The most self-aware of all the Classic Hollywood directors is Preston Sturges. Making your work meta and self-conscious is one of the most modern things you can do on TV and in the movies today, despite the fact that not all of Sturges’ films have aged as well as those of some of his peers.
His film “The Palm Beach Story” is so knowing of the time period it exists in and the films that were popular in its day that although it remains as sharp and as biting as ever, the audience has changed and is less familiar with the screwball comedies Sturges is poking fun at.
From the opening credits Sturges toys with his audience. A couple has an obvious meet cute, she’s seen tied and trapped in a closet, and he’s running to the alter before a frazzled and confused looking priest before a set of intertitles announces, “And they lived happily ever after… Or did they?” Is this a movie we need to have seen? Will this summary flashback be critical to the understanding of the movie?
Of course not. But everything in these images looks pulled from some mediocre screwball comedy Hollywood had been churning out in droves. It’s Sturges’ way of winking to his audience that although this movie isn’t going to look or feel different than any other popular genre movie like it, this movie knows better. It knows Hollywood leans on the crutches of its obscenely attractive leads and stereotypical character actors needlessly inserted for comic relief. “The Palm Beach Story” will do the same, but there’s an added layer of depth and observance here that everyone seems to know.
My guess is however that this would’ve been infuriating to audiences in 1942. In the early days of the mockumentary when a movie like “This is Spinal Tap” can not only flop but literally confuse people as to whether a band actually exists, how does any director 40 years earlier expect to make a film that is knowingly cliched and corny and do so only for the reason because it’s funnier that way?
“The Palm Beach Story” looks at a financially struggling married couple trying to make ends meet five years into their marriage. Gerry (Claudette Colbert) feels that her husband Tom (Joel McCrea) can find more success without her tying him down, and when her good looking figure conveniently lands them in some money, she goes off to Palm Beach where she can divorce Tom, land a millionaire and then send the money back to Tom.
It’s a story that only makes any sense in a screwball comedy, but Sturges deliberately makes it inherently unbelievable at every point that pushes the plot forward. There’s the wealthy old man in the sausage business who willingly donates hundreds to Gerry after catching her in her bathrobe. Then a drunken hunting team wreaks havoc on a train, forcing her meet cute with J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), one of the richest men in the world. By the way, only in a Classic Hollywood movie could anyone be named Hackensacker III.
Sturges even finds a place for the completely idiotic character Toto, a comic foil with such a thick and awful German accent that to laugh at him without a hint of irony would be impossible.
The whole movie plays on this added level of self-awareness, yet “The Palm Beach Story” remains one of Sturges’ underrated masterpieces. No Oscar nominations at the time, and today it is seen as not as drenched in faux Hollywood glamor as “Sullivan’s Travels” or brimming with the comedic performance of a lifetime by Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve.” It’s likewise a poor nominee for “baby’s first screwball comedy,” because it requires a strong sense of the genre, both good and bad, to truly appreciate it.