February 18, 1999

Announcements:

Lecture Notes:

I.  Undercutting the Thesis Comedy:  Preston Sturges

• His work was the exact opposite of Frank Capra's, who directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Capra's movies always had a happy-small-town-hero-wins-out kind of ending
• He had a very naive approach
• Sturges had a very cynical attitude about racial, class, and ethnic differences
• He satirized all of the things that Capra held dear:  he turned the goodness of the common man upside down
• Happy ending but in a different way
• People are made famous by a role of chance and being in the right situation at the right time, not by fundamental goodness

• Movie about a comedy director who decides to make a soul-searching exploration in his movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou
• He realizes people aren't interested in that type of movie, so he goes back to making comedies
• The character Sullivan was a stand-in for Frank Capra
• Sullivan joins a chain gang doing hard labor to find out what it is like to be poor
• One day they are watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon, and all of the inmates start laughing and forget their troubles
• This is when he decides to go back to making comedies:  to provide people with a temporary sense of escape from their current situations

II.  Sturges' Legacy

    A.  Lost in America

• A wealthy couple get bored with their current lives, so they decide to liquidate all of their assets, hop in a Winnebago, and hit the road to discover a new purpose in life
• When they get to Las Vegas, the wife blows all of their money
• They are forced to take on any job they can to survive
• They learn that there is no substitute for living in material comfort so they move back to New York City
• This movie reinforces Sturges' belief that you are better off doing what you were meant to be doing in life

• This movie is a scathing critique of Hollywood in the 1980's
• Hollywood was a bottom line business, only interested in making money
• In the movie, an immigration lawyer and his wife are raising a Hispanic child that they found homeless
• One of their friends is a big time violent action movie filmmaker
• Their friend ends up in the hospital, where he has an epiphany:  he should start making good, wholesome movies
• He compares himself to Sullivan
• In the end, he goes back to making action movies.  It's as if he is doing a service to humanity by doing this.

• This movie is a celebration of class overthrow
• A group of young people are driven by their own financial self-interest to make money on Wall Street
• Eddie Murphy plays an exaggerated Coon
• This exposes the hidden prejudices of the audience and gets us to laugh at them
• Gender difference is addressed at the end when Jamie Lee Curtis puts her money into the stock market
• Class difference is the most evident
• Dan Akroyd plays a rich, spoiled man who through the means of capitalism strikes up a friendship with Eddie Murphy, who is at the other end of the class spectrum
• Both men work together to make money
• According to Belton, this shows how capitalism works:  bringing people together from all backgrounds for a common goal
• Cynicism in the ending
• They take all of their money that they made in America and leave that country to go to a desert island
• This way they don't have to put up with the inequalities in America