The Palm Beach Story · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A deaf Texas sausage millionaire wanders into a Park Avenue apartment he's thinking of renting, walks the rooms, hands the current tenant's broke young wife a wad of cash, says the loveliest thing Preston Sturges ever wrote about growing old, and shuffles out. Nothing in the staging tells you this matters. No push-in, no music sting, no held reaction. He's photographed like a man who came about the plumbing. He has just started the movie.

That money sends Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) to a conclusion her husband can't follow her to: the most valuable asset in this marriage is her, and it isn't earning. So she'll go to Palm Beach, divorce Tom, marry a fortune, and fund his airport-suspended-over-a-city with the proceeds. That's the plot. Everything worth arguing about is in the word so.

Deleuze cuts the action-picture in two. There's the large form, where a whole situation bears down until somebody acts and changes it; that's the Western, and most of what we mean by story. And there's the small form, where the act comes first and the situation is what you work out from it — you read backwards, from behavior to circumstance. Comedy has always lived in the small form, which is why a gag lands before you can explain it. The Palm Beach Story runs on nothing else, and saying so dissolves the oldest complaint about the film: that it's a lightweight string of digressions with a plot hung loosely off it. It isn't underplotted. Its situation is being disclosed rather than resolved, and the disclosures are the scenes.

Deleuze calls the revealing act an index, and splits it two ways. The index of lack points at something the film won't show you. That's Lubitsch's grammar, developed at this same studio, where seduction and solvency get discussed in one suave vocabulary and the decisive transaction happens behind a closing door. Sturges took the door off its hinges and reversed the etiquette. The Wienie King's gift is fully visible and completely unexplained. Lubitsch hid the exchange to be delicate; Sturges shows the exchange and hides the reason.

The index of equivocity is the sharper tool: one act that fits two situations, with the film declining to choose. Gerry's desertion is her most devoted act. Her line about what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything is a boast and a price list in the same breath, and it cleared the Breen Office because it's phrased as sociology. Sturges had wanted to call the picture Is Marriage Necessary?; the Code took the title and left him the content. Victor Young's score goes most romantic exactly where the writing turns cold-blooded, and Rudy Vallee — the whole country's memory of a megaphone crooner — serenades Gerry while a small orchestra materializes under a window at night. Love isn't beating economics here. Love is being described, accurately, as an economic instrument, by people who are in it.

There's a third relation Deleuze names, and the Wienie King may be its best example on film. A mark is an object that behaves the way habit predicts: you see it, you know what follows. A demark is the thing that won't behave, the anomaly that halts habit and forces interpretation. The Wienie King arrives twice, motivated neither time, and the flat staging refuses to rank him above the furniture. He's a deus ex machina you aren't permitted to notice. So what kind of world is this? One where money simply weathers in from off-screen.

Weather is the right word, and the Ale and Quail Club proves it. A chartered fraternal order of elderly, armed, alcoholic millionaires adopts Gerry on the southbound train and then shoots the Pullman club car to pieces around her, firing at crackers, for minutes, touching the plot exactly once by getting her car uncoupled. Deleuze has a term for a crowd that operates as one feeling instead of a set of people: the dividual. No member of the club has a character. The club has a temperature. That's Sturges's entire account of wealth, delivered as slapstick and no less serious for it. The rich here aren't villains. They're conditions. Groucho's institutional anarchy in Duck Soup is the direct debt — an organization handed a set piece that escalates by pure gag logic — and Hawks had already proved in Twentieth Century that a row of train compartments is the best pressure chamber farce ever got.

It works because of how it's held. Victor Milner lights everything bright and even and keeps four to eight talking bodies legible at different depths; Sturges pans and dollies after people instead of cutting them into pieces, and he's miserly with close-ups. Deleuze's name for a frame worked this hard is the closed set: composition treated as a system, dense with information, where a gag can be built on somebody reacting at the back. Bazin would shortly argue that depth and duration leave the viewer's eye free to choose, and that the freedom is what makes an image honest. Sturges is using the honest image for jokes. When the frame gets too crowded to police, that's the punchline.

Which brings back the two minutes you couldn't read. The credits are a fast-motion silent-comedy scramble over the William Tell Overture: maids running, bodies unconscious, a bride sprinting, doors, telephones, a taxi. Ninety minutes then proceed as if none of it happened. In the last thirty seconds both Gerry and Tom turn out to have identical twins, and the unreadable wedding snaps into a scene — not the one you assumed. Equivocity built into the architecture. Sturges had invented that closed circuit himself a decade earlier, scripting The Power and the Glory: narratage, his coinage, a story that opens at its end and loops back. Keaton is under it too, in the undercranked crowds of Seven Chances and in a marriage deadline engineered like a patent. And Colbert is boarding a southbound train as a runaway wife with her fare underwritten by strangers, which is It Happened One Night with the sponsored passage restated as an openly quoted price.

Then the last card retracts the ending it just handed you: happily ever after — or did they? Deleuze's discourse-image is an image that poses a problem it has no intention of solving. Sturges lost his title and kept his question, and printed it on the way out.

He had also, by then, changed the job. He sold The Great McGinty for a nominal sum on the condition that he direct it, won the first Academy Award for Original Screenplay, and made writer-director an ordinary thing for a studio to permit. The Palm Beach Story is what that autonomy buys: a 1942 comedy with no war anywhere in it, set where money still behaves the way it did in 1929, spending its freedom on the question of whether a marriage is a contract or a market.

Watch the back of the frame next time. And notice that on a second viewing the prologue is the most legible thing in the picture. The marriage is the part you still have to infer.