Thursday Minute
No. 80 | April 22, 2010

O Preston, Where Art Thou?

Our theme this week
Films of Preston Sturges

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Great McGinty (1940)
Tuesday         —   The Lady Eve (1941)
Wednesday    —   Sullivan’s Travels (1942)

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Preston Sturges knew a few things about marriage:  he had four wives.  Any movie of his had something to say about the institution but in The Palm Beach Story it gets the full treatment.  No surprise, holy matrimony is not so holy in Sturges’s screwball world.

The film opens on a wedding day, the bride and groom played by Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea.  The action starts during the credits and if you watch carefully, you’ll realize it doesn’t add up.  The final scene is another wedding, with a hint for viewers that (arguably) ties it all together.

Five years into the marriage, Gerry Jeffers decides that she needs a divorce.  It’s not that she doesn’t love her husband, Tom—she loves him quite all right—but she needs money and she’s determined to find a man who has some.  Given this is a Sturges film, it’s not as simple as that.  Her quest gets her on train trip to Palm Beach, during which she meets one of Sturges’s most exquisite creations, the Ale and Quail hunting club, a crazy collection of millionaires with a fondness for gunplay and booze.  She barely survives.  Gerry meets John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), a mild-mannered but even richer eccentric, and the two of them share a memorable ride on his yacht.  The conversation inevitably gets around to the sexes and we get lines like this:  “Chivalry is not only dead, it’s decomposed”; and ”That’s one of the tragedies of this life, that the men who are most in need of a beating-up are always enormous.”  Eventually, Tom arrives in town, and it all gets sorted out—that is, who gets the money and who gets married.

The Palm Beach Story is McCrea’s second of three movies with Sturges.  The director had a loyal company of stock players and crew who worked with him across many films.  They include Robert Greig, Frank Moran, Jimmy Conlin, and Franklin Pangborn.  No one was as familiar a face as Sturges regular William Demarest, with ten credits total (including all five films featured here this week).

---

The Palm Beach Story
Preston Sturges, director

---

The Palm Beach Story
The Ale and Quail Club

 

---

Quote of Note
“You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything.”
—Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert), The Palm Beach Story (1942)

…58…59…60.