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CHRISTMAS IN JULY
1940
Director
Preston Sturges
Starring
Dick Powell
Ellen Drew
Raymond Walburn
Runtime
67 MINUTES
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A striving clerk wins an advertising jingle contest and triggers a corporate nervous breakdown in this comedy skewering the American dream of overnight success. Preston Sturges’s CHRISTMAS IN JULY is in many ways his most underrated movie, a riotous satire of capitalism that bites so deep it hurts.
An ambitious office clerk (Dick Powell), determined to strike it rich in an advertising contest with his stupid slogan (“If you can’t sleep, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk”), is tricked by a few of his coworkers into believing that he’s actually won, promptly gets promoted, and goes on a shopping spree for his neighbors and relatives. Like all of Sturges’s finest work, CHRISTMAS IN JULY captures the mood of the Depression exquisitely and the brilliantly polyphonic script repeats the hero’s dim-witted slogan so many times that eventually it becomes a kind of crazed tribal incantation. The supporting cast (including Ellen Drew, William Demarest, and Raymond Walburn) is luminous, and Sturges uses them like instruments in a madcap concerto.
An ambitious office clerk (Dick Powell), determined to strike it rich in an advertising contest with his stupid slogan (“If you can’t sleep, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk”), is tricked by a few of his coworkers into believing that he’s actually won, promptly gets promoted, and goes on a shopping spree for his neighbors and relatives. Like all of Sturges’s finest work, CHRISTMAS IN JULY captures the mood of the Depression exquisitely and the brilliantly polyphonic script repeats the hero’s dim-witted slogan so many times that eventually it becomes a kind of crazed tribal incantation. The supporting cast (including Ellen Drew, William Demarest, and Raymond Walburn) is luminous, and Sturges uses them like instruments in a madcap concerto.