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DVD The Palm Beach Story
Among the earliest writers to set his sights on the director's chair, Preston Sturges brought a frank, unsentimental view of the war between the sexes to his mid-'40s features that exemplify his style, as demonstrated in this prescient 1942 gem. Architect Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea) and his wife, Gerry (Claudette Colbert), further refine the archetypal Sturges couple--the male embodying strength, idealism, and a certain naivete, the female ultimately stronger, smarter, and (as revealed early on in an astonishing speech by Colbert) clearer-eyed and more pragmatic about the subtext of sex. This giddy shaggy-dog story follows the couple's split, and Gerry's subsequent flight to Palm Beach. This head-snapping frolic is paced by double-entendres and lampooning looks at the very rich, with standout performances by the predatory Princess Centimillia (the delicious Mary Astor), who's more than ready to comfort Tom, and the wealthy, dim-witted John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee, staking out a new career, post-crooner, as comic foil), Gerry's new suitor. Even the predictable reunion of the star-crossed lovers is achieved with an antic surrealism. Sturges's strength in building strong character ensembles is matched by his affection for coupling screwball dialogue with physical slapstick, seldom to better effect than in the drunken target practice of the Ale and Quail Club, who make Colbert's train ride to Florida a different kind of shoot-'em-up. --Sam Sutherland
Claudette Colbert is brilliant in this fine example of Preston Sturges' work. Vaguely reminiscent of "It Happened One Night," this film features a notable performance by Rudee Vallee.
And they lived happily ever after... Or did they?
The Palm Beach Story opens with shots from moments before a wedding. A maid on a telephone screams and faints... a minister waiting to performing a marriage ceremony... A groom runs into a taxi... A would-be-bride, bound and gagged, struggles to get out of a closet... the recovered maid sees a fully dressed bride and faints again... the would-be-bride kicks her foot through a door... the fully dressed bride catches a cab... the maid, seeing the would-be-brides legs breaking through the closet door, you guessed it, faints... the groom getting dressed in the taxi... The bride and groom meet at the altar... They are married!
The whole scene appears confusing and irrelevant as our story takes place years later. But, it is the genius of writer/director Preston Sturges that clarifies and justifies the opening in the last minute of the story!
In the meantime, our story follows the bride, now unhappy because of their lack of wealth. She decides to leave her husband, meet and marry a millionaire, and use that money to support her first husband's projects! Along the journey she comes across many funny characters and circumstances. Even though the premise sounds depressing, in the end we've got enough happy endings to fill the hour and 20 minute running time. This is screwball comedy by definition.
The original title of the film was IS MARRIAGE NECCESARY?
The DVD is a bare bones offering, and the print is a non-glamorous sufficient for viewing. But that's not why you watch this film!
Preston Sturges' "The Palm Beach Story"
Quite simply, one of the finest film comedies ever, one of a handful of comic masterworks from this great director. Claudette Colbert has never been better, and Joel McCrea, aside from being an outstanding cowboy hero ("Colorado Territory," "Ramrod," "Ride the High Country," etc.)shows himself to be highly skilled at farce, as well. (Watch him in Sturges' equally splendid "Sullivan's Travels," not to mention Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent.") Let us not forget Mary Astor and Rudy Vallee, nor the wonderful members of The Ale and Quayle Club. Okay, the beginning and finale don't make sense. Nonetheless, a must for any discriminating DVD library!
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Screwball comedy was practically invented by this classic Howard Hawks picture, a breathless farce with not an ounce of sentimentality. John Barrymore, in magnificent form, plays egomaniacal Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe, who molds his latest protégé, Mildred Plotka, into elegant thee-a-tuh star Lily Garland (Carole Lombard). The last hour of the picture has Oscar and Lily, now on the outs, battling each other on the Chicago-to-New York train. These two marvelous creatures are quintessential Hawks characters, figures of pure style who can't exist without the adrenaline and spark so amply supplied by the Hecht-MacArthur script. Hawks's giddyup pacing anticipates Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, and his deployment of character actors (notably Walter Connolly and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John Barrymore - Carole Lombard Director(s): Howard Hawks DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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During World War II, Hollywood's patriotic duty was to shoot stirring dramas and good-hearted comedies that celebrated America's brave soldiers and honored their loyal, virtuous wives and girlfriends. Which goes a long way toward explaining why this delirious Preston Sturges farce, filmed in 1943 at the height of the war effort (and of its director's powers), was delayed for a year while Paramount executives wrestled with Sturges's irreverence: in Morgan's Creek, the writer-director tweaked those stereotypes with his tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who only wants to send our boys off with a smile. That she does, but she wakes up after an all-night party with vague memories of a dubious wedding and soon finds herself pregnant.
Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Linda Darnell - Ann Sothern Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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