time, audiences typically liked their comedy to wear black tie (Fred Astaire, Cary Grant). Then, as now, light badinage ruled, and no one went to the movies to be reminded of financial troubles a few years after the Great Depression. Sturges's acid-washed pen made him a misfit at Paramount, where he lasted only four years as a writer-director (though he managed to make eight films). Sturges simply wasn't interested in making films that could be definitively marketed to the four "quadrants" sacred to the studios: (male/female, young/old). He was an original whose sense of humor was so dark that when he died, he was writing an autobiography titled, "The Events Leading Up to My Death." His idea of romance had the steely edge of the practical to it, something that today's movies--with all their insipid dialogue and tired formulas--could use a lot more of.
Mr. Smith is a film critic for the New York Post.
