The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

There are few scenes in movies that I cherish more than the encounter of Gerry (Claudette Colbert) and the Wienie King (Robert Dudley). Then again, The Palm Beach Story is filled with things I cherish: The wonderfully enigmatic opening credits, which must have had people sitting through the film twice to comprehend. The way William Demarest drawls out "bangbaang" when he's pretending to shoot targets on the train -- before the rest of the Ale and Quail Club arrives with loaded shotguns to blow the hell out of the club car. J.D. Hackensacker III's (Rudy Vallee) inexhaustible supply of pince-nez. The fetching outfit Gerry fashions from a pair of men's pajamas and a bath towel, using the pajama shirt as a blouse, the pants as a kind of snood, and the towel as a wraparound skirt -- as she remains blithely unconscious that the word "Pullman" is emblazoned on the backside. The way Sig Arno as Toto steals every scene he's in, even if he's only standing in the background. Mary Astor's giddy, horny Princess Centimillia. The sly fun poked at Vallee's past as a crooner. The way Sturges finds something funny for even bit players, like the cops on the street, to do or say. Joel McCrea and Colbert are of course peerless at this sort of comedy. I do have to admit that I'm a little distracted every time I watch Colbert on screen, tracking the way she always manages to get on the right side in every scene, the better to show off the preferred left side of her face. I wonder, though, if Sturges and cinematographer Victor Milner didn't pull a trick on Colbert in the scene in which Gerry is sitting at a dressing table: Though she's on the right side of the screen, the only view we get of her face is a reflection in the mirror of her supposedly inferior right profile. The Palm Beach Story is not as sexy as The Lady Eve (1941) or as satiric as Sullivan's Travels (1941), but it remains for me an inexhaustible delight.

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges, 1947)

The sad finale of two great Hollywood careers: Harold Lloyd's and Preston Sturges's. One of the great silent comedians, Lloyd had been making movies since 1913, but like so many stars of silent films he failed to make an impression in talkies and retired from movies in 1938. Sturges, who was starting up a new studio, California Pictures, with Howard Hughes, persuaded Lloyd to come out of retirement as a producer and director for the studio, but as so often happened when Hughes had a hand in things, nothing worked out right for either Sturges or Lloyd. Sturges had had a run as writer-director of seven comedies, from The Great McGinty in 1940 through Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944, that are some of the greatest ever made in Hollywood, but his attempt at a serious movie, The Great Moment (1944), was a major flop that led to his departure from Paramount and into his partnership with Hughes. Unfortunately, tensions with both Hughes and Lloyd over The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which Lloyd had been led to believe he would direct, contributed to the poor marketing and release of the movie. Its failure at the box office caused Hughes to pull it and to re-edit it into a shorter film renamed Mad Wednesday, which also failed. Lloyd never acted in another movie, and although Sturges wrote and directed three more, only Unfaithfully Yours (1948) has the comic finesse of his great 1940-44 films. It, too, was a box office flop, though it is now regarded by many as a late masterpiece. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, unfortunately, is no masterpiece, though it has some good moments. Many of Sturges's great company of character players are in the film, including Jimmy Conlin, Raymond Walburn, Rudy Vallee, Franklin Pangborn, and Robert Dudley, and the scenes in which they appear are invariably the best. It's perhaps unfortunate that Sturges chose to open the film with an excerpt from Lloyd's silent classic, The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925), because the slapstick sequences that follow in Sturges's part of the film pale in comparison. The central knockabout comedy scene in the film involves Lloyd, Conlin, and a lion stuck precariously on the ledge of a building; it recalls the classic skyscraper sequence in Lloyd's Safety Last! (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923), but the gag becomes overextended and glaringly improbable in this version.