Two decades before Andrew Sarris coined the term “the auteur theory,” Preston Sturges was arguably the first and foremost auteur of the talkies. By the end of 1942, he had already directed five films from screenplays he had written, The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, and The Palm Beach Story—all as efficiently engineered for maximum joy as a windup toy, all now rated as classics.
Frank Capra was every bit as prolific, but he relied on screenwriters, most often Robert Riskin, for his scripts in that era. Alfred Hitchcock, too, imposed his authorial imprint primarily through the camera, leaving the writing to others. Orson Welles was gearing up to give Sturges a run for his money, but his momentum as a mainstream filmmaker was thwarted when his follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was butchered in its editing phase by RKO Pictures while Welles was in Brazil fulfilling his duties as a U.S. goodwill ambassador.
