Christmas in July was the first Preston Sturges film I ever saw. By that time I had seen many of the other canonical comedies of the time and had read a lot about Sturges. But the film flummoxed me. What on earth? I laughed a lot but couldn’t get a handle on what I was supposed to think. What the hell was going on!? Even after I saw the other great Sturges comedies, Christmas in July seemed unusually odd. It took a lot viewings before the penny finally dropped.
The film was very successful with audiences. It provided Sturges with enough cred at Paramount to fund his next film, the incomparable Lady Eve. But at less than 70 minutes of runtime, it’s just a morsel — but what a morsel! Unlike the films on the Sturges Mt. Rushmore, The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story and Sullivan’s Travels, it ignores the almost obligatory conventions of Hollywood social comedies. Those films all have central attractive protagonists who don’t command events, but they do command attention and desire. They make things happen even if they don’t happen as intended and they’re rarely offscreen. They are dynamic centers. They’re as big as any of Capra’s stars — and, in fact, Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert were Capra stars. But after seeing Sturges’s films enough times it seems to me that those great canonical films are actually anomalies in Sturges’s comic universe. Christmas in July makes more sense if we leap over them to the wartime comedies, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. Those are the films that display Sturges’s genius in its purest form.
Christmas in July has one of zaniest premises of any Hollywood comedy. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), a modest clerk from the Lower East Side, has a vocation: he works to make it big and realize the American dream not by being an inventor, an entrepreneur, or an adventurer, but by winning a big contest prize. Although he has never succeeded, his paralogical optimism never falters. His current plan is to win the $25,000 prize for suggesting a new advertising slogan for the Maxford Coffee Company. His foolproof idea is: “if you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.” This stupefying phrase is the story’s fixed center of gravity. No one understands it, except Jimmy — and one other character, revealed only in the last minutes. Even if one does understand it, it’s howlingly ridiculous, based as it is on Jimmy’s denial of the most obvious, most universally accepted and most desired quality of the product. What are the chances of an ad slogan that denies the virtues of the product and has to be explained to everyone, like the punchline of a bad joke?
The manner of that joke will turn out to be the manner of the whole comedy. Jimmy thinks it’s smart and witty because it’s a play on words. But neither meaning of the pun makes any sense. “Bunk” could be an uncomfortable bed (which a lot of American men were experiencing in the military — it’s 1940), or the supposedly bunkum notion that coffee keeps one awake. Well, it doesn’t really matter either way, since coffee does keep you awake. So, Sturges has set up our hero in an impossible situation. This poor schlub is doomed, right?
This situation should be a non-starter, but the Sturges genius will have none of that. On the night when the contest winner is to be announced on the Maxford Coffee Hour radio show, with “the whole world” waiting, it turns out that the jury assigned by the company to pick the winner is deadlocked. At showtime. (Such radio contests were popular in reality, and the comedies spoofed them relentlessly — some of my favorites are The Huxley Mint Julep Hour [Every Night at Eight], The Chatsworth Linoleum Hour [Two Girls on Broadway], and the superb Flagenheim Cheese Hour [Twenty Million Sweethearts]). Stunned by the turn of events, the company’s owner and CEO, Dr. Maxford (Raymond Walburn), storms into the jury’s deliberation room, to learn that the decision is being stymied by a single holdout, head of the shipping department Mr. Bildocker (William Demarest). From this early point onward, all the comic energy will come from the supposedly peripheral characters. I mean, all of it. Jimmy and his faithful fiancee Betty (Ellen Drew), who believes in Jimmy even though she doesn’t believe in his slogan-making prowess or his luck, and has zany domestic American dreams of her own, are basically “technical leads” like the juveniles of romantic comedies from Roman comedy to Gold Diggers of 1933.
I think the choice of Powell to play Jimmy was odd. Powell had recently moved from Warner Bros. to Paramount and was anxious to break from his otherwise successful pigeon-holing as a cheerful, crooning Howdy Doody. He fills the niche that Sturges would later fully develop for Eddie Bracken — an eccentric little guy of no importance who’s swept up by events he has absolutely no control over. But while Bracken’s little guy is perfectly cast — full of tics and involuntary secrets, and he’s actually physically little — Powell often comes off as hardened by experience and skepticism, foreshadowing the noir actor yet to come. Unlike Henry Fonda in Lady Eve or Joel McCrea in Palm Beach Story, who also play hapless and occasionally sullen men, Powell has no screwball master-dame to offset him. The studio no doubt needed at least one established star. Because of this mismatch, it’s a relief that he becomes something of a background figure behind Sturges’s stable-stars Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest, Torben Meyer, Frank Moran, and especially Raymond Walburn. (Dr. Maxford may be Walburn’s best role — better even than Mayor Everett J. Noble in Hail the Conquering Hero. Though that’s pretty close.)
The situation at hand: two complementary absurd stalemates. The “low” predicament of a hero who has pinned his hopes on a horse that not only has no chance of winning, but seems to be running the race backwards; the “high” predicament of a corporate contest whose prize can’t be awarded because it’s being decided by a jury with a juryman who takes the independence of juries — all juries — seriously. Dr. Maxford, as it happens, doesn’t care about the contest, just the company’s reputation and his own. Bildocker cares mainly about the jury’s integrity. Jimmy, who does care about the prize, believes mainly in his own obviously inept talent. Other than Dr. Maxford, the actual sponsor of the prize, nobody seems to think about the craziness of putting so much energy and hope into a radio contest.
Just when we think we’ve reached maximum stalemate, Sturges flips the script. Jimmy’s martinet supervisor, Mr. Waterbury (Harry Hayden), has been observing that Jimmy is not keeping his eye on the job. He calls him to his office and gives him what begins as a solid management-Protestant ethic lecture. But as soon as Jimmy explains that he hasn’t been doing his work because he can’t stop daydreaming about the prize, Mr. Waterbury delivers a surprise. He’s completely sympathetic. Instead of arguing that dreaming about winning a prize instead of doing hard work is a sure sign of failure, he argues the opposite. It shows initiative. It shows hopefulness. And if he fails to win the prize, that doesn’t mean he’s a failure — using his own example to back it up. Even though he’s a lowly middle-manager, he doesn’t consider himself a failure, if only because he once had outsized dreams of being lucky.
What on earth are we supposed to make of this? Some commentators feel this is a moment of deadpan, near cynical satire. But at whose expense? Does the audience really want to accept Jimmy continuing his life as a clerk in a Brazil-like white-collar sweatshop?
While all this is going on, three of Jimmy’s fellow workers decide to play a prank on the silly dreamer. They concoct a convincing fake telegram informing him that he has won the contest. Jimmy blasts into manic ecstasy. It’s infectious. It’s Powell’s best scene. The pranksters are burdened by guilt, but can’t find the occasion to let Jimmy know the truth. Jimmy’s joy — and the fake telegram — convince his employer, Mr. Baxter (Ernest Truex), that Jimmy truly is a success. In every way. As a reward for, and a company investment in, his successful talents he’s to get a promotion, an office of his own, and a job providing ad slogans for his own coffee company (which is clearly a competitor of Maxford’s). Since Jimmy appears to be a success, he is a success. It’s like being famous for being famous.
Jimmy follows the telegram’s instructions to pick his check up at Dr. Maxford’s office. In a normal world that the pranksters were relying on, this would be the moment when the truth is revealed and Jimmy is thrown out as a fraudster. But that’s not how it works in Preston World. Reading the telegram, Maxford, flummoxed and frustrated, believes that the contest’s decision has been made without his being informed of it. It’s a plausible conjecture, considering the events leading up to it. To all appearances, Bildocker has taken over. Maxford hands the check for 25k (worth almost 500k in today’s money) to the grateful Jimmy, who now feels fully justified in his talent.
Maxford soon discovers that the jury is still deliberating, Bildocker is still holding out, and he has delivered 25k to a non-winner. So, just to be clear: within the company walls the contest is not over, the jury is still in session, but in the outside world everything is operating as if the opposite is true.
Meanwhile, Jimmy and Betty have gone shopping, buying presents at Shindel’s Department Store for all their friends and relations, entirely on the credit Mr. Shindel (Alexander Carr) extends to Jimmy on the strength of Jimmy’s as yet uncashed check. One of the many funny inside jokes in the film is the demonstration of “The Davenport,” a sofa that can be transformed into a bed, which Jimmy has promised his beloved Ma. The joke is that in the real world Sturges — an avid and witty inventor — himself helped design just such a mechanical sofa.
Jimmy and Betty meanwhile arrive in their pseudo-Hester Street neighborhood as conquering heroes, distributing gifts, sharing their wealth, producing the titular Christmas in July. It’s a scene full of Capra-like sincerity, until, that is, Mr. Shindel, apprised that Jimmy’s check is “rubber,” arrives demanding the return of all the goods he sold Jimmy on credit. This may be Sturges’s greatest cartoon crowd scene. Not only are the street and scene crowded, so is the comedy, as the zigzags and surprises come thick and fast. Shindel demands that Jimmy be arrested — in fact, the whole neighborhood should be arrested. The beat cop (Frank Moran), who’s known Jimmy all his life, compares the very Jewish Shindel to Hitler and refuses to arrest anyone. Then arrives Maxford himself, calling Jimmy a fraud and he, too, demanding he be arrested. At which point Shindel joins the cop (who calls Maxford in his turn a Mussolini) against Maxford.
But there’s no getting around the fact that Maxford is objectively right — Jimmy has won nothing and his money’s no good. Heartbroken and guilt-ridden, Jimmy returns to his new office to tell Mr. Baxter the truth. Mr. Baxter responds with a claim that’s precisely the opposite of the one Mr. Waterbury delivered to Jimmy at the beginning. Jimmy is indeed a failure because now everybody believes he’s one. Talent doesn’t count. What counts is what people believe. Vox populi. However, we’ve just witnessed Jimmy as a Capraesque success in his lower class neighborhood. Betty appears to make a compelling American case that the only thing that really matters is not achieving success, but having the chance to achieve it. Baxter appears to accept this, grudgingly. He relents and decides not to fire Jimmy, if only because his name has already been painted on the office door. So, does that mean that the only thing that matters is to give Chance a chance?
The Stoical bourgeois moral uplift is short-lived. Bildocker arrives triumphantly in Dr. Maxford’s office to inform him that a winner has finally been decided. Bildocker browbeat his exhausted fellow-jurors into agreeing with his choice. Which is, surprisingly or precisely not surprisingly, Jimmy’s very absurd slogan.
Let’s unpack all this, if we can. Following Betty’s moral logic, all Jimmy needed was a chance “to win,” he got it, and he “won.” But wait! he didn’t win because of his talent; the slogan is still ridiculous, even if it’s the winner. The story then actually supports Mr. Baxter rather than Jimmy: the slogan isn’t bad because it doesn’t make sense, it’s good because it won. And the “reason” it won is because Bildocker stubbornly refused to accept the plausible one that his fellow jurors all agreed about, and basically forced his solitary choice through — a choice that he never actually explains. Why would he? That would be explaining a punchline. For all we know, maybe he didn’t even get it. And the audience that has been tossed around in the comic vortex isn’t sure about any of it.
The great French film theorist Andre Bazin famously called Sturges a moralist. Bazin argued that Sturges consistently satirized American ideological values, revealing them to be myths sustained by popular will alone. The illustrious film critic Manny Farber did not agree that Sturges intended to be a satirist. Satirists take implicit value positions from which they criticize other, usually explicit ones. Farber contended that Sturges was a humorist, a comedian. Comedians do not privilege or protect certain values over others; they throw all values into the comic mix. Everything that appears solid is made fluid, everything clear is confused, everything orderly is mixed up. That’s how the Comic Spirit works. Nothing is sacred for comedy. Sturges threw everything his ingenious mind took note of and subjected it to comic ridicule and chaos, and in every manner — satire, slapstick, dry wit, paralogic, dirty innuendo, verbal misunderstanding, topsy-turvydom — and in any combination.
I’d put it this way. Sturges’s films in general, and Christmas in July in particular, are more comic than American drama and cinema are accustomed to. The values that Hollywood employed to control comedy’s will-to-chaos — romantic love, honesty, family loyalty, work ethic, sundry upstanding bourgeois behaviors — are often elements in Sturges’s stories, but they don’t determine the happy endings. Bazin believed that Sturges’s audiences were in on the jokes, while the characters were not. I have doubts about that. Few audiences can keep up with the pace of the comic turns, the torrent of tropes and ironic twists. I can recall vividly how puzzled I was about Jimmy’s slogan — not only about what it might actually mean, but how could a whole movie be based on such a bizarre premise? I could say the same thing about the beginning and ending of Palm Beach Story. Or the stunning ironies of The Lady Eve, ranging from the out-front premise (two women too alike to be the same dame) to the subtle scandalousness of the ending. Those are just a few examples. Christmas in July makes sense, I think, not as a romantic comedy, or screwball, or an Aristophanic crazy-plan-that-inexplicably-works, and certainly not a disciplinary moral comedy. As its title subtly tells us, it’s a comedy of a world constantly turning upside down. And for no other reason than that the Comic Spirit acts as Chance. Its world isn’t a temporary enchanted zone like in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chance — Fortuna — rules. The Romans might have understood it. Chance gifts Jimmy with his success; Chance takes it away; and gives it back again. Betty’s inspiring speech doesn’t really provide much uplift. If folks need only a chance to give Chance a chance, it will be Chance that provides the first chance. And the one before the first chance. On and on, ad absurdum.
In one the film’s most famous moments, a black cat rubs against Jimmy as he and Betty leave the darkened office space, melancholy and unaware that he has actually won the contest. Betty asks the night janitor, Sam (Fred Toones), whether a black cat signifies good luck or bad. Sam responds: “That all depends on what happens afterwards.” The film ends not with a celebration, a feast, or a wedding — we’ve had the celebration already, before it was “earned.” Maybe the true happy ending will happen offscreen, off-story. Or, as The Palm Beach Story might have it: “Or will it?” The closing moment isn’t of bonheur, but the image of the little black cat staring straight at the audience.
It all depends on what happens afterward.
