The Palm Beach Story (1942)
(On Cable TV, February 2020) It’s not often that a classic Hollywood movie has me blinking in confusion, rewinding and starting again to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything, but then again very few Hollywood movies have as fast-paced an opening as writer-director Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, which crams a film’s worth of romantic comedy hijinks into a three-minute-long summary (if that), then proceeds to tell the sequel to that non-existing first film. (Pay attention, though, because there are a lot of clues in that opening flash to foreshadow the otherwise confounding last minute of the film.) Not that things get any sedate after that, considering that our happily married couple at the end of that film summary find themselves out of cash to develop an invention. In the finest screwball tradition, they have a flash of inspiration—why not divorce, let her find a rich husband, and allow that new guy to finance the development of the invention? If you think that’s insane, you haven’t met the other characters of the tale—including a shooting-obsessed hunting club eager to transform a train car into a shooting gallery. Part of Sturges’ miraculous first years, The Palm Beach Story is very, very funny from beginning to end. It’s filled with characters acting in ways we’d consider crazy, good lines of dialogue and plenty of screwball sequences—and it doesn’t skimp on a very romantic and satisfying ending. This is all enlivened by a charming throwback view of the 1930s as seen from the upper-class, from nighttime trains to fancy yachts and elaborate aristocratic entanglements. Claudette Colbert is utterly adorable in the lead role here, with Joel McRae providing good support as a nominally less-crazy husband. I know a lot of viewers have their favourites in Sturges’ filmography—either The Lady Eve or Sullivan’s Travels or maybe even The Big McGuinty. I’ll have to re-watch all of them to make up my mind, but for now I’m putting up The Palm Beach Story as my favourite by a nose—perhaps, unlike the better-known others, because it came out of nowhere and hooked me so quickly.