Inventor Tom Jeffers and his wife Gerry are down on their luck financially. Married for five years, the couple is still waiting for Tom's success. Anxious for the finer things in a life, Gerry decides that they both would be better off if they split. But before she can act, she ends up entangled with the Wienie King, a strange older man being shown around her apartment with his wife by a building manager anxious to rent it out from beneath his delinquent tenants. Sympathetic to her plight – and utterly taken by her youth and charm – the man gives her $700 from a giant roll of cash he keeps in his pocket. This is enough to get their rent current, pay off their most urgent bills, buy a new dress, take Tom to an expensive dinner, and still leave $14 and change in pocket money for Tom, and then she says she's leaving him.
In spite of a night of amour following their tipsy return home after their dinner, she awakens early, packs a bag, and makes for the train station. Bound for Palm Beach, Florida, her plan is to get a divorce, meet and marry a wealthy man who can both give her what she craves and also help Tom. Penniless, and repeatedly escaping from Tom's clutches, she is finally invited to travel for free as a guest on the private car of the well-to-do and soused Ale and Quail Club.
When the Club proves too rowdy and repeatedly fire off hunting rifles in the private car, nearly killing their bartender, she flees to the upper berth of a Pullman car, in the process meeting the meek, eccentric, amiable, and bespectacled John D. Hackensacker III (played by Rudy Vallée), who immediately falls for her.
Left without her clothes or purse in the chaos of her flight from the Ale and Quail reverie, she willingly accepts Hackensacker's chivalrous charity, although she doesn't know who he is. This takes a dramatic turn towards extravagance during a shopping spree for ladies finery he instigates in Jacksonville, swirling from trifles to haute couture and jewelry encrusted with precious stones.
Only when Hackensacker hands the store manager a card telling him to charge it all to him is it revealed he is the third richest men in the world and owner of the Erl King, a fabulous yacht, which the twosome board for the final leg of the journey to Palm Beach.
Back in New York, the now despondent Tom receives the same kind of generous no-strings-attached charity from the Wienie King he had accused Gerry of trading sexual favors with, which helps clear his mind. The King encourages him to rent a plane, fly to Florida, and show up with a bouquet of roses to win back his bride.
Arriving in Palm Beach, Tom is directed to the dock and Hackensacker's yacht. There he sees the affectionate new couple aboard. Failing to run him off on shore, a flustered Gerry introduces Tom as her brother, Captain McGlue. Hackensacker's oft-married, man-hungry sister, Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor), is immediately smitten with Tom, dismissing her current lover, the bumbling Toto, by asking him to retrieve a handkerchief.
When Gerry tells Hackensacker, who is working his way to propose to her, that her "brother" is a partner with her husband in the same investment, Hackensacker agrees to back it, saying he likes the Captain and it will keep it "all in the family" once they are married.
Invited to stay at the Princess' estate, the Jeffers' couple valiantly try to maintain their farce – while Tom reluctantly wrangles to win Gerry back, and Gerry determinedly seeks to stick to her original plan. Until, to the strains of Hackensacker crooning "Goodnight Sweetheart" beneath their window, the couple end up romantically entangled just as they had their last night together.
Reunited and unmasked the next morning, they confess the ruse to the Hackensackers. After John agrees to finance Tom's invention as simply a "good investment", sans sentimentality, and Tom and Gerry are asked if they have a brother and a sister. They do...twins!
There is an elaborate dual wedding, with Tom as best man and Gerry as matron of honor, John Hackensacker hand-in-hand with Gerry's sister and the Princess with Tom's brother. A title card tells us that they "lived happily ever after...or did they?", before credits roll.
At least part of the initial inspiration for The Palm Beach Story may have come to Preston Sturges from close to home. Not only had he shuttled back and forth to Europe as a young man, his ex-wife Eleanor Hutton was an heiress who moved among the European aristocracy, and had once been wooed by Prince Jerome Rospigliosi-Gioeni. One scene in the film is based upon an incident that had happened to Sturges and his mother while traveling by train to Paris, where the car with their compartment and baggage was uncoupled while they were in the dining car.[3]
The story Sturges came up with was entitled Is Marriage Necessary?, which, along with an alternative, Is That Bad?, became a working title for the film. The original title was rejected by Hays Office censors, who also rejected the script submitted by Paramount over its "sex suggestive situations...and dialogue." In spite of changes the script was still tabled because of its "light treatment of marriage and divorce" and overt parodying of John D. Rockefeller. More changes were made, including reducing Princess Centimillia's divorces from eight to three (plus two annulments), before the script finally was approved.[4]
This was Sturges' second collaboration with Joel McCrea, following Sullivan's Travels from the previous year and they worked again on The Great Moment, filmed in 1942 (but released in 1944). Although Colbert and Sturges worked on The Big Pond (1930) and the first version of Imitation of Life (1934), The Palm Beach Story was the only time they worked on a movie Sturges wrote and directed.
Many members of Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors appear in film, such as Al Bridges, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Robert Dudley, Byron Foulger, Robert Greig, Harry Hayden, Arthur Hoyt, Torben Meyer, Frank Moran, Charles R. Moore, Jack Norton, Franklin Pangborn, Victor Potel, Dewey Robinson, Harry Rosenthal, Julius Tannen and Robert Warwick.
This was the seventh of ten films written by Preston Sturges in which William Demarest appeared.[6]
Claudette Colbert received $150,000 for her role, and Joel McCrea was paid $60,000.[3]
The second unit did background shooting at Penn Station in Manhattan. The film went into general release on 1 January 1943. It was released on video in the U.S. on 12 July 1990 and re-released on 30 June 1993.[7]
Reception
Contemporaneous reviews
Upon its release The Palm Beach Story received mixed reviews. Among the positive reviews wereThe Hollywood Reporter calling it a "sophisticated laugh riot" featuring one of Colbert's "most accomplished light performances."[8]The Daily Film Renter praised the film's "scintilating dialogue and provocative situations."[9]Variety described the film as a "tongue-in-cheek spoofing of the idle rich" and predicted that the escapist nature of the story "will prove a welcome change of pace in theaters that have perhaps been overloaded with strictly war output."[10] "The boys in the camps, and in far-off places...will welcome the film for that very reason...there is no hint of war," wrote G.L. Burnett of The Knoxville Journal.[11]
Other critics were put off by the escapist narrative. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times said the film “lacked social significance” and contained "next to no drama," concluding that "it's a question of weighing, perhaps, whether this is the least best or the next to least best" of Sturge's five films.[12] He added that The Palm Beach Story suffered from the same fault as Sullivan's Travels: "a tricky and not too convincing ending."[12] Several reviews claimed the reliance on dialogue made the film “slow and garrulous."[13] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times claimed the film “is very short on action and very long on trivial talk…It should have been a breathless comedy. But only the actors are breathless—and that from talking too much.”[13] He added: “Perhaps he was making an experiment in conversational comedy.”[13]
Reporting a few hours after its release in the Rivoli Theatre, Ed Sullivan concluded:
"The cinema reporters did not like The Palm Beach Story...The reason that the critics felt let down by this flicker, obviously, was that they have come to look for something special from Sturges--wit, irony, undertones, the unconventional in a medium that often is conventional to the point of triteness...The Palm Beach Story, they felt, was third-rate Sturges and they announced the verdict, not with malice, but because they were rooting for another home run."[14]
Retrospective reviews
The Palm Beach Story went on to garner positive reviews from the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes with a 97% positive rating based on 30 critic reviews. Retrospectively, the film has received critical acclaim for representing "the culmination of the great screwball comedy tradition of the 1930s."[15] In 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader included the film in his unranked list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100.[16]
Screwball comedy is a film subgenre of the romantic comedy genre that became popular during the Great Depression, beginning in the early 1930s and thriving until the early 1940s, that satirizes the traditional love story. It has secondary characteristics similar to film noir, distinguished by a female character who dominates the relationship with the male central character, whose masculinity is challenged, and the two engage in a humorous battle of the sexes.
Claudette Colbert was an American actress. Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the late 1920s and progressed to films with the advent of talking pictures. Initially associated with Paramount Pictures, she gradually shifted to working as an actress free of the studio system. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for It Happened One Night (1934), and received two other Academy Award nominations during her career. Colbert's other notable films include Cleopatra (1934) and The Palm Beach Story (1942).
Sullivan's Travels is a 1941 American comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges. A satire on the film industry, it follows a famous Hollywood comedy director who, longing to make a socially relevant drama, sets out to live as a tramp to gain life experience for his forthcoming film. Along the way he unites with a poor aspiring actress who accompanies him. The title is a reference to Gulliver's Travels, the 1726 novel by satirist Jonathan Swift about another journey of self-discovery.
The Lady Eve is a 1941 American screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a 1944 American screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, and featuring Diana Lynn, William Demarest and Porter Hall. Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff reprise their roles from Sturges' 1940 film The Great McGinty. Set against the backdrop of World War II-era America, its plot follows a wayward young woman who, after attending a party with soldiers in her small town, awakens to find herself married and pregnant, with no memory of her new suitor's identity.
Preston Sturges was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic and mature, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene.
The Great McGinty is a 1940 political satire comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff and featuring William Demarest and Muriel Angelus. It was Sturges's first film as a director; he sold the story to Paramount Pictures for just $10 on condition he direct the film. Sturges received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Joel Albert McCrea was an American actor whose career spanned a wide variety of genres over almost five decades, including comedy, drama, romance, thrillers, adventures, and Westerns, for which he became best known.
Boom Town is a 1940 American Western film starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, and Hedy Lamarr, and directed by Jack Conway. The supporting cast features Frank Morgan, Lionel Atwill, and Chill Wills. A story written by James Edward Grant in Cosmopolitan magazine entitled "A Lady Comes to Burkburnett" provided the inspiration for the film. The film was produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Secret Fury is a 1950 American psychological thriller film noir directed by Mel Ferrer and starring Claudette Colbert, Robert Ryan and Jane Cowl.
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) is a satirical comedy-drama film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines and William Demarest, and featuring Raymond Walburn, Franklin Pangborn, Elizabeth Patterson, Bill Edwards and Freddie Steele.
The comedy of remarriage is a subgenre of American comedy films of the 1930s and 1940s. At the time, the Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, banned any explicit references to or attempts to justify adultery and illicit sex. The comedy of remarriage with the same spouse enabled filmmakers to evade this provision of the Code. The protagonists divorced, flirted with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together.
Christmas in July is a 1940 comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges based on his 1931 play A Cup of Coffee. It was Sturges' second film as writer-director, after The Great McGinty, and stars Dick Powell and Ellen Drew.
Arise, My Love is a 1940 American romantic comedy film directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland and Dennis O'Keefe. It was made by Paramount Pictures and written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry. Containing an interventionist message, it tells the love story of a pilot and a journalist who meet in the latter days of the Spanish Civil War and follows them through the early days of World War II. Colbert once said that Arise, My Love was her personal favorite motion picture of all the films she had made.
No Time for Love is a 1943 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Written by Claude Binyon, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo, the film is about a sophisticated female photographer assigned to photograph the tough "sandhog" construction workers at a tunnel project site. After saving one of the sandhogs from a fatal accident, she becomes attracted to this cocky well-built man they call Superman. Unsettled by her feelings, she hires the man as her assistant, believing that her attraction to him will diminish if she spends time with him. Their time together, however, leads to feelings of love, and she struggles to overcome her haughtiness and make her true feelings known.
Practically Yours is a 1944 comedic film made by Paramount Pictures, directed by Mitchell Leisen, written by Norman Krasna and starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray.
Diamond Jim is a 1935 biographical film based on the published biography Diamond Jim Brady by Parker Morell. It follows the life of legendary entrepreneur James Buchanan Brady, including his romance with entertainer Lillian Russell, and stars Edward Arnold, Jean Arthur, Cesar Romero and Binnie Barnes.
Along Came Jones is a 1945 American Western comedy film directed by Stuart Heisler and starring Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest, and Dan Duryea. The film was adapted by Nunnally Johnson from the 1944 novel Useless Cowboy by Alan Le May. It was the only feature film produced by Cooper during his long film career.
The Great Moment is a 1944 biographical film written and directed by Preston Sturges. Based on the book Triumph Over Pain (1940) by René Fülöp-Miller, it tells the story of Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, a 19th-century Boston dentist who discovered the use of ether for general anesthesia. The film stars Joel McCrea and Betty Field, and features Harry Carey, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn and Porter Hall.
Robert Dudley was a dentist turned film character actor who, in his 35-year career, appeared in more than 115 films.
References
↑ James Curtis, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges, Limelight, 1984 p162
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