So this week, I joined my friend Eric McDonough & his lovely missus for a podcast—they are big fans of our ACF series on Preston Sturges (here’s my pomocon post about it) & they invited me to talk about Sturges’s 1940 screwball comedy Christmas In July. You know: The American Dream! But kidding aside, this is the story of an ambitious young man who doesn’t want to die of hard work like his father, despises himself for not earning enough to take good care of his aging mother, & feels too much of a loser to propose to his eager fiancé. There’s a great big America out there, especially across the way in Manhattan, where money, glamour, & the future are all happening—it is sheer agony to see it, but not be able to be part of it. So the working stiff gambles on himself trying to make it as a sloganeer, an ad man, & win some kind of ticket to a world above the ordinary one. Self-promotion is the way in America, because if you’re not full of yourself, why should anyone else care? Then it turns out that having all his wishes come true might crack his confidence faster than never having succeeded in the first place, since the fall is much harder than the rise was sweet! Here’s the link to Apple Podcasts & here to AnchorFM, which offers many venues for listening…
Here’s the trailer to the hilarious thing: