A Preston Sturges Edition of Film Quotes

The Great McGinty

Last Spring I revived the  film quotes feature on this blog  after seven years of dormancy. Since then I've compiled lists of quotes from foreign films, movies from the 1970s, Marx Brothers movies and a list of my all-time favorites. In days of yore I had a list strictly from Woody Allen movies, and one with quotes strictly from female characters. Today I present one-liners from the six great films by writer/director Preston Sturges. Sturges had a nice career as a writer before the early forties and he did some good work writing and directing from the mid-forties on, but from 1940-1944 he had an amazing output of seven films, one of which was good (Christmas in July) and the other six were classics. No director has had such an amazing output in so short a time. Of course Sturges' films were comedies. They had equal parts witty dialogue, slapstick and satire. Sturges the director's greatest asset was Sturges the writer. Here are a few examples.

From the Great McGinty:

If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish. — William Demarest as Skeeters.

You got me all a tremble. I bet you're scared to death of yourself. — Brian Donlevy as Dan McGinty.

From The Lady Eve:

Positively the same dame! -- William Demarest as Mugsy.

Don't be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common. -- Charles Coburn as Colonel Harrington.

Well, it's just that I've been up the Amazon for a year and they don't use perfume. — Henry Fonda as Charles.

I said they're not good enough for him. Every Jane in the room is giving him the thermometer and he feels they're just a waste of time. He's returning to his book; he's deeply immersed in it. He sees no one except - watch his head turn when that kid goes by. Won't do ya any good, dear - he's a bookworm - but swing 'em anyway…. — Barbara Stanwyck as Jean.

Sullivan's Travels

From Sullivan’s Travels:

There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan. — Joel McCrea as John L. Sullivan.

You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned. — Robert Greig as Burrows.

You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!'  — Veronica Lake as The Girl.

Not from you, Sully, that's true. Not with pictures like So Long Sarong, Hey, Hey, In the Hayloft, Ants in Your Plants of 1939... But they weren't about tramps, lockouts, sweatshops, people eating garbage in alleys and living in piano boxes and ash cans. — Robert Warwick as Mr. LeBrand

Palm Beach Story

From The Palm Beach Story:

Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That's hard to say with false teeth! — Robert Dudley as Wieinie King.

Toto's a refugee - from his creditors, I think. — Mary Astor s Princess Centimillia.

You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything. — Claudette Colbert as Gerry Jeffers.

That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous. — Rudy Vallee as J.D. Hackenacker III.

From The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek:

The trouble with kids is they always figure they're smarter than their parents - never stop to think if their old man could get by for 50 years and feed 'em and clothe 'em - he maybe had something up here to get by with - things that seem like brain twisters to you might be very simple for him. — William Demarest as Constable Kockenlocker.

I don't deal with spooks. She doesn't need a lawyer, she needs a Medium. - Al Bridge as Mr. Johnson.

Of course he has to have a first name. Everybody has a first name. Even dogs have first names, even if they don't have any last names. -- Eddie Bracken as Norval Jones.

Hail the Conquering Hero

From Hail the Conquering Hero:

I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, in all the years that I have been unsuccessfully mixed into politics, this is the first and only time that I have ever seen a candidate for office - given an opportunity to prove publicly, permanently and beyond peradventure of doubt that he was honest, courageous and veracious…" — Henry Hayden as Doc Bissell.

Well, that's the war for you. It's always hard on women. Either they take your men away and never send them back at all; or they send them back unexpectedly just to embarrass you. No consideration at all. — Elizabeth Patterson as Aunt Martha.

If I could reach as high as my father's shoestrings... my whole life would be justified - and I would stand here before you proudly... instead of as the thief and the coward that I am. — Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith.

They say opportunity's only got one hair on his head and you gotta grab it while it's going by and dog it down or you mightn't get another chance. — William Demarest as Sgt. Heffelginger.