Preston Sturges (1942)
Over the opening credits, we watch what look like excerpts from the film to follow – at least, they feature Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, the two stars of the picture. The clips describe troubled preparations for a wedding. There are alternating shots of Colbert (a) in a bridal gown and (b) en deshabille, bound and gagged; a maid in attendance faints melodramatically and repeatedly. McCrea changes from one suit into another: in the back of a car, he hurriedly buttons the waistcoat on his morning dress. Eventually, the couple makes it to the altar. The sequence as a whole is suitably accompanied by the William Tell Overture with Mendelssohn Wedding March embellishments. ‘And they lived happily after’, proclaims a legend on the screen. A second legend asks, ‘Or did they?’ and is followed at high speed by succeeding year dates – 1937 to 1942 inclusive. The camera comes to rest on a plaque, advertising a Park Avenue duplex apartment to let. The plaque has the look of a memorial. Inside the apartment building, an expensively-dressed, middle-aged woman (Esther Howard) and her much older husband (Robert Dudley) are being shown round by the building manager (Franklin Pangborn). He explains – with some difficulty, since the elderly man is deaf – that the place isn’t looking at its best, thanks to the current tenants, who’ve fallen behind with the rent. The camera moves upstairs to reveal Claudette Colbert – trying to hear what’s being said while also keeping out of sight. It’s pretty clear who the defaulting tenants are.
These are the first few, extraordinary minutes of The Palm Beach Story. The matrimonial prologue is like nothing I’ve seen as an opener – it’s frantically amusing but, as you watch, baffling. In contrast, the comedy in the duplex depends on something far from original – a character’s deafness. Fifteen years after the first talking pictures, this must already have been a very familiar comic device. Yet I can’t bring to mind a funnier hard-of-hearing routine – thanks to Preston Sturges’s dialogue, and its superb delivery by Robert Dudley, who’s crotchety but chipper, and Franklin Pangborn, who’s determinedly ingratiating. Dudley’s character – the ‘Wienie King’ – made a fortune in sausages. On his tour of the duplex, he bumps into Gerry Jeffers (Colbert) in the bathroom and promptly insists on bankrolling her – to pay off the rent owing, and more. Gerry phones her inventor husband Tom (McCrea) to tell him the good news but he doesn’t want to be interrupted. Tom’s deep in his latest abortive attempt to find $100,000 in sponsorship for the prototype of his scheme to build airports suspended above cities by wires. When he returns home that evening, Gerry explains to her suspicious husband the Wienie King’s largesse. She also proposes that she and Tom part company. Gerry has expensive tastes. She needs a husband whose wallet allows her to indulge them.
Next morning, Gerry walks out on Tom and asks a cab driver where’s the best place to get a quickie divorce. The driver reckons that ‘this time of year’ Palm Beach, Florida is a better bet than Reno, Nevada. At Penn Station, Gerry boards a train which Tom, who doesn’t want her to leave, fails to get on. He returns disconsolately to the duplex. The Wienie King, a geriatric fairy godfather, turns up there again and gives Tom his air fare to join Gerry. En route to Palm Beach, Gerry makes the acquaintance of a polite, mildly eccentric fellow (Rudy Vallée) who turns out to be John D Hackensacker III, one of America’s richest men. He’s in the lower bunk in the sleeping car and Gerry the top one. (He thinks it’s ‘not American’ to travel in a ‘state room’ – or to tip generously.) On the way up to her bunk, she inadvertently steps on his face and breaks his spectacles but John D doesn’t mind. By the time they’re in Florida, on his yacht, he’s fallen in love with Gerry. His fabulous wealth is just what she’s looking for. They head off to the luxurious home of his oft-married sister, Maud (Mary Astor), currently the Princess Centimillia. The Princess spots, observing them from a distance, a ‘good-looking man … I haven’t seen before’. This is Tom, newly arrived from New York. Gerry can’t disguise the fact that they know each other but she passes Tom off as her brother. The Princess insists that he come and stay too.
Preston Sturges was famous for combining slapstick and verbal comedy. Manny Farber was among his champions who preferred the former. Farber’s December 1942 review of The Palm Beach Story includes the following: ‘Very irritating is a latter-day failing of [Sturges], an unbounded delight in his ability to write witty dialogue, not one line of which he will forgo’. The abundant dialogue is fine by me, provided that the performers are good, and temperamentally different, enough to give it variety – as they do here. The charming savvy sparkle of Claudette Colbert’s Gerry articulates very satisfyingly with Joel McCrea’s humourless rectitude as Tom (a quality that has its own comic charm). Mary Astor and Rudy Vallée are enjoyably complementary too. It’s the slapstick I’m less keen on, although it’s fine in the early New York sequences here. Thanks to McCrea’s athleticism and innate propriety, it’s amusing when Tom Jeffers is falling downstairs or losing his pyjama trousers. I’m afraid I was bored, though, by one of the film’s most celebrated episodes. A bunch of eccentric millionaires are travelling – with their dogs and guns, to a shooting holiday – on the same train that’s taking Gerry Jeffers to Palm Beach. The ‘Ale and Quail Club’, as they’re called, get increasingly drunk and, in Manny Farber’s words, ‘lead yapping hounds through Pullmans in a privileged orgy of destruction’. This goes on for a long time and it’s as tiresome as it sounds. That goes even for the dogs. In Florida, the Princess Centimillia is trying to get rid of Toto (Sig Arno), a house guest of uncertain nationality. His pratfalls and funny-foreigner locutions made me want to see the back of him as much as Mary Astor did.
The 1930s saw two famous plays in which a recently divorced couple eventually gets back together. The former partners come to realise they had better conversation and sex with their ex than they’re going to have with the ex’s replacement. Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story were theatre hits in, respectively, the first and last years of the decade. Both were made into films the year after their original stage production and The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor, was one of the most admired pictures of 1940. The set-up of The Palm Beach Story naturally brings these romantic comedies to mind and Sturges’s film may even have been named for the Barry-Cukor screwball classic: The Palm Beach Story was the title chosen after the Production Code office had rejected the candidly challenging ‘Is Marriage Necessary?’ Their counterparts in Private Lives and The Philadelphia Story are, however, very different from Tom and Gerry (are they named for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon duo, which made their screen debut in 1940?) We don’t get the sense of this couple being drawn inexorably towards reunion. Tom doesn’t want them to split up in the first place but that could because he’s a socially conventional chap. There’s a mutual physical attraction, evident when – early then late on in the story – Gerry has trouble undoing her dress and has to ask Tom to help out. The Jefferses don’t fall back in love, though, or even seem to enjoy each other’s company, except when they’re kissing. And whereas Tracy Lord, the proud, demanding heroine of The Philadelphia Story, must be taught a lesson, Gerry Jeffers doesn’t renounce her adventuress ambitions.
This lack of sentimentality generates considerable suspense. Can Preston Sturges deliver an ending that’s neither a copout nor too downbeat? He can. When John D Hackensacker III agrees to invest in Tom’s airport-on-wires, Gerry finds her husband a more attractive proposition than he was before. She and Tom admit their true relationship to John D and the Princess. The lovestruck billionaire is still prepared to support Tom’s venture but he’s naturally disappointed – he had his heart set on Gerry. She doesn’t by any chance have a sister? Only a twin sister, she says. The Princess liked the look of Tom too – he doesn’t have any brothers? Only a twin brother, he replies. Identical twins in both cases and we suddenly get the film’s overture. Perhaps Tom and Gerry weren’t meant for each other and married the wrong twin back in 1937. The Palm Beach Story ends with a shot of another wedding – or series of weddings: John D Hackensacker III marries one Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea the other; the second McCrea marries the Princess. (There’s a seventh person in the line-up: the indomitable Toto. This is the one time his presence makes you smile.) Sexual attraction and money have combined to save the day for all concerned. There’s a reprise of the opening legend ‘And they lived happily after’. And of the follow-up question ‘Or did they?’ – things could still be the wrong way round for someone. The visual trompe l’oeil of the three couples at the altar is a perfect illustration of the artificiality of Sturges’s happy ending but the surpassing satiric wit behind it is the real thing. The couples’ curtain call is not just funny. It’s elating.
5 February 2016
