Madame et ses flirts

A real hoot from Preston Sturges, a rollicking watch which is over all too soon. From the brilliant stop-start sequence over the titles, confusing right until the last frame which at last makes crazy sense (I'm sure Preston would forgive the oxymoron!) of it all, taking in a madcap menagerie of characters, every bit as eccentric as their names or nicknames indicate, for example get these; the Wiener King, the Ale and Quail Club, Princess Centimillia not to mention John D Hackensacker the Third. The set-piece comedic set-ups at the couple's flat, train station, on-board the train and on Hackensacker's yacht are played to the hilt with lightning fast delivery of dialogue so good you take for granted the comic timing so effortlessly achieved. Star of the show is the lovely effervescent Claudette Colbert, almost 40 at the time of making this movie but looking years younger in a variety of differing costumes, taking in over-sized men's pyjamas to the very best costumes that Hackensacker can buy.She's an audio-visual treat, putting into effect her madcap idea for the betterment of her unlucky, under-achieving, unrecognised husband, played with straight-laced, straight-faced aplomb by previous Sturges alumni, Joel McCrea. There are far too many other minor highlights amongst the supporting cast along the way to mention, with almost everyone in the cast getting to make some kind of wisecrack and the whole is served up as a riotous upper-class Marx Brothers-type confection for the 40's replete with a sub-Harpo stooge as Princess Centimillia's adoring numb-skull suitor. There are so many scenes which just fizz and crackle with wit and occasionally bawdy humour, as Sturges takes pot-shots at sexual mores and the idle rich. Rudy Vallee is great in his role as the hopelessly smitten, hapless multi-millionaire and Mary Astor equally winning as his caustic, man-mad sister. To summarise, 90 minutes of sheer Hollywood bliss topped off with that magic Sturges touch.

One element of this film that shouldn't be ignored is that it, like "Sullivan's Travels" and "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," is a conscious lampooning of earlier movies from the 1930s. It takes a standard, conventional plot from those movies and turns it on its ear. The same plot can be seen for example in the Paramount movie from 1931, "Up Pops the Devil," with Carole Lombard and Norman Foster (who coincidentally was Claudette Colbert's first husband). In that movie, a wife who still loves her husband wants to divorce him for his own good; she thinks she's just a noose around his neck, and once rid of her, he'll become a success. It's set in the same upper crust of society as "The Palm Beach Story," with a millionaire suitor for the wife and a nymphomaniac girl for the husband. Here, everything is played straight, with as much pathos and melodrama being milked out of the situation as can be. In "The Palm Beach Story" though, the same basic plot and characters are used, but it's the comedic potential and wackiness of the situation that's emphasized, to marvelous effect.

The subplot with the twins, glanced at in the beginning and end of the picture, is another conscious lampooning of conventional movies, here a lampooning of the structure of movies themselves, of their conventional beginnings and endings. It's not meant to be taken seriously; as McCrea's character casually says at the end, it's all stuff "for another movie."

No words can be found to adequately praise Claudette Colbert's performance. Joel McCrea is good too, as the prototypical wooden 1930s leading man. Rudy Vallee is absolutely hilarious as a "momma's boy" version of John D. Rockefeller, as is Mary Astor as his rich nymphomaniac sister. Her eunuch, Toto, played by Sig Arno, seems straight out of an Ernst Lubitch picture, perhaps a Sturges nod to the master. Quite a few scenes of the film, in their settings and atmosphere, pay homage to Lubitsch. Sturges does the "Lubitsch touch" proud, especially in those two scenes when Colbert sits on McCrea's lap so that he can undo the back of her dress, with the two of them both times melting into a kiss, and the scene ending with a fade out, leaving little doubt as to what will happen next. The second scene is particularly romantic, done as Rudy Vallee sings "Good Night Sweet Heart," itself a standard of the 1930s. Vallee also sings a line of "Isn't It Romantic," a song introduced in the luminous 1932 film "Love Me Tonight," directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The music in the film itself hearkens back to those great romantic comedies of the 1930s.

It's nice to see Sturges's stock company of actors popping up here as well. I noticed William Demarest say his name was "Bill Docker," the same name his character had in Preston Sturges's "Christmas in July."

In short, "The Palm Beach Story" is a wonderful film, whose richness can really be appreciated when seen in context, in the context of those old 1930s Paramount films, both the melodramatic ones like "Up Pops the Devil," that it lampoons, and the comedic, romantic ones like "Love Me Tonight" and "One Hour with You," that it pays homage to.

"The Palm Beach Story" is a lopsided comedy (part of it's funny and part of it's not), but the movie is back-ended with all of the funniest bits, so it allows you to forget the slower parts and it sends you out on a high.

After a sensationally bizarre opening credits sequence, the movie settles down into a slightly less zingy version of "The Awful Truth." Claudette Colbert thinks her marriage to Joel McCrea isn't working, even though he doesn't think likewise. She thinks she's not a capable enough wife; he thinks he's a failure as a man and husband. She takes off for Palm Beach to get a divorce despite all of his attempts to stop her. On the train to Florida, she meets a wealthy tycoon who wants to marry her and give her everything she could possibly want, but she realizes that what she really wants is her husband.

This is all told with a lot of wit and flair. The early scenes with Colbert and McCrea drag, and an extended bit of nonsense on the train involving the Ale and Quail Hunting Club is superfluous and not very funny. But once everyone shows up in Palm Beach, the film becomes a delight, and a bonus is added in the person of Mary Astor, who plows on to the screen about half way through the film and decimates everyone in her path with her quick-tongued and hilarious performance as a rich society lady with a lot of time on her hands and her sights set on Colbert's husband.

What I liked about this film was that Colbert and McCrea don't seem to have a lot of chemistry in their early scenes together; he seems so stiff and bland, and you don't really blame her for wanting to get away. But after you've seen both of them with other people, they seem so much more right for each other when they get back together, and there's all this chemistry you didn't initially realize was there. I don't know if that's due to their performances, the writing, the directing, or whether it was just a happy accident, but it works beautifully.

Grade: A-

An inventor (Joel McCrea) needs cash to develop his big idea. His wife (Claudette Colbert), who loves him, decides to raise it for him by divorcing him and marrying a millionaire.

One of the more interesting things about this film is the trouble it had getting made thanks to the censorship office. Although there is no explicit sexuality or foul language, it does have some questionable themes. There is talk of prostitution, and apparently the censors did not like the way marriage and divorce were handled so lightly. Even after the necessary cuts, this remains a strong central part of the plot and humor.

Interestingly, the Bill Hader interview on the Criterion disc adds a lot. You might not think of Hader as a film historian or critic, and maybe he is not. But he really understands Sturges and how Sturges wrote his scripts. He connects the dots between Sturges and the Coen brothers, as well as explaining how each character, no matter how minor, is important to the story.

The Palm Beach Story is one of the best examples of the wonderful nonsense that Hollywood used to turn out in its best comedies. It's only in the movies that circumstances like these happen and it's quite beyond my powers to describe them.

Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert come to a dry patch in their marriage and decide to split. Colbert takes a train to Palm Springs and McCrea pursues her by plane. And they both wind up with a brother and sister pair of gazillionaires in the persons of Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor.

I will say that Preston Sturges did kind of reach into left field for his romantic ending, but that's half the fun of The Palm Beach Story.

Only half because the other half is the fun of the journey. Not much happens to Joel, but Claudette is on one wild ride when she's adopted by a gang of drunken millionaire sportsmen known as the Ale and Quail Club.

The proponents of gun control should get the right to The Palm Beach Story and run it at all opportunities. Seeing these louts, plastered out of their minds and shooting off their weapons is pretty funny and the best argument I know for gun control. Preston Sturges used some of his favorite players from his usual stock company for members of Ale and Quail.

Also look for a very funny performance by Robert Dudley as the 'wienie king' whose encounter with Colbert sets everything in motion.

Rudy Vallee gets to sing in this which is also nice. He sings a chorus of Isn't It Romantic and then sings his own hit, Goodnight Sweetheart which has the opposite effect from what he intended.

The Palm Beach Story is the object lesson in how to make screen comedy and make it to last.