314 - The Palm Beach Story, United States, 1942. Dir. Preston Sturges.
And they all lived happily ever after!
Or did they?
1937 . . . 1938 . . . 1939 . . . 1940 . . . 1941 . . . 1942.
Tom and Gerry have been married for five years. But things are not going as well as they started. Frankly, they did not start so well either. During the opening credits, as Gioacchino Rossini's William Tell Overture plays rapidly, interrupted with freeze frames by Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March, some kind of hijinx seem to be going on. A wedding. Fainting. A bride bound and gagged. What?
Tom is an architect and inventor. He has designed steel rods that can stretch over the rooftops of the city, like tennis racket strings, to create an airport runway suspended in air downtown. How convenient! All he needs is $97,000 to build a prototype. Things cost less in those days.
Meanwhile, Geraldine, or Gerry, sits at home feeling useless. She cannot cook or sew, and does not know how otherwise to help her husband. They are over their heads in debt and behind on their rent. They are on the verge of losing their apartment.
968 Park Ave.
Duplex Apartment for Rent
The Wienie King comes to call. Robert Dudley, 73, plays a grizzled diminutive cowboy millionaire who invented the Texas Wienie. "Lay off 'em; you'll live longer."
He walks through the available apartment without knowing the current tenants still inhabit it. Gerry hides behind the shower curtain in the bathtub. He finds her.
He likes her.
"I don't suppose you go with the flat? No, I suppose that's too much to hope for."
Enough to pay off their debt, pay the rent, buy a new dress, and have fourteen dollars left over.
When Tom comes home he suspects the worst. He is jealous.
So this fellow gave you the look?
At his age it was more of a wink.
Seven hundred dollars! And sex didn't even enter into it, I suppose?
Sex always has something to do with it, Dear.
He wants to find this Wienie King and teach him a lesson.
Tom and Gerry argue. She loves him. She wants to support him. She believes she can help him. If not with her skills then maybe with her looks.
"You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything."
He says No. He does not want her to demean herself. So she decides to he will do better without her.
She leaves.
She goes to Palm Beach.
She takes the train. With no money. But with her looks. The ticket-taker helps her.
Thank you for your chivalry.
Any time from 8 to 12.
While looking for a bunk she meets another millionaire, John D. Hackensacker III (a fusion of John D. Rockefeller and Hackensack, NJ), played comically by teen idol Rudy Vallee in a role that transformed him from crooner to comedian.
Back home Tom is flummoxed.
But the Wienie King comes back. And demands that Tom go get his wife back. He gives him the money to take a plane and meet her in Palm Beach.
Tom is the cat and Gerry, the mouse.
And the plot precedes a later classic comedy, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), with the train ride--with singing on the train and climbing into the top bunk above a future date--the trip to Florida, staying in a hotel, pretending to be someone they are not, the short man in the Captain's cap. Just without the gangster plot.
With an ending one of the boldest deus ex machinas in film.
A screwball is a baseball pitch that breaks in the opposite direction of a curveball or slider. The batter expects the ball to curve one way, but it curves the other way.
A screwball comedy is a comedic film made in the 1930s and early 1940s featuring a romantic plot, sexual chemistry, fast talking, banter, innuendo, mistaken identity, cross-dressing, strong women, slapstick, farce, courtship and marriage or remarriage.
These characteristics are reminiscent of English Renaissance comedy. Shakespeare and his peers. Francis Beaumont. John Fletcher. Thomas Dekker. Thomas Heywood. Ben Jonson. John Lyly. Thomas Middleton.
The Palm Beach Story stands in a line of movies about marriage and remarriage.
The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), My Favorite Wife (1940), Love Crazy (1941), The Lady Eve (1941),
Note also the similarity in title between The Philadelphia Story and The Palm Beach Story.
Preston Sturges fills his film with strong character actors with fully developed and memorable personalities. He is also willing to take his time with set pieces, stopping to enjoy the people and events on the street, in the train station, on the train, on the boat, and at the hotel, without feeling compelled to move the story economically along. For him it works usually.
As more people get to know him, more will discover his importance in the history of the movies as one of the great writers, one of the great directors, one of the great storytellers, and one of the great entertainers.
"That's hard to say with false teeth."
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