Movies
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
『パームビーチ・ストーリー』1942年
Fan page about the movie “The Palm Beach Story” (1942), directed by Preston Sturges, starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea.
The Story
Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) have been married for five years, love each other, and have everything except money. He is an inventor with a few good ideas but without the cash to finance them. Gerry loves him so much that she conceives a plan: divorce Tom, find a new and very rich husband, then use the man’s money to help Tom realize his ambitions. Tom loathes the idea, but the fact is, their bank account is down to nothing. They are being forced out of their posh apartment and, while Tom is out, a half-deaf but very wealthy prospective new tenant (Robert Dudley) walks in to look the place over. He tells Gerry he’s the “Wienie King”, and, taking a liking to the young woman, begins pulling wads of cash from his pocket and handing them to her. Gerry immediately pays off some bills and buys herself a few frills. When Tom shows up, she tells him about her good fortune and then gives him what’s left, $14 and some change. Tom doesn’t like the idea of some stranger giving his wife money. Tempers rise and soon Gerry leaves, bound and determined to catch herself a moneybags. She arrives at the train station, penniless, but soon is befriended by the “Ale and Quail” club, a high-living, hard-drinking group of wealthy men off on a hunting trip. They buy Gerry a ticket to Palm Beach, FL, and she joins them on a trip that soon degenerates into a wild free-for-all as the drunken hunters decide to enjoy a little skeet shooting in the lounge car. Gerry takes refuge in a sleeping car and meets J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), perhaps the richest man in the world. Her looks and charm soon claim another victim, as J.D., when the train stops, buys her a complete new wardrobe, then invites her to join him on his yacht. On the yacht, she meets J.D.’s man-hungry sister Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor), who has gone through four or five husbands (no one is certain) and is currently dallying with Toto (Sig Arno), a man who speaks in some unknown dialect that’s uproarious. Princess Centimillia is nicknamed “Princess” because she was once married to royalty. As J.D. goes all out to woo Gerry, Tom, who has tracked down his errant spouse, arrives in Florida. Princess Centimillia takes one look at him and decides he must be husband number whatever, and Gerry pleads with him to pose as her brother so she doesn’t lose J.D. The charade naturally leads to complications, and soon the truth is revealed to J.D. and Princess Centimillia, who are shattered. But wait…
This is one of the most hilariously funny movies you will ever see, overflowing with madness, sophisticated dialogue and unforgettable characters. Against the background of raging World War II, Sturges reasoned that what the people needed was some laughter - and he delivered the goods, poking fun at how sex and money rule our lives.
Star Bios
Claudette Colbert was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin in Paris, France on September 13, 1905. She came to America in 1911, dreaming of a career in fashion design, but was persuaded to go on stage in 1923, and soon became a reliable Broadway leading lady. She started out into the movies in 1927 (still the silent picture era), but it was not until the early 1930s that she was given the parts that made her one of the most popular actresses of her time. Her breakthrough year was 1934, when she played the title role in Cecil DeMille’s Cleopatra, and won an unexpected Academy Award for her canny comic performance as a spoiled rich kid on the run in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. In subsequent years, it was in comedies that Colbert found her most appreciative audiences: Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), It’s A Wonderful World (1939) and Midnight (1939) showed time and time again that she was one of the screen’s leading light comediennes. But she took on a variety of parts in dramatic movies as well, such as Drums Along The Mohawk (1939), Arise, My Love (1940) and Since You Went Away (1944). Leaving the big screen with an appearance in Parrish (1961), Colbert embarked on stage work right through the 1980s. In 1987, she appeared with Ann-Margret in a two part CBS miniseries, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, dazzling viewers with her ageless appearance and panache. In 1989, she received the Kennedy Center Honors in recognition of her lifetime achievement. After nearly seventy years as a performer, she announced her formal retirement in 1992. On July 30, 1996, she died on Barbados, where she had resided during the last decades of her life.
Joel McCrea was born on November 5, 1905, in Los Angeles, CA. Like many natives of Southern California, McCrea more or less drifted into movies because they were there. Having built up a solid box-office standing by starring in a score of drawing-room dramas, comedies, and adventure films during the early 1930s, Wells Fargo (1937) was the first bona fide Western that he made. It was his start into the genre for which he is best remembered, and which would become his preferred field of work until the 1960s. However, in the early 1940s, he turned in memorable performances in two of Preston Sturges’ greatest comedies, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). Equally well received was his vigorous turn as the all-American reporter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Most of his subsequent movies were Westerns, where he did not only do the usual marshall and cowboy parts, but was also seen in the roles of Western legends like Buffalo Bill (in Buffalo Bill, 1944), Wyatt Earp (in Wichita, 1955) and Sam Houston (in The First Texan, 1956). In real life, he invested wisely in real estate and livestock, listing his occupation as “rancher” on his tax returns. He was married to former actress Frances Dee for 57 years, making theirs one of Hollywood’s longest unions. Joel McCrea died on October 20, 1990, in Los Angeles.
The Director
Preston Sturges was born on August 29, 1898, in Chicago, IL. Descending from an eccentric family, he grew up in France and was educated in a variety of institutions both in the U.S. and abroad. As a young man, he managed the New York branch of a cosmetics company his mother had started, but a life-threatening emergency appendectomy instilled in him a keen awareness of his own mortality and a burning desire to accomplish things of which he had only dreamed before. He summarily quit the business world to become a playwright. During the 1930s, he built a reputation as a witty writer with a discerning ear for American speech patterns and colloquialisms. Increasingly dissatisfied about having to relinquish his scripts to directors who, he felt, did not do them justice, he finally persuaded Paramount to let him direct one of his own scripts in 1940 (he sold them the script for just one dollar, as an anecdote would have it). The Great McGinty, a political satire, was a sleeper hit. Sturges followed it with Christmas In July (also 1940), a comedy that did quite good business. The films that were to follow in the years to come are hard to describe - as Leonard Maltin put it, they all more or less featured “the incongruous but effective blend of sophisticated, sometimes ribald dialogue and uproarious slapstick that became a Sturges trademark”:
The Lady Eve (1941) with Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck
Sullivan’s Travels (1941) with Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake
The Palm Beach Story (1942) with Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert
The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek (1944) with Eddie Bracken, Betty Hutton
Hail The Conquering Hero (1944) with Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines
After leaving Paramount in the Mid-1940s, Sturges all of a sudden was out of work - just a few years after reigning as Hollywood’s “wonder boy” of comedy. He died on August 6, 1959, in New York, where he was negotiating new projects for the stage and TV.
Quotes
(manually transcribed from video)
“Wienie King”: I’m the Wienie King! Invented the Texas Wienie! Lay off ‘em, you’ll live longer.
“Wienie King”: Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That’s hard to say with false teeth!
(In the couple’s living room, discussing why an elderly man would just give her $700)
Tom Jeffers: (with heavy sarcasm) I mean sex didn’t even enter into it.
Gerry Jeffers: But of course it did, darling. I don’t think he would have given it to me if I had hair like Excelsior and little short legs like an alligator. Sex always has something to do with it - from the time you’re about so big.
Tom Jeffers: I see.
Gerry Jeffers: And wondering why your girlfriends’ fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden - nothing wrong, just an overture to the opera that’s coming.
Tom Jeffers: I see.
Gerry Jeffers: You don’t, really, but from then on you get it from taxi drivers, bellboys, cops, delicatessen dealers, visiting noblemen, and I even think I got it from a corpse once at a funeral.
Tom Jeffers: (exasperated) Got what?
Gerry Jeffers: The look. (She rolls her eyes and mimics) “How’s about this evening, babe?” Sometimes they say it and sometimes they don’t, but it gives you a fine opinion of men on the whole.
Tom Jeffers: So this gent gave you the look.
Gerry Jeffers: The Wienie King? At his age, darling, it was really more of a blink.
Tom Jeffers: (fridgidly) Really. This is very illuminating.
Gerry Jeffers: You don’t have to get rigid about it. It was perfectly innocent, I assure you.
Tom Jeffers: And where did you meet this Weenie King?
Gerry Jeffers: (starting to laugh) You’ll die laughing when you hear where.
Tom Jeffers: (between clenched teeth) All right - convulse me.
John D. Hackensacker III: That’s one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.
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