The Palm Beach Story
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Synopsis
This wild tale of wacky wedlock from Preston Sturges takes off like a rocket and never lets up. Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert play Tom and Gerry, a married New York couple on the skids, financially and romantically. With Tom hot on her trail, Gerry takes off for Florida on a mission to solve the pair’s money troubles, which she accomplishes in a highly unorthodox manner. A mix of the witty and the utterly absurd, The Palm Beach Story is a high watermark of Sturges’s brand of physical comedy and verbal repartee, featuring sparkling performances from its leads as well as hilarious supporting turns from Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor as a brother and a sister ensnared in Tom and Gerry’s high jinks.
Picture 9/10
Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story has received a new 4K restoration that serves as the base for Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition. The new 1080p/24hz high-definition transfer presents the film in its original aspect ratio of about 1.33:1 on a dual-layer disc.
I’m not entirely sure if Criterion or Universal is behind this new transfer but either way what we get is absolutely wonderful. Other than a couple of places where I feel the source limits things the digital transfer is crisp with superb definition making fine patterns clearly visible and delivering excellent textures. The image is free of noise and distortion, with natural looking film grain—that is very fine—and cleanly rendered edges. Contrast looks nicely balanced, providing fairly deep blacks and distinctively rendered gray levels.
Most impressive, though, is just how clean the source is. Despite a few very minor issues (there are some fine tram lines in places, a few bits of debris, minor scratches, and a few moments that look out-of-focus) there is next to nothing in terms of damage. It’s clean. This, together with the superb transfer, aids in delivering one of the more outstanding digital presentations I’ve seen recently.
Audio 6/10
Also solid is the lossless PCM mono track. Though still a product of its age, sounding a bit flat with some harsh music in the background, it’s at least clean and free of noise, with clear dialogue and adequate volume levels.
Extras 5/10
With Criterion’s fairly loaded special editions for other Sturges titles (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, and to a lesser extent, Unfaithfully Yours) it’s not that of a big a surprise to see that the features for The Palm Beach Story are sparse, though it’s no less a letdown. James Harvey’s 17-minute interview simply feels like a summarization of the excellent Sturges documentary The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, found on Criterion’s Sullivan’s Travels, where Harvey simply gives a general overview of Sturges’ career. He does talk a little about the director’s style and writing, covers what he most admires about his work while addressing some criticisms against him, and even looks a little at the film and some of its more baffling moments (the opening and ending for starters) but it’s not a terribly in-depth interview.
A bit better for me (though I have a feeling it may irritate others) was probably Bill Hader’s 10-minute contribution. An obvious fan of Sturges’ work, Hader focuses mostly on Sturges’ writing, admiring how much effort he puts into his secondary characters, the effortless flow of his dialogue—even reading a few lines from the script for The Palm Beach Story to give an example—and then talks about modern writers and filmmakers who have obviously been inspired by the man. He tries to imagine how Sturges probably acted out the roles while writing the characters, something he noticed the stronger writers on SNL do, and explains how that helped in developing characters and situations. I sense some may find the feature a bit tactless, though I think Hader is just excited to be talking about Sturges and deconstructing his writing style, which made the feature a fun one from my perspective.
The remaining disc features come from the archives, starting with a radio adaptation from 1943, put on by the Screen Guild Theater. Starring Claudia Colbert and Rudy Vallee reprising their roles, and Randolph Scott filling in for McCrea, the 29-minute adaptation heavily compresses the film’s story, managing to pack the first hour of the film into 10-minutes of the radio adaptation, quickly jumping from Colbert’s meeting with the Wiener King (who now sounds like Elmer Fudd) to her on the train, where she immediately meets’ Vallee’s character (it completely bypasses the gun club). From there it then follows the last act of the film, though again rushes through it. It’s more interesting just as a product of radio theater, though it’s not a terribly good adaptation, rushing through everything and changing a lot of key points (it even drops the “twist” ending).
Criterion also includes Safeguarding Military Information, an 11-minute wartime “educational” film written by Sturges, which was also recently included on Arrow Video’s Blu-ray edition of Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. It basically points out the dangers of military personnel or civilians inadvertently giving away secret information as presented in a couple of scenarios: 1.) a sailor explaining to his girlfriend over the phone that he can’t make a date because his ship is scheduled to depart as a man with a not-so-inconspicuous radio hangs out nearby or 2.) a mother reading a letter from her son deployed overseas to the local meat shop clerk while everyone listens in. It also helpfully tells you what to do when some random person comes up to you in a bowling alley and asks you out of the blue about that secret anti-aircraft gun you’re working on. Though the message is fine (“lose lips sink ships”) it’s still a somewhat unintentionally funny propaganda film, just a teeny bit over the top. Still, it’s a nice inclusion.
The release then presents a standard fold out (not one of the large ones that has been appearing in most Criterion releases as of late) featuring an essay by Stephanie Zacharek, which offers a decent examination of the film, with a section on odd opening and ending.
Overall it’s disappointing, with very little in the way of a critical slant, but I enjoyed Hader’s portion and the included propaganda short.
Closing
A disappointingly slim special edition with only a couple of supplements I enjoyed, but the transfer is strong and makes the release worth picking up.
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