Fairy Tale

I recently watched The Good Fairy, a 1935 comedy directed by William Wyler and starring Margaret Sullavan. (They fought and fought and then, late in the shoot, eloped.)  I hadn't seen it in years, but it was as charming as I'd remembered.

This time around I noticed that the film, with a script by Preston Sturges (freely adapted from a Molnar play), foreshadows his work as a director.

There are minor instances.  For instance, Luis Alberni plays a comic Italian, as he would in another Sturges screenplay (Easy Living) and a Sturges-directed film (The Lady Eve).  And, early on, there's a specially created film within a film that the characters watch, as there is in Sullivan's Travels.

But there are themes and character quirks that Sturges would use again once he was in charge.

The male lead is a lawyer, played by Herbert Marshall.  He becomes successful through what is essentially a mistake, and it gives him confidence he never had before.  The same plot device would be employed with Dick Powell in Christmas In July.

More significant, Sullavan plays a lovely young woman (of course) and it turns out that every man who runs into her wants to do things for her. Sure enough, Sturges would take that concept and run with it in The Palm Beach Story, which is based on the idea that a beautiful woman doesn't need money, since others will take care of her.  Though, to be fair, in that film, Claudette Colbert is wise, whereas Sullavan is a naif.  But the concept is the same.