Generally acknowledged as the first Hollywood screenwriter allowed to direct his own movies, Preston Sturges (“The Lady Eve,” “Sullivan’s Travels”) holds a special place among the great auteurs in film history. What to make then of those films he wrote before becoming a director in his own right? Film Forum’s series, “The Early Sturges: Preston Sturges Screenplays, 1930-1939,” which begins today, presents a mixed bag of works, revealing stark similarities as well as surprising contrasts between these early films and the director’s later masterpieces.

Sturges’s voice was a very pronounced one as a writer. Even in the hands of a director with a starkly different sensibility, his personality peeks through, be it through his expertise with broad comedic gags or his navigation of the emotional minefields of Depression era America. (Heck, his voice is prevalent even when telling the tale of a 15th-century French poet in 1938’s “If I Were King,” screening April 6.) Somewhat surprisingly, the best films of his early screenplays are those made by strong-willed filmmakers who brought new angles to the writer’s familiar motifs.

Certainly, little would suggest that William Wyler, who would go on to direct “Ben Hur,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and other expansive, Oscar-winning epics, could do justice to a bubbly Sturges comedy. But 1935’s “The Good Fairy” (screening April 3 & 4), based originally on a Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnar, is a prime example of the effectiveness of such an odd collaboration. An orphaned girl (Margaret Sullavan) resisting the advances of a rich businessman (Frank Morgan) pretends to be married to a poor lawyer (Herbert Marshall). Desperate for the girl’s affections, the businessman offers the “husband” a job. The results are hilarious, but it’s not the kind of zippy farce one might expect. Wyler brings a more methodical pace and a visual grandeur to the proceedings; there’s an uncanny precision to his compositions and a graceful rhythm to his actors.

Still, Sturges’s mark is evident. He has a unique fondness for the charming fraudster – Sullavan’s character in “The Good Fairy” may be more of a naif than the later gold diggers of “The Palm Beach Story,”or even the fake war hero of “Hail the Conquering Hero,” but the writer’s affection for duplicitous characters still shines through in her well-meaning dishonesty.

An impoverished innocent again becomes the beneficiary of a dim businessman’s generosity in 1937’s “Easy Living” (screening April 1 & 2), directed by Mitchell Leisen, a former production designer who had made a name for himself as a master of elegant, moody romances. Here, a stingy banker (Edward Arnold), furious that his wife has blown thousands of dollars on a fur coat, throws it off his balcony. It lands on a struggling young woman (Jean Arthur), who tries to return it. The banker, charmed by her honesty, takes the girl to a fancy clothing store. People seeing them begin to assume the two are having an affair. This opens a great many doors for our impoverished heroine; it also brings her in contact with the banker’s handsome, wayward son (Ray Milland) who, dissatisfied with his family’s wealth, has started working at an automat.

Needless to say, a frothy romance ensues, but even here, there’s an edge to Sturges’s work. It’s evident in the way he skewers the lemming-like devotion of the moneyed classes to status and hearsay. Milland’s suspicion of his own family’s wealth, as well as his desire to work his way up, is portrayed as admirable, but much of the final act of the plot hinges on a quick attempt to make money off the stock market. Sturges’s characters always display that uniquely American trait: A desire for wealth combined with a deep distrust of anyone who possesses it.

One of the most striking things about the films Sturges directed (the good ones, at least) is the effortlessness with which they move between broad comedy and genuine emotional catharsis. These early efforts hint at a similar fondness for tonal swings. In Leisen’s 1940 classic “Remember the Night” (screening April 3 and 4 along with “The Good Fairy”), Fred MacMurray plays a lawyer prosecuting a female shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck, playing another dishonest Sturges charmer) for stealing some jewelry. Despite his strict adherence to the law, the merciful MacMurray pays the bailiff to allow the accused out of jail for the holidays while her case is pending. A screwup brings the two of them together, and before we know it, they’re in a car driving toward small-town Indiana, which just happens to be where they’re both from.

The film is first and foremost a romance, but it starts off in a go-for-broke comic register: Stanwyck’s thievery, for all its potential pathos, is played for laughs, as is MacMurray’s slick lawyering. (There’s even some unfortunate, dated humor at the expense of his black servant.) But the film sharply switches gears in the second half: The visit home reveals that Stanwyck’s strict, puritan mother doesn’t want anything to do with her daughter, while the warm communality of Mac-Murray’s family reveals the source of his innate decency.

Thus, a film that features goofy cow milking scenes, daffy manservants, and screwball dialogue becomes a somber, gentle paean to the comforts of family life. It’s the kind of ambitious shift that has claimed many a lesser writer or director. Sturges and Leisen – two artists with sharply different sensibilities – pull it off magnificently. “Remember the Night” would be the last film Sturges wrote for another director. As such, it was a hint of what was to come.

Until April 6 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick, 212-727-8112).