The Palm Beach Story

Preston Sturges' manic farce begins without a word being spoken for its first few minutes as it plows through its setup without giving the audience a chance to catch its breath. Like his earlier masterpiece Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story begins with the end of another movie. In this tale of marital stress, he quickly sets up the marriage of the two main characters as they race to get to the church on time and quickly gets to the title card "and they lived happily ever after." This tends to be the end of most romantic comedies and its rushed pace shows Sturges' distaste for the demands of genre.

A few seconds later, a second title card appears that reads "or did they?" From there, the film gets down to the business of telling its tale. Fast forwarding to a few years later, the couple (well-intentioned engineer/dreamer Joel McCrea and pragmatic beauty Claudette Colbert) are in dire financial straits and the need for material comfort is beginning to have an effect on their marriage. Colbert's encounter with the near-deaf "Texas weenie king" in her shower (I'll leave it up to you to discover how that happens) leaves her a few hundred dollars richer and, before long, the seemingly sensible woman has the solution to the problems that money (or the lack thereof) has placed on her marriage: she heads down to Palm Springs for a quickie divorce and begins her hunt for a millionaire.

The film propels itself from there into a series of comic set pieces that defy conventional logic but seem perfectly at home in the bizarre screwball comedy universe Sturges creates for the film. For instance, a hunting club with a decidedly wealthy membership drunkenly decides to do some hunting on a cross country train. But there are a couple of underlying truths that Sturges wisely employs to give all this some kind of grounding in the real world. One, that a different system of law and justice exist for the richest members of society and two, that the same alternate system can be exploited by an attractive woman who's willing to employ her charms to get what she wants.

What Colbert decides she wants is the favor of Rudy Vallee, who appears as an upstanding (and very gullible) multi-millionaire. Imagine Donald Trump filtered through Jimmy Stewart and you get the idea. The film even finds ways to work a couple of musical sequences in to take advantage of Vallee's presence (he was better known at the time for his singing than for his screen work). In fact, Sturges finds ways to weave in a lot of seemingly disparate elements, including a deus ex machina that will leave you laughing at its audacity.

Fans of Preston Sturges have been under-served by the DVD medium (only three other of his titles are available in the format) and Universal's disc of The Palm Beach Story continues this tradition by offering NO EXTRAS WHATSOEVER besides subtitles in French and Spanish (and I'm sure the subtleties of Sturges' dialogue are lost in the translations).

Come on, you mean to tell me Rudy Behlmer wasn't available to do a commentary? Or any of the contemporary directors (like Alexander Payne) who toil under Sturges' long shadow? His widow Sandy Sturges is still alive! This is just shoddy work on Universal's part and I can only hope they shell out a little extra for future releases.

But the transfer is nice, the price is low, and the film is good for enough laughs that it's still worth a place on your shelf. -- Christopher Hyatt