Preston Sturges was the only true comic genius of classic Hollywood comedy. He was the most artistically ambitious comic director of his time. He wanted to do everything better than anyone else around him. He wanted to be the best screenwriter, the best director, the best synthesizer of comic styles — not just of film comedy, but of the literary tradition going back to the Greeks. He wanted his films to be the wittiest, funniest, most complex, most cosmopolitan, most verbal, most slapstick, most cinematic, and above all, the most reverent about the Hollywood conventions of rom-com and screwball while simultaneously ridiculing their conventionality mercilessly. And he achieved all that with stunning ease and fluidity. It’s no wonder that he managed to make very few films compared with his fellow Olympians like Lubitsch or Hawks. Of Sturges’s Seven Wonders (The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story, Sullivan’s Travels, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero — actually eight if you count Unfaithfully Yours), The Palm Beach Story seems to be treated by critics and film historians with a kind of cool respect, compared with their ecstasies of admiration for The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, and the wartime satires. But I love it more than those others.
Of the core meta-plots of Western comedy the crown jewel is the ridiculous plan that the characters treat as plausible and works out in the end, contrary to all reason. It’s the archetypal situation of slightly cracked go-getters who have no business winning out in the end, but the Comic Spirit adores them. Its most illustrious ancestor is Aristophanes — think of the crazy plans that propel the action of The Birds, The Frogs, and Lysistrata. Classical scholars often note that this figure of a restless, loony planner reflected ancient Athenians’ attraction to fast-talking, golden-tongued plotters and mover-shakers. Classical Hollywood loved them, too, and for the same reasons. The comedies of the age are so packed with hilarious “designs for living” and contorted revenge plots that it’s hard to think of a film that doesn’t include at least one of them. It was the currency of comedy by the time Sturges began directing. Sturges had a whole culture of Crazy Plan Comedies to work with and to shape to his own ends.
While almost all of Sturges’s films involve more than one crazy plan unfolding independent of the others, The Palm Beach Story is a Grand Fugue of them. Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea), a soberly daffy inventor-architect, seeks funding for his plan to build a sort of mesh screen airport over New York City. Unsurprisingly, he can’t secure any enthusiastic investors.
Meanwhile, and by contrast, Tom’s beautiful wife Gerry (Claudette Colbert) receives unexpected funding of her own from a half-deaf Texas sausage-millionaire-codger, “The Weenie King,” not for any “practical” project, but simply because she’s a beauty about to be evicted from her and Tom’s high-rent apartment for lack of funds.
When Tom balks at his wife accepting the The Weenie King’s donation, Gerry, used to a life of comfortable luxury and tired of being swamped by debts, feels both she and Tom would be better off if they split up. She, because a gorgeous dish can always find a kind, rich admirer, and he, because she can use her charms and new connections to steer funding for the airport his way. The opening scenes are stunning in their economy, humor, and design. Gerry and Tom are near-abstract inversions of each other. The stiff, dignified, masculine husband can’t support his wife, can’t realize his crazy plan despite its “practicality,” and can’t prevent his wife from being assisted in her plan to leave him by a multitude of helpers provided by chance. Gerry, by contrast, doesn’t work or have any “practical” plans to build anything, but she has feminine beauty, and she knows how to put that to work.
The dialogue is among the best that Sturges ever concocted. PBS is the only one of his films that revolves around an adult married couple who are used to talking with each other. Gerry’s argument for gold-digging is irresistibly plausible. The part was written for Colbert, who at this point in her career could deliver the most suspect reasoning with perfect assurance and sincerity. McCrea, for his part, also plays to his by-then established type, the stern and noble manly man, standing up for upstanding values, but now sullen and humiliated by his professional and marital failures. He’s a sad guy. But unlike the utterly de-phallicized Hopsie in The Lady Eve or David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby, he has an ace in the hole. He’s handy with zippers. (Once again Universal Studios has blocked some clips — but not others. Go figure.)
Gerry’s plan will work, if only because she can’t help but get help for it from admiring strangers. She acquires a fairy godfather in The Weenie King, and sets off into the unknown, assisted by, in order, a New York cop, a taxi driver, a Penn Station ticket-taker, the Ale and Quail Gun Club (a group of rich drunk and demented hunters on a spree), and ultimately by J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), one of the richest men in the world. And if her plan works, she will indeed provide for Tom. The phallus game is in full play and in typically screwball fashion — Tom keeps losing at it as Gerry keeps gaining. Along the way, Gerry’s plan will intersect with the Gun Club’s planned holiday and J.D’s plans to find the right wife, while Tom’s project to recover Gerry will intersect not only with J.D.’s competing plan, but the erotically voracious designs of J.D.’s sister, Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor). The Sturges genius is evident, with not a little debt to Lubitsch. The ostensibly self-interested gold-digger beauty is actually becoming the loving fairy benefactor of the husband she is in the process of divorcing.
As in most screwball comedies, the heroes are behind the eight ball and the heroines work intricate wonders even when they’re not trying. Despite a night of evident connubial satisfaction, Gerry is intent on her purpose, and leaves Tom the morning after. She has only a suitcase to her name (and even that she has to abandon on her journey), but she’s confident that she can get “anything without doing anything.” And thus commences not only the plot intrigue, but Sturges’s particular genius with the fetish game. Though The Palm Spring Story is no match for Easy Living in this respect (Mitchell Leisen’s prop-obsession takes that movie into giddy object-oriented fantasy), Sturges is always masterful with phallic object-drama. As Gerry leaves the apartment in her mousiest attire, Tom runs after her wrapped in a bulky comforter — a “wrap” that’s made more necessary because his p.j.’s pants fall to the floor, as if making a point. Gerry’s moving out completes Tom’s full loss of masculine dignity — first the “wrap,” then the pants, then falling down the stairs, all to the typical Sturges cartoon soundtrack.
While none of the other male characters have particularly potent phallic jam, they all seem to have more than Tom. With no money of her own, Gerry nonetheless acquires the help of random men who have more power than Tom — cop, cabbie, and the shotgun-happy Quail and Ale club, who adopt her as a mascot as they shoot up their private railroad car in a demented spree. And of course, the nonpareil codger king of weenies. Escaping from Ale and Quail’s chaos, Gerry finds a free upper berth in a Pullman car, and in her attempt to climb up into it, steps on the pince-nez attached to the nose of the passenger in the lower berth, who happens to be Hackensacker, an indignity that actually occurs twice.
Hackensacker is another one of Sturges’s inspired characters. Super-rich, but honestly pretending to be penny-wise, he’s traveling in a Pullman — if the Ale and Quail can secure a private car, surely the richest man in American can, too. But he doesn’t. Hackensacker is one of Sturges’s many arithmetic comedians. (I’ve noted a propos Easy Living that Sturges loves to make comedy out of counting.) Parodying the quintessentially American penurious capitalist-protestant spirit, Hackensacker devotedly inscribes every little outlay of money in a little book, but never adds them up.
Rudy Vallee’s phallic challenges are played to the hilt, but he’s also a sympathetic guy genuinely moved by Gerry. Vallee’s style of soft masculinity, so powerful in the radio days of the late Twenties, was more than slightly ridiculous in the early 40s, but Sturges does wonders with it. Like an inadvertent dominatrix, Gerry smashes two pairs of spectacles right on his face (it happens all the time, he tells her). But of course he’s the richest man in America, not to put the contrast with Tom too blatantly, and though his various fetishes — pince-nez, captain’s hat, account book — are not very impressive, he has the loot to back them up. Everybody’s got more jam than Tom. To press the point, Sturges has Gerry, having lost her luggage, appear in the dining car for breakfast with J.D. in a elegant makeshift creation composed of pajamas and a Pullman blanket.
With almost Structuralist humor, Sturges contrasts even Gerry’s masterful relationship to bedding with Tom’s ridiculous “comforter.”
Smitten with Gerry, the shy but endearing moneybags J.D. finally finds a woman he can buy things for, and it looks like the Cinderella’s plan is working perfectly. Her little Prince Charming takes her to a world in which she’ll know no debt, she’ll be wrapped in haute couture (recall that Tom doesn’t even notice Gerry’s new dress at the beginning of the film) — and to top everything off, she can persuade J.D. to funnel some of his largesse back to her soon-to-be-ex-husband. And after her divorce, she can live honestly in luxury as the wife of the richest man in America. What could go wrong?
Well, meanwhile, back in New York, The Weenie King returns to the apartment and runs into Tom. He not only disabuses him of his jealous suspicions, he explains everything clearly to Tom. (The Weenie King is one of my favorite Sturges characters. So hard of hearing that he misunderstands practically everything, he’s also the character who understands the world best, and can explain it, too — and fix things, to boot.)
And Sturges makes sure we aware that his apparent debilities don’t mean that he’s not fully in control of the phallus game. Even he is more potent than Tom.
He, too, funded by The Weenie King, Tom sets off after Gerry to win her back. Gerry is stunned when, arriving in Palm Beach on J.D.’s big yacht, she sees Tom waiting for her. She has allowed J.D. to construct a story about a somewhat abusive husband she’s running from, and can’t let on that the ruggedly handsome interloper (he’s Joel McCrae, remember) is him. Tom, of course, knows nothing about her dalliance with J.D. Their plans are not meshing. On the spot, Gerry improvises, introducing him as her brother, Captain McGlue (a sublime Sturges name). Add the complication that J.D.’s thrice divorced and twice annulled ever-amorous sister, Princess Centimillia (yet another great name!) immediately takes a shine to Tom/Capt. McGlue, and insists that he stay in their Palm Beach mansion with them.
The Palm Beach Story has some uncanny overlaps with Colbert’s other comic masterpiece, Midnight, which was released three years earlier. (I confess I’m not a great fan of It Happened One Night.) Given Sturges’s love of parodistic one-upmanship and his incredible receptivity to the work of his contemporaries, it’s safe to assume that there’s even an element of homage in this. Colbert and Astor star in both Cinderella stories. (They are Astor’s best comic roles.) There’s a fairy godfather in both. And in both, Colbert plays a luminous gold-digger with a heart so pure it’s an insult to call her that. She’s prevented from hooking up with an eligible rich suitor by her more salt-of-the-earth true love, who is forced to pretend that he is not who he truly is. In both, her character has to constantly improvise fictions to prevent the truth from coming out. There’s good reason to think that Sturges was showing off his chops — to Midnight‘s director, Mitchell Leisen, with whom Sturges had a rocky history (Leisen had directed two of Sturges’s screenplays, Easy Living and Remember the Night, not to Sturges’s satisfaction) and to Midnight‘s screenwriters, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, the only comic writers in Hollywood who could be considered Sturges’s peers. (And not for nothing. In many ways, the Brackett-Wilder team was the model for synthesizing European and American comic models, something Sturges could do all by himself.)
Tom’s sudden presence is a monkey-wrench in Gerry’s plan. Things were going so smoothly — so much that J.D. has prepared a surprise for her. He plans to propose marriage, and to sweeten the deal he arranges to serenade her under her window — a window in her room that adjoins Tom’s because, well, he’s her “brother.” Gerry needs Tom to be gone or neither of her plans — marrying a rich guy and funding Tom’s airport — will succeed.
From this point on, Palm Beach Story‘s conclusion moves into Escher-like comic-ontological delirium. We have Rudy Vallee playing J.D. Hackensacker hesitatingly crooning (fronting an appropriately opulent orchestra) “Isn’t It Romantic,” one of the real Rudy Vallee’s signature radio songs — but also a tune that runs through the underscore of Sturges’s monster success of the previous year, The Lady Eve, as if it had been written for it.
As the sweet song swells, Gerry becomes more and more frustrated, until she loses her control over the phallus game altogether. No fetish has been able to stop her, but one. Nothing has been able to block her smooth design, but one thing. A zipper.
We’ve been here before.
We’re not done yet, but this is probably the place to mention the crazy rationality of Sturges’s imagination, and the ways in which The Palm Beach Story emphasizes his feel for sophisticated European comedies. There’s more than the usual Lubitschean touch. (I’ve opined in other posts that Sturges was a great admirer, and occasional emulator, of Lubitsch.) But it goes beyond that. PBS has some of the traits of Parisian romantic boulevard farce, so sophisticated about designs for living that they approached erotic cynicism. And so formally classical that they revel in symmetries. I mentioned the Structuralist joke comparing Gerry’s and Tom’s sartorial bricolages. In general, in PBS the volume of comic doublings is off the chart, doublings that can’t help but interfere with and invert each other. Two bedclothes jokes. Gerry’s two new dresses (the one Tom ignores and the one J.D. buys for Gerry). The Weenie King’s two interventions. Two fake captains (Tom’s Captain McGlue and J.D.s yachting uniform). Two mutually inverting suitors: Tom, the husband, without money and charm gets the girl, while J.D., the man with money and charm doesn’t. (Ah, but hold on, he does, actually). Two eligible (technically) beautiful women with plans: Gerry, with no money but principles, sees her plan undone by sex (and zippers), but it works out in the end– even without divorce; and the Princess, the much-divorced/annulled sex-crazy beauty with money doesn’t get her man. (Keep holding on.) And the two zippers that Gerry can’t unzip herself. Only Tom can. And that’s enough to win the phallus game.
That would be enough for most writer-directors, but not for Sturges. Even though we might want to say, with Mussolini in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek that “enough is sufficiency,” it’s not a real Sturges job until sufficiency is exceeded and the doubles are doubled. Two of every two. Two sets of twins and two endings — one at the beginning, and one at the other end. And they are the same, somehow.
PBS surely has one of the zaniest conclusions of any romantic comedy. The great French farceur, Feydeau, spoke of the algebra of farce. The action is simultaneously crazy and completely logical. The audience, viewing the action onstage like a crowd of gods, laughs because the sufferings of the comic characters make perfect sense — formally. They didn’t see the logic at first, but in hindsight it’s clear. So, what does Sturges do? The situation is dire. J.D. can’t marry Gerry because she already has a husband, whom she loves, and who is the master of her zippers. The Princess can’t marry Capt. McGlue because he’s already married to Gerry. What is to be done? So many dreams dashed. Until, that is, J.D. asks Gerry whether she has a sister. Just a twin, she replies. Tom has one, too. Even Shakespeare might have been satisfied with that. Not Sturges. We’re thrown back to the hectic opening credits, which depict an intrigue (it’s too hard to explain) of a Gerry lookalike in a wedding dress (or is it Gerry?) somehow prevented from attending her wedding, Tom (or a lookalike) ready in the church, and then a wedding between God knows who. At the end of the film we have what could pass as a conventional comedy-concluding double wedding. As Tom and Gerry attend as best man and bridesmaid, J.D.is apparently marrying Gerry’s identical twin and the Princess (in white! sheesh!) is marrying Tom’s identical twin. Neither twin seems to be quite sure what the hell is going on. Nor does the audience. So who got married at the beginning? Why was there such a kerfuffle? What has been going on? As Tom notes in passing “that’s another plot entirely.” This is not Feydeauesque algebra. It’s close to Shakespearean pixillation, as “every Jack shall have his Jill,” but even Midsummer Night’s Dream makes more sense than pulling twin twins out of a hat at the finish line. So we’re forced to go back to the unhinged wedding at the beginning. Was Gerry’s sister supposed to marry Tom? Was Tom’s twin originally supposed to marry Gerry? Is PBS‘s final double wedding the Comic Spirit’s last minute resolution of a problem we didn’t know existed until Tom and Gerry needed some comic divine intervention to get out of jam so they could live happily every after? (Or did they?)
Just a wee note on twins. Bergson thought twins evoke laughter because they indicate the “absent-mindedness of nature.” Given its infinite creative power, why would nature produce two identical beings if it was paying attention to what it was doing? I’ve always enjoyed that idea, but I don’t think it’s even remotely why twins are potentially so funny. It’s because they are error-generating persons. That’s what the Menaechmi, Amphitryon, and The Comedy of Errors are about. Two humans who can be mistaken for each other (it helps when they are also dressed exactly alike) yet the audience knows they are very different because they are human persons who act differently from each other. With his characteristic chutzpah, Sturges inverts that situation, too, by producing two sets of twins not as problems, but as solutions. Are the two Gerries different? The two Toms? Who the hell knows, but The Palm Beach Story doesn’t care. If they’ll do for J.D. and the Princess Centimillia, they’ll do for Tom and Gerry. They’re solutions of a comic algebraic function that even Feydeau probably wouldn’t have imagined. (Or are they?)