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Certain he would be replaced due to his directorial inexperience, he was delighted when a representative of Paramount visited him at his home, and told him the studio was so thrilled with the footage shot thus far that they had no plans of replacing him. "I gave up not drinking and not smoking and have not been troubled with pneumonia since," he wrote. But looking at this scene from "July," as Jimmy (Dick Powell) gets out of a cab with his girlfriend to deliver unexpected gifts to people in his downtrodden neighborhood, it looks like Sturges gave up being "Preston Sturges," at least for the space of one scene. Compared to "The Lady Eve" or "The Palm Beach Story," where the action is so often soundstage-bound and made lush and gauzy through star-focused three-point lighting (which makes the slapstick pratfalls all the more unexpected and hilarious), this scene from "July" is harder-edged, shot outdoors, full of large and busy crowd shots where the actors are often dominated by the landscape.
Look how hard the outline between Dick Powell's face and the taxicab is at the start, and how the shadow falls across his right cheek, how the fabric of the street stand is torn, how the eye travels to the two men standing next to it in the lower left corner, one's work-cap and the other's fedora cutting up the frame.