Deus Ex Hackensacker
It can be dangerous to take a filmmaker at his word. Or, if not dangerous, it can cause you to stop thinking. Preston Sturges’ explanation of his intent with The Palm Beach Story was that he wanted to explore/illustrate “the aristocracy of beauty,” or, as Claudette Colbert’s character puts it, “It’s amazing what a pretty girl can do without doing anything.”
With typical Sturges complexity, the plot of this film sets up three intertwined problems: (1) the marriage of Tom and Jerry is in trouble because (2) he can’t interest anyone in his crazy idea of an overhead airfield made of wire mesh and (3) he won’t let Jerry use her charm to help him.
Jerry resolves to divorce Tom so she can help him from outside the marriage, removing his right to be jealous. The film now follows her adventures, with Tom following her. The REAL problem of the film is the marriage, but all the lesser problems have to be solved so it can be rescued.
Jerry has to somehow get to Palm Beach with no money, obtain a divorce with no money, and meet and marry a millionaire who can finance Tom’s tennis-racket airport. While the intuitive solution to making this interesting dramatically – screenwriting 101 – would be to make the most of these obstacles, Sturges goes the advanced route, having solutions fall into her lap at every turn.
Jerry has already had $700 thrust into her astonished hands by the Weenie King, a deus ex machina in the wizened flesh, but that money has been spent settling old bills. Now she has to make her own way, or so you might think.
It starts with the cab driver, played by Frank Faylen, the sinister asylum attendant from The Lost Weekend. He glances down, sees that Jerry has what Frank Capra considered the best body in Hollywood, and consents to drive her to Penn Station for no fare.
At the station, Jerry immediately meets a whole carload of rich millionaires, as you do. They take care of her train fare problem and supply her with a stateroom, but none of them seems particularly marriageable to say the least, so Sturges contrives a few misdemeanors to drive Jerry into the arms of John D. Hackensacker, one of the richest men in the world, who happens to be traveling by lower berth on the same sleeper train. He also has her lose her clothes, but rather than being a problem, this just cements the introduction and allows Hackensacker to act the role of heroic rescuer, which he might otherwise be judged ill-suited for.
Sturges’ casting genius is in full bloom here – Rudy Vallee was a 1930s crooner whose attempts at becoming a Hollywood star had flopped catastrophically. Sturges realized that the pathos of this bygone idol had a comic side, if you were prepared to be a little cruel. Vallee appears not to have noticed that he was becoming a figure of fun – perhaps he thought the joke was the film’s pretense that he, a singing star and ladies’ man, was a ridiculous schnook. In fact, no such irony is intended: he just embodies the character perfectly.
Jerry has now found a man dopey enough and rich enough to give her ex the $99,000 he needs – twice. This should seem like lazy, implausible and self-defeating plotting, but it isn’t – well, alright, it’s implausible, but Sturges is getting a lot of his best laughs out of implausibility here. It’s all fuel for his romantic comedy plot because if Jerry succeeds, the marriage is over, and the marriage is all we really care about. Well, actually, that’s not true. We care about John D. Hackensacker, ridiculous figure that he is. Schnooks are usually too priggish and oafish to care about, and Rudy Vallee certainly embodies a characterization impossible to take seriously as romantic rival, but he’s sweet and noble too, and while his sister, played by Mary Astor in another startling bit of casting against type, seems indestructible, Hackensacker has some real human vulnerability. You could probably drop him on his head without injury, but you can’t go breaking his heart.
Which leads to the film’s final deus ex machina, a completely ridiculous rabbit from the hat which would be unfair to give away. The fact that it’s all been set up from the start just makes it sillier – it’s a grand joke about the lengths we’ll go to swallow a preposterous tall tale so long as it makes us happy. Sturges knows we enjoy happy endings, even dishonest ones, but he’s too smart not to make us aware of the trickery.
by David Cairns