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Jan 26, 2015 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

After five years of wedded bliss, Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) have hit a rocky patch in their marriage. The couple’s money troubles have snowballed to the point where they’re being evicted from their Manhattan apartment; Tom can’t seem to find investors for his plan to build a floating airport, and Gerry doesn’t see the point in him maintaining upkeep on a wife who can’t cook. She hitches a train to Palm Beach, where she plans to get a divorce and grant Tom his financial freedom—and find herself a new, wealthier husband willing to take her as a trophy wife. But while Tom and Gerry’s finances have run dry, their love for each other has not; Tom takes off after her. He finds Gerry in Florida, already in the arms of a well-known billionaire (Rudy Vallée). Caught in a growing web of madcap lies, the couple is swept up into the upper-crust lives of the wealthy heir and his eccentric, socialite sister (Mary Astor).

“Do you know what it feels like to be strangled by bare hands?” – Tom to Gerry, in a loving marital spat.

The film opens with a fast-paced, downrighyt zamy prologue: Claudette Colbert is first seen gagged and bound in a closet, then seconds later hurrying off to a church resplendent in full wedding dress. She meets Joel McCrea at the altar, while her doppelganger is seen kicking a hole through the door to the closet where she’d been tied up. Meanwhile, the audience is left as bewildered as the housemaid caught between the two Colberts—the poor woman faints each time she spots either of the look-alike girls. (The goofy punch line to this prologue doesn’t come until the movie’s coda.) Set to the William Tell overture and punctuated with overdramatic freeze-frames, this opening works as a visceral summary of Preston Sturges’ dizzying and silly comedic style. Where the humor of The Palm Beach Story’s opening scenes comes as a rapid-fire chain of disorienting visual gags, the rest unfolds as much through sharp dialogue as it does through the increasingly irreverent situations Tom and Gerry find themselves in. Sturges was a master of the screwball comedy, and Colbert was a perfect conduit for the writer-director’s verbal wit; the actress was one of the era’s smartest—or, at least, smart-mouthed—leading ladies, and her aptitude for comic timing is near-perfect tthroughout Palm Beach Story.

“You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything.” – Gerry to Tom, regarding her prospects without him.

This 1942 comedy came in the early half of Sturges’ decade-long stretch of filmmaking that included the masterpieces The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels, and is just one small step below those two classics. While the extras included on this new Palm Beach Story Blu-ray can be burned through rather quickly by Criterion’s usual standards, they’re generous enough for what is ultimately—though still outstanding—one of Sturges’ second-tier films. (This April’s upcoming reissue of Sullivan’s Travels looks like it will contain the sort of mini-master class on the filmmaker that the label is always so good at compiling.) The first notable supplement here is a vintage—impressively truncated—radio adaptation of the film in which Claudette Colbert reprised her role; the second is a short armed forces training film written by Sturges about the importance of safeguarding military secrets. (It isn’t nearly as stuffy as it sounds, featuring a surprising amount of the writer’s trademark humor.) The last two pieces of bonus material are a brief, Sturges 101-style video essay by historian James Harvey, and an interview with super-fan Bill Hader; the latter is not all that educational or enlightening, but it is enjoyable enough listening to the comedian gush over one of his favorite filmmakers.

www.criterion.com/films/28103-the-palm-beach-story

Author rating: 7.5/10