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.”
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