The Palm Beach Story (1942) – ***½
I’m not alone in rating The Palm Beach Story a couple of notches below the best of Preston Sturges’ early 40s output. It doesn’t have the same perfect balance of heart and humor; the story, especially the silly, abrupt resolution, feels like a shaggy-dog story, an excuse for farcical situations and high-speed banter. That Sturges was a master of both, and that the cast does a fine job of performing them, keeps one entertained, but it’s not as profoundly romantic as The Lady Eve, as incisive and insightful as Sullivan’s Travels, or as explosively funny as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. It’ll have to settle for being a very good film in the company of great ones.
Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) has a problem. She loves her husband Tom (Joel McCrea), and he loves her, but she’s convinced she’s not the wife he needs. See, Tom’s a struggling architect (and a bit prideful), and they’re on the verge of being evicted from their apartment. But when the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), an eccentric, extremely generous old man, gives Gerry enough money to settle the rent and their other debts, Tom’s chilly response reminds Gerry of all the other attempts she’s made to help him, only for his pride to get in the way. So she hits upon a plan.
She’ll go to Palm Beach, divorce Tom, and find a sugar daddy, through whom she can bankroll Tom’s career. Despite Tom’s efforts, she’s able to board a train bound for Florida thanks to the generosity of the Ale and Quail Club, whose drunken antics eventually lead Gerry to flee their private car, which is uncoupled and left with the club members somewhere along the line…along with what little luggage Gerry has. But she meets John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), who’s as generous as the Wienie King and nearly as strange…but also much younger and more handsome. He begins to fall for Gerry, and she’s convinced she’s found her man.
Tom isn’t about to give up on the woman he loves, and thanks to the Wienie King, he gets a plane ticket for Palm Beach, where he catches up Gerry and Hackensacker…and Hackensacker’s sister, the Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor), who takes an immediate fancy to Tom. Gerry passes him off as her brother, “Captain McGlue,” and the stage is set for a love quadrangle which can only end in…well, in this film, at least, it ends in a hexagon. How well you’re able to figure that out depends on how closely you’re watching the opening scenes.
Indeed, anyone watching the film for the first time, or without at least knowing the twist at the end, will be rather baffled indeed, and the exact circumstances are never entirely spelled out – which might be a vote of confidence in the viewer on Sturges’ part, or a show of cleverness that might just be a bit too clever for its own good. For my part, it’s just not quite funny enough to reward the effort of untangling it, and doing so only makes the resolution of the story feel like slightly less of an ass pull. In any case, the story is mainly a vehicle for witty dialogue and wacky hijinks.
We do get quite a few of those, whether it’s the banter between Gerry and Tom, his desperate chase of her, the Wienie King’s very presence, the Ale and Quail Club’s raucous behavior, Hackensacker’s mild-mannered absurdity, the Princess’ breathless chatter and carefree approach to matrimony, and the character of Toto (Sig Arno), a former lover of the Princess whose grasp of English is as slight as his grasp on the Hackensackers’ generosity is strong. Given how they throw their money around, you can’t really blame him. And for the most part, it’s quite amsuing.
It’s well acted too, with Colbert’s nimble timing and ability to seem both refined and ludicrous at the same time, McCrea’s stubborn, almost pouting tenacity, Vallee’s oblivious charm, and Astor’s bubbly relentlessness. It’s crisply edited and handsomely presented. It just doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, and the weak ending only underlines that. But those parts are pretty considerable.
Score: 82
Invention for Destruction/The Fabulous World of Jules Verne/Vynález zkázy (1958) – ***½
On a purely aesthetic level, Invention for Destruction is certainly a **** film; it uses a painstaking visual scheme to evoke the woodcut illustrations which graced Verne’s novels when they were first published, with elaborately artificial settings and special effects, right down to the shading lines which had to be carefully painted onto the sets, all to singularly striking effect. It also has a wonderful score by Zdeněk Liška (who’d later provide a fine score for the eternally underrated The Angel Levine), which perfectly fits the arch, wryly humorous tone of the film, one which invites us to both appreciate the quaint beauty of 19th-century futurism and smile knowingly at that very quaintness. Unfortunately, the film isn’t quite as rewarding on a dramatic level.
Loosely based on Verne’s Facing the Flag, it follows the efforts of the evil Count Artigas (Miloslav Holub) to take control of the world with a variety of inventions, including a submarine (shades of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and an incredibly volatile explosive developed by Professor Roch (Arnošt Navrátil), who is kidnapped by Artigas’ agents, along with his assistant, Simon Hart (Lubor Tokoš). On the way to Artigas’ stronghold, Back-Cup, his henchmen sink a ship, “rescuing” the lone survivor, a young woman (Jana Zatloukalová). As Roch works on his invention, unaware of Artigas’ true intentions, Hart tries to warn the world, stop Artigas…and possibly enjoy a happily-ever-after with the young woman.
The narrative lacks much momentum, and the characters are blank-faced ciphers. The latter, at least, was entirely intentional, with Zeman saying
My heroes were not allowed even to sneeze or scratch their heads; they had to adapt themselves completely to their unreal surroundings.
Source
Mission accomplished, I suppose, but to what end? To ensure we won’t be distracted from Zeman’s carefully crafted visuals? (There was never much chance of that happening.) Archetypal characters are one thing, but Invention is populated by non-characters, and it’s hard to get too invested in what’s going on, not that much actually is; things happen, but there’s never any serious question that Artigas will be defeated and the attractive young people will end up in each other’s arms. There’s never, I’m sorry to say, much question of our being actually excited by the film.
But thanks to the imagination and skill of Zeman and his team, we may still be fascinated by it. I was certainly tickled by the use of sound effects, entranced by the imagery, and conscious of how much the film clearly meant to Zeman; I was also intrigued by the parallels between Professor Roch’s invention and the Cold War arms race. It reminds me a great deal of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, another film which put great effort into creating an elaborate retro-futurist world for our heroes to explore, but which gave them only the bare bones of a story to enact. It’s an exquisitely frustrating work.
Score: 83
Inspiration/Inspirace (1949) – ****
Included on the Blu-Ray of Invention for Destruction are several of Zeman’s early shorts, and I was most interested in watching this, a love letter to Czech glassmakers. On a rainy day, a glass artist sits in his workshop, struggling to come up with ideas. Looking out the window, he sees, in a raindrop on a leaf, a little sea populated by fish, a ballerina/figure-skater who twirls and glides about, and a dandelion seed which transforms into a Harlequin figure, who pines for the dancer. The film ends with the artist setting to work on, presumably, the realization of his vision.
Zeman’s style is perfectly suited to the short form, with the central conceit never outstaying its welcome. The delicate little figures are beautiful in their own right and seamlessly animated; the visuals are breathtaking throughout, from the artist veiled by the rain-streaked window to the little Harlequin separated from his beloved by a pane of translucent glass. Like Invention, it features a lovely score by Liška, adding to the gentle beauty on display. The abrupt ending is a bit unsatisfying, but otherwise it’s a treat.
Score: 88
The Rules of the Game/La règle du jeu (1939) – ****
That Rules of the Game was met with hostility upon its initial French release seems inevitable; how else should a film long regarded as one of the greatest ever made have been greeted? Going by the supplements on the Criterion DVD, Jean Renoir may have made things worse for his own film by trimming scenes which made the characters more sympathetic; he trimmed it further after the opening to no avail, as the film was banned a few months later, and it was only in 1959, when other hands restored the film and put back those scenes Renoir cut twenty years earlier, that viewers were able to appreciate the full scope of the characters and Renoir’s portrait of them.
To be sure, it’s not a flattering portrait; in the very first scene, heroic aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain), after making a record-breaking trans-Atlantic flight, admits that he did so only to impress his lover, Christine (Nora Gregor), and when she fails to come to the airfield, whines about her betrayal on live radio. This is just the start of a series of romantic entanglements among the upper classes, which will also encompass Christine’s husband Robert (Marcel Dalio), his mistress Geneviève (Mila Parély), Christine’s niece Jackie (Anne Mayen), and Octave (Renoir himself), an old friend of Christine’s and André’s closest friend.
Things are just as messy among their servants; Christine’s maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) is married to Robert’s game warden Schumacher (Gaston Modot), but feels little attachment to or affection for him; she prefers to stay in Paris and attend to Christine (and enjoy a series of lovers), and once at Christine and Robert’s country estate, starts a dalliance with Marceau (Julien Carette), a poacher whom Robert hires over Schumacher’s objections. This triangle will eventually spill across the class divide with fatal results, but there is no more sense of tragedy in this than in all the broken hearts throughout the film.
This film is set, after all, in a world where lovers cannot run away together until the man has made his case honorably to the woman’s husband, where a murder can be swept under the table as an accident, fooling no one present but being praised an example of the sweeper’s class (“That’s rare nowadays!”), where marriage vows seem almost an impediment to happiness and real happiness seems exceedingly rare. The pursuit of pleasure may yield temporary results, but the pursuit of understanding – of real human connection – is hampered by the characters’ own disconnection from real human concerns.
Especially in the restored version of the film, we can feel pity for the characters, especially Octave, who is more nakedly human than his fellow aristocrats, but also on far more tenuous financial footing; he openly describes himself as a failure, and admits that he survives more on the generosity of his wealthy friends than on his own resources. Ironically, Renoir was himself born into wealth and privilege, but rather than living off the family fortune, pursued his own artistic muse, making himself immortal while the idle rich of his generation have vanished into history.
While I think Grand Illusion is the greater film, Rules of the Game is no mean feat, its sharply managed combination of farce and satire and carefully balanced cast of characters (there are quite a few I haven’t mentioned) speaking to the excellence of Renoir’s script and direction, while the cast is uniformly strong, even Renoir, who heavily cut his own performance before and after the unfortunate opening. The film has a classy look, thanks to the lavish sets (which helped make it the most expensive film in French history at the time), and despite all the re-editing, it flows naturally throughout, right through to the bitterly knowing final moments, where decorum triumphs over truth and justice.
Rules of the Game has cast a long shadow, with Gosford Park (by that master of the ensemble cast, Robert Altman) only being the most obvious spiritual successor to its pointed examination of the class system in 30s Europe. Ironically, Julian Fellowes, who wrote Gosford Park, would go on to create Downton Abbey, a work which reflects great nostalgia for the way things used to be, for the days of great houses with huge staffs, for the days when the moneyed classes could hunt (or stand around and shoot while their servants stirred up the game) and philander and enjoy the fine food and drink their rank could afford. It makes you wonder who’s had the last laugh.
Score: 92
Diversion (1979) – ***
CW: Self-harm.
A married writer, Guy (Stephen Moore), calls up Erica (Cherie Lunghi), a casual acquaintance, and takes her to dinner while his wife Annie (Morag Hood) is out of town with their infant son. Dinner turns into an affair, and when Guy tries to sneak away at the break of dawn, Erica convinces him to spend the following day with her. When he tries to leave that evening, she objects to being used, cutting her wrists shortly after. Guy bandages her wrists and calms her down, staying overnight and saying goodbye in the morning (and asking a friend to corroborate his cover story for Annie’s sake). The next day, after Annie has returned home, Erica calls, asking to see Guy again. He tries to convince her it’s impossible, but she isn’t having it. He hangs up, and when she calls again he plays it off to Annie as a wrong number. The phone rings again. Annie asks Guy if he’s going to answer it, and he says it’s only a wrong number. Annie picks up the phone. Cut to black.
In case you couldn’t tell, this was the basis for Fatal Attraction; James Dearden wrote both films, and directed this one. This film only runs about 40 minutes (some sources say 50 minutes; the version I watched was taken from an A&E broadcast and might have been cut), and covers about the first act of Attraction, obviously bringing things to a close much earlier and much less sensationally than the later film. It also has a rather less sympathetic male lead, one who goes out of his way to make a date with the attractive woman whose number he got a few weeks earlier, rather than one who meets an attractive woman at a party, meets her again at work, and ends up getting dinner with her before having a fling.
It’s certainly better than the overwrought Attraction, with characters who behave somewhat like human beings and situations which are relatively believable. It’s not great, partly because of Dearden’s amateurish direction and partly because it’s a bit too drawn-out to pack the punch of a truly great short (or featurette, I guess). But it is solid, thanks largely to the effective performances, namely Moore as the thoughtless philanderer and Lunghi as the woman scorned; I especially like how she delivers the line “Naughty boys shouldn’t play with matches.” (The shot in which she delivers it, with her face in shadow except for one eye, is easily the best in the film.)
I’m surprised it hasn’t been included on the DVD or Blu-Ray releases of Attraction, and in fact it remains quite obscure to this day (just 45 votes on the IMDb). Paramount apparently tried to erase it from history when they bought the rights, but to no avail – I really don’t know why studios ever bothered to do this, since the film in question always manages to survive. It’s not a must-see, but it’s certainly worth seeing for the moments between Moore and Lunghi where she cuts through his defenses and rationalizations, laying bare his own moral weakness. It packs more of a punch than boiling the bunny ever did.
Score: 75
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