A cinematic mystery that I find impossible to explain is exactly what is going on in the screwball mayhem under the opening titles at the start of Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942). My inability has a major advantage: Even if I could explain that beginning, I couldn’t tell you about it without giving away the film’s perfectly delicious ending. And that would be a total spoiler. So if you’ve never seen The Palm Beach Story, and are among the lucky folk soon to taste its delights for the first time, you can go to it in all innocence. And what a treat you have in store.
The career of Preston Sturges (1898–1959) poses an extraordinary problem for those who rank the best films numerically: He wrote and directed seven of the five greatest sound-film comedies ever made. (Yes, I realize that’s mathematically impossible.) In addition to leaving no room for the achievements of geniuses like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, his masterworks jostle each other for the top places, and aficionados have ferocious debates about the order of their priority. (Some would add an eighth film, 1940’s Christmas in July, to the list, but I, like many, find it only second-drawer Sturges, which ranks it higher than most sound comedies, but not as high as his peaks.) The last third of The Lady Eve (1941) has always struck me as overly convoluted, while Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) both have a dark underpinning that moves them out of the realm of pure comedy.
The Great McGinty (1940), like The Lady Eve, runs aground slightly in its last third, though here through movie-style sentiment rather than plot elaboration. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) is almost pure outrageous farce, which is wonderful—I used to screen it for students when teaching Aristophanes—but in effect it represents a whole different genre. And then—after an unwise lapse into the serious for The Great Moment (1944) and the wholly misbegotten Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947)—comes one last Sturges masterpiece, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), a film so innovative in form that even largely favorable reviews couldn’t save it from audiences’ utter bafflement at a narrative so wildly different in shape from what they were used to.
The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, and Unfaithfully Yours—all six of these are imperishable and unforgettable. But if I had to choose a single masterpiece from the oeuvre of Sturges’ extraordinary decade as a cinema superhero, it would almost certainly be The Palm Beach Story. A pure comedy, full of moral truth and riven with daring absurdities, it is as light as a perfect French pastry yet rich in nutritious substance of a kind rarely found in flaky desserts. Laced with bitterness and blunt truths, it has a zest and an energy that keep it from ever cloying; it can be rewatched countless times—at reasonable intervals—without ever seeming stale. It shares with Sturges’ other great films the hallmarks of his style, yet it stands apart from them with an elegance that comes partly from its subject and partly from the canny, freewheeling way Sturges approaches it.
To explain that last sentence, we must go back a bit, to the childhood of the boy who was born Edmund Preston Biden in Chicago in 1898, son of Edmund C. Biden, a traveling salesman, and Mary Estelle Dempsey, a woman of good Anglo-Irish family with dreams of glory and a remarkable drive for bringing them to fruition. She shortly divested herself of Biden and married Solomon Sturges, a wealthy stockbroker who became young Preston’s adoptive father. Solomon Sturges also became the voice of stability in young Preston’s life; Mary Dempsey became its wild streak, though one that must have had a degree of sagacity to sustain it. She founded what rapidly became a highly successful line of cosmetics, which she named D’Este, after the legendary beauty whom the poet Dante had adored. When the aristocratic D’Este family of Italy deigned to sue the upstart, she claimed a distant kinship with them (her father’s name was Dominick D’Este Dempsey) and won the suit, as a concession legally changing her own name to Mary Desti, and changing the spelling of her brand name to match. Then, having built up the huge business, she entrusted it to other hands and went off to Europe, taking her son with her, to pursue her next great passion: Isadora Duncan, one of the pioneers of modern dance, to whom she became a one-woman management and promotion team.
Young Preston spent much of his youth shuttling between the comparative sanity of a Chicago stockbroker’s home and the bohemianism of pre–World War I Paris as seen by Isadora’s circle. (He lived to adulthood only because he hadn’t felt like going for a drive with Isadora’s much younger children on the fateful rainy day in 1913 when the car they were in skidded off a Paris bridge into the Seine, drowning them.)
This bifurcated existence—spending much time among the wealthy and the European aristocracy while being knocked about from pillar to post—explains to some extent the extremes, of hilarity and melancholy, slapstick and grim sobriety, that are among the hallmarks of Sturges’ work. Gerry (Claudette Colbert), the heroine of The Palm Beach Story, has a hapless faith in some rescuer turning up at the worst of times that recalls Isadora’s personality. And the film offers not one but two of the motor-mouthed matrons, a regular feature in Sturges comedies, who are often said to be based on his mother. One can easily imagine the isolation the young Sturges felt at being regularly dragged from one situation into another. His sense of detachment from his constantly shifting environment may have been one of the elements in his makeup that drove him, in his decade as a director at Paramount, to form what became known as his “stock company,” about which more later.
Sturges’ grounding in European culture not only enabled him to deal with the international super-rich who are a key part of The Palm Beach Story, but it also supplied the movie’s core, through a connection that I do not think anyone else has ever pointed out. When the action starts, Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry are broke and about to be evicted from their duplex apartment in a luxury building. Tom is an inventor, a visionary entrepreneur with an idea about building airports within cities. (Far from absurd, this notion recalls such techno-visionaries of the time as Norman Bel Geddes and R. Buckminster Fuller.) He can’t, however, get anyone to back his enterprise. Rich investors seem interested, but they also tend to display a degree of interest in Gerry’s wifely charms. The fanatically jealous Tom reacts ferociously to any display of such interest, and very shortly finds himself again without investors.
This schema immediately calls to my mind Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole (book by Meilhac and Halévy, also the librettists of Carmen). Périchole and Piquillo, who love one another madly, are street singers in colonial Peru. They never earn any money because, when Périchole passes the hat after one of their performances, the men crowd around, which makes Piquillo come storming up in anger, at which the men shrink back, so that the hat always remains empty. Eventually Périchole decides she must leave Piquillo and find a rich man. So she sneaks away while he sleeps, leaving him a farewell letter. Her departure triggers what can only be called a series of screwball-comedy events—including her meeting with the rich and powerful provider she’s been searching for—that ends with Périchole and Piquillo happily reunited, this time presumably for keeps.
In its own free-spirited way, The Palm Beach Story follows La Périchole’s matrix. Tom and Gerry—their names would have made moviegoers at the time immediately think of the cat-and-mouse team in MGM’s popular animated-cartoon series—adore one another but are in desperate straits economically. It’s their looming eviction from the apartment where they live (clearly beyond their means) that brings Gerry into contact with her first millionaire, the eccentric elderly “wienie king” (Robert Dudley) who gives her both the money and the inspiration on which to leave Tom. And when we see him again, he even-handedly does the same for Tom, giving him the money and the inspiration to pursue Gerry.
The intrusion of this delightfully two-faced deus ex machina provides me with a good excuse for writing about Sturges’ innovative casting procedures. Where other directors in the studio era searched for new faces, or for comics (including radio comics) who could supply their standard routines, Sturges built what was in effect a repertory company—not a “stock company,” as it is often called, because what they supplied, in one Sturges film after another, was precisely not a stock routine. They were character comedians, many of them with stage experience on Broadway or elsewhere, others with long experience in vaudeville or in silent films. They were mostly male; one of the few women among them was Esther Howard, who plays the wienie king’s bossy wife in The Palm Beach Story, and who seems to have been Sturges’ prime repository for the comic uses he made of his mother’s assertiveness. Sturges loved casting these actors again and again. William Demarest, who makes only a very brief appearance in the film among a covey of drunk millionaires, appears in roles of varying size in eight of Sturges’ movies. Sturges shared private jokes with these colleagues: The onetime star vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, a bottle-nosed, thickly East European–accented performer who is seen only briefly in The Palm Beach Story, in two other Sturges movies plays a character with an Irish name. (He is Rafferty, the music-store owner who befriends Demarest’s family in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.)
Other American directors and producers assembled such informal companies of actors on whom they could rely, a need particularly important in B movies, which had to be shot speedily so as not to go over their minuscule budgets. In producer Val Lewton’s films, made around the same time as Sturges’, actors in key secondary roles appear again and again: Tom Conway, Isabel Jewell, Elizabeth Russell, the actor-calypso singer known as Sir Lancelot. But Sturges’ movies are wholly peopled with such dependable folk. (He reused reliable leading players, too: Joel McCrea and Eddie Bracken each did two films for him, and Rudy Vallee four.) He shaped and challenged them as well as depending on them. There were few parallels to Sturges’ work in this realm till the heyday of Ingmar Bergman (who trained as a director in repertory theater) and Akira Kurosawa (a Russophile for whom the Moscow Art Theatre was a model).
Paramount executives, always in search of new sensations, found Sturges’ approach troubling. One of them famously asked him, “Why don’t you use some other actors for a change?” To which Sturges replied, “I like these actors.” In another context, he explained that, having played key roles in his earliest pictures, they had a moral right to be cast in the later ones—implying also that he had a moral right to keep the company he chose.
While Sturges’ troupers can be seen all through The Palm Beach Story, the greatest number of them play “The Ale and Quail Club,” the second batch of millionaires who aid Gerry on her quest for a wealthier husband. These scenes, with their weird mix of drunken obstreperousness varied with dribs of chivalrous consideration, have an additional disturbing ring today: They display wealthy men demanding what we now call white privilege, to a sickening and even lunatic extent. Even their attempt at courtesy when they all crowd into Gerry’s sleeping compartment to serenade her, much to her dismay, is grotesquely painful. Plus, it devolves into the scene in the bar car, where those who aren’t serenading Gerry use loaded shotguns to attempt to hit targets tossed up by the terrified black bartender. Here Sturges, under cover of the racial-stereotype comedy of the period, has smuggled in through imagery ideas that, if spelled out explicitly in dialogue, would certainly have been deleted by both Paramount and the Production Code’s censors.
It’s in escaping the dangerous rowdiness of the drunk Ale & Quail Club that Gerry encounters, through a slapstick meet-cute in a sleeping car, her third and most beneficent millionaire, John D. Hackensacker III (Vallee). The slapstick has a dangerous edge to it—I, who have a terror of eye injuries, always wince in pain at the repeated breaking of his pince-nez—which also becomes an eerie part of the character’s psychology. (When she apologizes, he tells her he rather enjoyed the experience.)
Vallee’s arrival onscreen, roughly midway through the film, brings us a confluence of histories. From his dialogue, we get glimpses of Gilded Age robber barons and their descendants’ uses of the enormous wealth they amassed. (When Gerry expresses fear that he’s a burglar, he replies, “No, that was my grandfather. That’s what they called him, anyway.”) At the same time, Vallee’s own presence—easily recognizable to a 1942 audience—brings its own cultural history. An icon of recordings and radio in the 1920s and early 30s, he was drifting into the unhappy role of a quasi-camp nostalgia object when Sturges, by casting him here, in effect reinvented him as a light comedian. Vallee took to his new categorization with alacrity and played it happily for the rest of his career, appearing in three more Sturges films—he’s particularly brilliant as the hero’s foolishly self-important brother-in-law in Unfaithfully Yours—and ending up on Broadway in 1961 as the fatuous CEO in Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
The daring of Vallee’s leap from aging heartthrob to comic wooer is reinforced by his willingness to go along with two strokes of Sturges’ audacity: The movie audience gets to hear Vallee croon Ray Noble’s “Goodnight, Sweetheart” (Sturges pays ironic homage to the crooner’s sensual power by having the song drive Gerry and Tom into lovemaking), and while dancing with Gerry, he sings a snippet of Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic”—prompting her to remark, “You have a nice little voice.” A more egocentric man might have been stung by this: Vallee was the first of the radio crooners to become a huge pop star, and his detractors had spent years taunting him for his small vocal instrument and wavering pitch. But Vallee did not let the dig stand in his way. By accepting the role, he turns the joke back on those who ridiculed him. And his comic playing is so precise in every other respect that one comes to love him. Some of the female students for whom I’ve screened The Palm Beach Story have waxed indignant at what they viewed as a deceit being practiced by Gerry on Hackensacker; only the sympathy evoked by Vallee’s touching performance could have triggered such a misreading.
His sustained skill is all the more admirable given his relative inexperience at nonmusical acting (most of his previous film appearances had been as a featured singer or bandleader in musical revues), and the fact that he must hold his own onscreen not only against Colbert and McCrea, but also while contending with Mary Astor as Hackensacker’s sister, the much-married Princess Centimillia.
Astor’s performance is usually the first thing mentioned when the subject of The Palm Beach Story comes up. (Dudley’s appearance as the wienie king runs a close second.) And without question, it’s breathtaking—one of those nonstop verbal displays that make you grateful for the existence of sound film. (Its tragic counterpart, made nearly at the same time, would be Agnes Moorehead’s performance in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.) Glittering with energy and openly sexual, Astor’s playful aggressiveness seems to take over the movie even in her few silent or underplayed moments. This was a great period for Astor, who had been through many personal tribulations, and was to face a few more, in the course of her bumpy artistic career. Her two previous films had been The Great Lie, for which she won the best supporting actress Oscar, and The Maltese Falcon, which most film fans think of as her keystone performance. Neither those nor most of her other film appearances, however, reveal the aptitude for comedy that Sturges and this outrageous role released in her. While seeming excessive, her playing is almost magically nuanced, never too much yet always at what appears to be its peak.
Astor and Vallee, as scions of a billionaire family, balance each other elegantly, two contrasting types of what might be called self-interested generosity. They represent one mode of being super-rich—perhaps a fairy-tale mode to some extent—that contrasts sharply with the behavior of the drunk millionaires, lost in their private obsessions in their private railroad car. And the billionaire siblings’ essential benevolence brings the story full circle—thematically back to the wienie king, whose generosity started the narrative wheels in motion, and then, in the surprise ending, back to (but never explaining) the craziness of the opening title sequence. It is all settled, with terrifying ease, in one quick piece of trick photography, a final Sturgesian mock on Hollywood’s (and the audience’s) loving propensity for happy endings—with a pair of end titles (also recapitulating a pair at the opening) to remind you that it is only a mock, that you have been watching a movie, a frothy concoction whipped up by a master entertainer, and not sampling anything that pretends to be a slice of real life.
Sturges trespassed on real life often enough in his other films; in this one he escapes from it, freely and happily. America was fully involved in World War II by the time the film went into production, but only a few hints of that reality appear, despite the wealthy characters’ international links. The Princess, rebuked for the shortness of her many marriages, replies that “Nothing is permanent in this world except Roosevelt, my dear.” (FDR had just been elected to his historic third term.) And her lapdog-like follower Toto (played by the émigré operetta comedian Sig [Siegfried] Arno) is described by the Princess as “a refugee—from his creditors, I think.” (The film’s only other foreign-accented character is the dress-shop saleslady, played—uncredited— by longtime U.S. resident and onetime Broadway star Odette Myrtil. Her casting in the role may have had an in-joke aspect: Over the next decade, Myrtil designed stars’ gowns for a number of pictures.)
The joy of this pure escape from reality must have merged with the happiness Sturges felt at the success of his first three pictures (the fourth, Sullivan’s Travels, had gotten a more mixed reception, but it opened two days before Pearl Harbor) to produce the unusual exhilaration that The Palm Beach Story transmits. Like the best Champagne, it produces a happy giddiness no matter how often you sample it. Sturges may have sensed that such elation could not last forever: The film contains its own hangover cure, when Gerry, after her traumatic night on the train, orders a prairie oyster at breakfast, and Hackensacker, who clearly doesn’t know what it is, bravely orders one too. (For those unfamiliar with this archaic concoction, a prairie oyster is a raw egg, yolk unbroken, served in a glass with Worcestershire sauce, salt, and black pepper, drunk down quickly to cure a hangover. Yuck.)
The process wasn’t all happiness. The unusual amount of independence Sturges commanded as Paramount’s most successful writer-director produced a general caution, mingled with envy and distrust, in studio executives who resented and somewhat feared the prospect of artists demanding more control in the corporate world of Hollywood’s studio system, forcing Sturges to battle them on matters both big and little. This was particularly true after the former songwriter B.G. (“Buddy”) DeSylva became Paramount’s head of production, while The Palm Beach Story was in preproduction. Subsequent Sturges films met with delays, and sometimes outright obstruction, from DeSylva’s office. Sturges’ next film, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, intended as a follow-up to 1940’s The Great McGinty, was filmed in 1943 but not released until the following year. Much of that delaying, however, came from the battles Sturges was perpetually fighting on a different front—with the censors of Joseph L. Breen’s Production Code office. Paramount executives, even less interested in controversy than they were in artists’ creativity, were not always supportive. On The Palm Beach Story, Sturges even had to haggle with the censors over the number of divorces the Princess Centimillia was allowed to have: “Your sister’s been divorced eight times”/ “No, no, five—three were annulled” became “Your sister’s been divorced five times”/ “No, no, three—two were annulled.”
The infighting did not dampen Sturges’ spirit, nor douse the flame of his wit. The masterful mix of outrageous comedy and tragic pain that infuses both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero gives us sufficient proof of that. Age and stress did not begin to catch up with him till he had left Paramount, and even then, one more masterpiece remained, the initially misunderstood Unfaithfully Yours. But The Palm Beach Story holds a special place. At the midpoint of his triumphal career, with three works of genius before it and three more to come, with a long, grueling apprenticeship behind him and a long, somewhat sad downward spiral ahead, it is an apex, a crown jewel of foolery with infallible zest and unexpected bite. Of the seven Sturges masterworks that compete for slots among the five greatest sound comedies, it is the unmistakable winner. It lives happily ever after. And as Sturges knew, few films, like few marriages, can claim that.
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