The Palm Beach Story (1942)

USA, 88 minutes

Director: Preston Sturges

Writers: Preston Sturges, Ernst Laemmle

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: Victor Young

Editor: Stuart Gilmore

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Rudy Vallee, Mary Astor, Sig Arno, Robert Dudley, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Al Bridge

The Palm Beach Story is packed to the rafters with loony comedic character actors, and it also has some of my favorite stars of the time, including Mary Astor and Claudette Colbert. And Rudy Vallee is a revelation here, smooth, self-possessed, and knowing. But there are points in this movie—the opening scenes, for example—when I wonder how director and cowriter Preston Sturges was ever allowed to make movies. It's so clumsy in its frenetic attempt to establish a premise, with quick cuts, mugging for the camera, pointless freeze-frames, people fainting, someone escaping from a closet. Madcap! Zany! Wackadoodle! But can someone please tell me what's going on?

Eventually the antics settle into a story—a marriage that has lasted five years is now foundering because hubby Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea, a Sturges regular) sees himself as a stone failure. And he might be, considering his ambitions. His dream is to build an airport in the downtown of a city above the buildings, made out of steel mesh—I think we're actually intended to believe he's some kind of inventor-prophet without honor in his own land. But the main point of the story is the souring marriage, which of course will be saved by picture's end in a wrap-up nearly as frenetic as the picture's opening, and more pleasantly unlikely. Symmetry.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

USA, 90 minutes

Director / writer: Preston Sturges

Photography: John F. Seitz

Music: Charles Bradshaw, Leo Shuken

Editor: Stuart Gilmore

Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Byron Foulger, Eric Blore, Robert Greig, Torben Meyer, Jimmy Conlin, Margaret Hayes, Ray Milland, Preston Sturges

At the point we meet John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), at the start of Sullivan's Travels, he is a successful can't-go-wrong Hollywood wunderkind director of comedies (for example, Hey, Hey, in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939). Maybe a kind of Roy Del Ruth or Lloyd Bacon? Now he wants to make an earnestly serious picture about social suffering and so forth. Mogully producers love Sullivan for his commercial touch of comedy gold, but they don't want to muck that up with some dour exercise that won't sell tickets. This is actually a familiar pattern even in later eras, where comic players of varying ability often appear to believe drama is more exalted than comedy, something they consider more like their day job. Because I am a Boomer, Woody Allen (Interiors, etc.) and Bill Murray (The Razor's Edge, etc.) spring quickly to mind.

I usually forget that the earnestly serious movie John L. Sullivan is determined to make is called O Brother, Where Are Thou? so it usually comes as a pleasant surprise. The Coen brothers redeemed it as a good joke nearly 60 years later. One of the bottomless supply of character actors attending director and writer Preston Sturges (speaking of the commercial comedy touch of gold, which for him was approximately across the midcentury war years) points out to Sullivan that he's not qualified to make a movie about social troubles, having never experienced any himself. That makes Sullivan determined to go to Wardrobe, get himself a hobo costume, and bum the rails around the country, searching for just that experience. And so here we are. 

The Lady Eve (1941)

USA, 94 minutes
Director: Preston Sturges
Writers: Monckton Hoffe, Preston Sturges
Photography: Victor Milner
Music: Phil Boutelje, Charles Bradshaw, Gil Grau, Sigmund Krumgold, John Leipold, Leo Shuken
Editor: Stuart Gilmore
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, Martha O'Driscoll, Janet Beecher, Robert Greig, Luis Alberni, Jimmy Conlin

In many ways The Lady Eve comes on as a romantic comedy, with two big and beautiful stars in Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. But the instincts of director and cowriter Preston Sturges steer the movie more toward screwball and beyond. We may think of 1941 as a war year, but the Pearl Harbor attack did not occur until the end of the year. And the movies, in the isolationist meantime, were prolific and often seemed more intent on tearing up and rewriting templates. The Lady Eve is a romantic comedy in the same way Hellzapoppin'  is a musical and Citizen Kane is an experimental art film and/or biopic. More than anything, I suppose, The Lady Eve is a Sturges picture, offering up a full orchestra of vaudeville gags, character players, and pratfalls, themselves little symphonies of smashing plates, falling cutlery, and stammered apologies. Sturges never had much sense of cinema formally. But just like he was willing to try anything for a laugh he was also willing to try anything with the technology, as seen in a mirror-driven monologue here. Rampant experimentation appeared to be a regular feature of the movies in 1941. Even a relatively straightforward comedy like the W.C. Fields vehicle Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is full of surrealistic turns.

In the spirit of classic screwballs like My Man Godfrey and Bringing Up Baby, the leads here are as zany as everything else. Stanwyck, who in the first place could do anything, is about at the peak of her powers. Consider her 1941: Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and You Belong to Me. She's Jean, a conniving con artist and card sharp traveling aboard a passenger ship as the daughter of her mentor, the self-titled Colonel Harrington (Charles Coburn, excellent as always). She is self-assurance itself, speaking a mile a minute and flinging off sparks in all directions. "Every Jane in the room is giving him the thermometer," she says in the mirror monologue, sizing up her prey and the competition. Her target is the dweebish and independently wealthy Charles Poncefort Pike (Fonda), a scientist with an interest in snakes who is returning from an exploring expedition in the Amazon. She calls him Hopsie after he tells her it's a family nickname he hates. Working against his already stolid type, Abraham Lincoln Tom Joad Henry Fonda is especially good playing an absent-minded professor harried by a perpetual erection—a notable skill, not often seen in midcentury American movies or done well ever.

The Lady Eve (1941)

#15: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

In his earlier pick of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Steven wrote, "There was a time when it was the duty of Americans to insert the wisecrack that could deflate delusions of grandeur." Preston Sturges practically spun an entire career out of that—short, perhaps even limited, but so fully realized that nearly every one of the dozen or so pictures he made are worth seeing. They crackle with energy and spitfire dialogue, which sometimes goes by so fast even the players seem to be having a hard time keeping up (and I have to think a lightbulb or two lit up over Robert Altman's head when he saw the way Sturges made use, perhaps inadvertently, of overlapping dialogue). The troupe of character actors Sturges regularly went to—William Demarest, Eddie Bracken, Jimmy Conlin, Al Bridge, Arthur Hoyt, Victor Potel, and many others—are so familiar it's a case of never-ending déjà vu, and they are absolute comedy pros.

My favorites include The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Betty Hutton's great moment), Sullivan's Travels (in which a successful comedy director wants to make a very serious Grapes-of-Wrath-style picture called O Brother Where Art Thou?), Christmas in July, and Unfaithfully Yours, which came a bit later than the sweet spot of Sturges's early '40s surge. (The Great Moment is really the only one to skip.)