Christmas in July

On the surface this effort from the brilliant Preston Sturges looks like a standard sugar coated feel good movie, but strip away the outer skin and you get a delightful collage of comedy, romance, satire, drama, and nudge nudge observations about hunger of wealth and all the spin offs that wealth creates.

I don't deem it unfair to state that the films core plot of frivolity may not be to everyone's taste, but to me personally it ticks all the boxes for a joyride with more at its heart. The pace of the film is more in keeping with screwball comedies of the great era, but that is not to say that the film doesn't shift down a gear for poignant reflection, because it does, but ultimately the film is full of hilarity from many quarters, that is acted out accordingly from a sparky cast, and of course directed by a deity .

A joyous winner that prods you in the ribs and gives a cheeky wink along the way. 9/10

A clerk making $22 per week dreams of winning the $25,000 grand prize in a coffee company's slogan contest. Sturges' second directorial effort is not only a sweet and simple comedy but also fast-paced and efficient, wrapping up in just over an hour. As the ambitious but earnest sloganeer, Powell basically plays the role of the straight man, surrounded by loony characters, including Walburn as the flustered owner of Maxford House, not to be confused with Maxwell House, and Sturges regular Demarest as one of the judges of the contest. Despite the short running time and the emphasis on comedy, Sturges manages to make the characters human.

Short and sweet, bright and breezy, but not without pith, this early Preston Sturges feature helped further establish his "wonder-kid" reputation in the early 40's before his great classics "Sullivan's Travels", "The Lady Eve" and my favourite "Hail The Conquering Hero".

The simple premise of a hoax win in a national coffee-slogan competition for ordinary average nice-guy Powell is the springboard for a light morality tale along the lines of "he who does good has good things happen to them" - although not without the usual series of ups and downs, just as you'd expect.

Of course nobody here is really bad, even the duped killjoy Mr, no make that Dr Maxford of the sponsoring coffee company or Mr Shindler of the too-trusting department store from whom Powell buys gifts for the whole neighbourhood on the strength of the phony winning telegram placed on his desk by his prankster work colleagues. Even when he finds out that his win is bogus, Powell can't get angry at the tricksters, so it's no real surprise that his homeliness, honesty and humility wins everyone over, including his feisty girl-friend, played by Ellen Drew, with the predictable twist in the last reel that Powell's slogan wins anyway.

Powell is very likeable in the lead, although Drew is a little too high-pitched in delivery for my taste as the film develops. There's the usual troop of madcap eccentrics which peoples almost every Sturges comedy, with some nice little cameos, I particularly liked the actor playing the deadpan cop, not above making some contemporary allusions to Hitler & Mussolini to stress a point.

The dialogue of course is mile-a-minute vernacular and I got a kick out of Sturges' Dickensian word-play over triple-barrelled lawyer's names (along the lines of "Swindle Cookum and Robbem!"). Right from the start, we get the "screwball comedy" template of a poor Joe and his girl, dreaming of something bigger waiting for something extraordinary to happen, with Powell and Drew's extended night-time scene on their New York apartment roof-top, and succeeding entertaining scenes including Powell's reaction to "winning" the competition and best of all the frenetic crowd scene when Maxford tries to get his money back only to cop a batch of rotten fruit ("Don't throw the good stuff" admonishes one parent to a tomato-wielding youngster), it's all good clean fun and ends up happily ever after. And get a load of that "zoom" shot back into Maxford's office at the end - it certainly got me out of my chair, not the last time Sturges employed camera tricks of this type - remember the memorable stop-start sequence to "The Palm Beach Story".

The movie celebrates community, the little guy who dreams of making it big and how to meet disaster with alacrity, in short a feel-good movie with a big heart, well worth an hour and four minutes of anyone's time.

Have said many times about being a pre-1970s classic film fan, of all genres and decades, a lot of my favourite films being made between the 1930s and 1960s. The same applies too for films from the 1970s onwards. Am not saying that every pre-1970s film is great, there are a fair share of average all the way down to dud ones but they are out-weighed by the very good to classic films (the best parodied and referenced numerous times since and influenced many film-makers).

Preston Sturges had for me one of the best "golden years"/prime period for any director, which started with his debut film 'The Great McGinty' (which is very good). My definition of this is when a director makes 5 or more great films in a row. From this period, even when the film was one of the weaker ones it still managed to be good and more, which is testament to how great and more his best golden years/"prime period" films were. Feel the same about 'Christmas in July' as with 'The Great McGinty', though slightly preferring the former. Found 'Christmas in July' to be a joy to watch and deserving of more praise than it gets, when it comes to satirising dreamers placing faith in get-rich contests 'Christmas in July' is a great and relatively overlooked example of how to do it well, make it entertaining while also relatable and tactful.

Can find hardly anything to fault actually. Maybe it is a little too short, would have been more than happy with having 10-15 minutes more perhaps. That can be easily ignorable though, as there is not a dull second to be had in 'Christmas in July', one of those films that drew me in from the start and never let go, and the many good things are so great.

Maybe other Sturges films are sharper (am actually going to include 'The Great McGinty' here), have more insights into the subjects explored and are more daring. Again a very subjective personal preference and not actually much of a knock on the film.

That it's so beautifully paced throughout and always compelling in its story, which entertained and invested emotionally, is one strength of 'Christmas in July', but there are many more. Sturges' direction continues to be remarkably well accomplished for again so early on (this is only his second film released quite close to 'The Great McGinty'). The production values are very good, very nicely shot in particular even if visually there aren't exactly iconic moments (not that it needed to be, not that kind of film).

A major strength of 'Christmas in July' is the script. The comedy is hilarious at its best and never gets corny. The pathos is genuinely touching without getting schmaltzy. And the romantic element is truly charming and with remarkable humanity. It's not always easy balancing more than two tones well and there have been many instances in films that do where one or more have not been handled well. 'Christmas in July' balances the comedy, pathos and romance deftly, no signs of them clashing with each other that it doesn't make sense, and all three as indicated are written spot-on. Then there are the performances, which are uniformly good. As likeable and charming Dick Powell and Ellen Drew are, and their chemistry is just lovely, it's the comedic performers who shine more with the main scene stealer being Raymond Walburn.

In summary, a joy. 9/10 Bethany Cox

Not as well known as "The Lady Eve" or "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "Christmas in July" was an unusual film for the writer-director Preston Sturges: it's more wistful, less frenetic. Though it's filled with a myriad of those wonderful character actors that Sturges loved to use to fill the frame (including Franklin Pangborn and William Demarest), it's touching in its regard for the struggling young couple (played by Dick Powell and Ellen Drew) who get swept up in the idea of winning a slogan contest ("If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!"). The romantic mood seems to be set in the Depression era, reminiscent of the scripts that Sturges wrote for those Depression comedies "The Good Fairy" and "Easy Living": innocents get swept up in mistaken identities and come out winners anyway. Maybe it's not as manic as his classic romantic comedies, but it has its share of hilarious moments and it's full of charm.