Preston Sturges and four by Elliott J. Clawson.) Though he had a thirty-year Hollywood career, Sturges' greatest comedies were filmed in a furious five-year burst of activity from 1939 to 1944, during which he turned out "The Great McGinty", "Christmas in July", "The Lady Eve", "Sullivan's Travels", "The Palm Beach Story", "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "Hail the Conquering Hero". Half a century later, four of these – "The Lady Eve", "Sullivan's Travels", "The Palm Beach Story" and "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" – were chosen by the American Film Institute as being among the 100 funniest American films. The film
Max Wagner the 1940s, Wagner was part of Preston Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors, appearing in six films written and directed by Sturges, beginning with "The Palm Beach Story" In 1940 during the filming of "The Mad Doctor", Wagner was credited for driving 50,000 miles as an on-screen taxi driver on the studio back lots of Hollywood. Since his appearance as a cab driver in "Charlie Chan in Shanghai" (1935), producers often cast him as a wise-cracking or henchman taxi driver. "I was cast as a taxi driver about five years ago", Wagner told a reporter. "And I was typed."