Say “screwball.” Do you linger on the first part, slink on its slip and milk the sibilance? Screw is: the thing that turns in order to adhere, a colloquial cheat or swindle, an exclamation of disavowal, saying sex without saying sex. Say it again. And that second word? A ball, a blast, a bounce, a dance. Again, it’s the lovemaker’s euphemism! “You sure love to ball.”
A certain liberation emerges in unloosening the figurative, in literalizing the poetry of it. Etymologically, it’s a sporting matter: when we say “screwball,” we’re thinking of cricket pitches whose arc “becomes in fast bowling a sharp angle” (from the 1866 volume Cricket, By Captain Crawley, which is actually by George Frederick Pardon, a caddish English sportswriter). And we’re thinking of a long, weird line of baseball chuckers that includes “King” Carl Hubbell, Christy “Big Six” Mathewson (though he called it a “fadeaway”), Luis “Tite” Arroyo, John Franco, Yu Darvish. Larry McCray, a writer at the Troy Times, wrote in 1868, “That ‘screw’ ball of his that twists and speeds as if shot from a rifle, was really artistic.”
The point being: you need a body to make something staid slurve. There can be chaste comedies and there can be demure romances, but to enter the mode (not genre!) of screwball, you need to make a thermal hound of the old camera eye. Desire has a heat: sic your eyes on it and our bodies will follow. When we talk about screwball comedies, we mean a certain outgrowth of romantic comedy—classically but by no means exclusively filmed between world wars—gone haywire, a tittered assault on gender, class, and the desire that binds them in the form of prairie oyster: spicy, gritty, a tonic of truly suspect efficacy, if not delectation.
Now say “The Palm Beach Story.” Your lips are making shapes like “A 1942 screwball comedy directed by Preston Sturges starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea” but all I can hear is, “This is how the anarchy of love moves in the world, confused and discombobulating, and—somehow—stabilizing in its arrhythmia.”
An American story: Preston Sturges (née Edmund Preston Biden) was born in Chicago, Illinois. He spent half his childhood in France and helped invent kiss-proof lipstick (‘Red-Red Rouge’), a ticker tape machine, and an intaglio photo-etching process. He was in the Army Signal Corps. He never saw action. He got an appendectomy. It was 1927. He wrote a play called The Guinea Pig, moved to Hollywood in 1929, wrote some screenplays, made a bundle on some screenplays, became frustrated at how often directors and producers monkeyed with his dialogue. And then he sold The Great McGinty (1940) to Paramount Pictures for $10, a bargain fee predicated on Sturges’s simultaneous hiring as director. Less a bootstrap-puller than a fabulous con-man who got off and over in equal measure on the English language and its capacity to remodel how we talk—and how we talk about desire—Sturges worked for over 30 years in Hollywood. He is most remembered for a scant four of those years, a cometic stretch in which he wrote and directed The Great McGinty, Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (1944), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). He died in 1959, burning cigarettes in a room at New York City’s famous Algonquin, chiseling out a memoir that wouldn’t see the light of eyes until 1990, in which he surmised, “Between flops, it is true, I have come up with an occasional hit, but compared to a good boxer’s record, for instance, my percentage has been lamentable.”
An American story: Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea, that old magnetic boogie board) is an inventor with a crackpot idea—a massive scale, mesh netting-runway that would allow planes to land above buildings instead of around them—and no backers or capital. Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert, arch but never detached, those tractor beam eyes) is his wife. Tired of scrimping, one day she ditches Tom and sets out for anywhere else, winding up on a Florida-bound locomotive. Aboard the train, she meets John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallée, on the downswing of teen idol era and reborn here as a sweet-dweeb comic par excellence), the richest man in the world. Gerry falls for Hackensacker (kind of) and Tom follows her south to win her back (kind of), immediately becoming the objet de désir of Hackensacker’s sister, “The Princess” Maud (Mary Astor, a bleached howitzer of timing, a miracle of appetite). Gerry and Tom pretend to be siblings to keep the ruse going (if half-heartedly), Gerry trying to simultaneously woo Hackensacker and extort $99,000 for her husband/faux-brother’s fanciful airport creation. Between lies, dances, and a fortuitous nighttime performance of “Goodnight Sweetheart,” Gerry and Tom stop resisting, and fall back into each other’s arms and lives. How do you snap a baseball into its final screw? They each had twin siblings all along! This ludicrous revelation in the film’s last breath leads to a double wedding for the film’s comic accoutrement and a happy (kind of) reunion between Tom and Gerry.
One problem with writing about how desire happens is that summary is often a process of reduction for clarity. The passage above indicates the narrative story beats of The Palm Beach Story, the kind of thing you might write in a treatment. It is what happens. But often, what happens is less important than how it moves. Screwball would just be romantic comedy if it didn’t screw, just like love would just be companionship if it didn’t overdrive the senses. Sex would just be a handshake if it didn’t turn our nerves into vibrated alloys and pinging pinky balls. Sturges’s stories are expert and clean constructions, turnt on drips of irony dribbled out far as they’ll go before they snap back into classical resolution of form: marriage and remarriage, sometimes three times over. But Sturges’s writing—a process that we might say touches story with style and translates the science of “motivation” into the language of desire—resides and thrives in the fugitive space of non-optimizable chaos.
Absent from our straight-line summary of The Palm Beach Story is the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), an aged coot-benefactor with half his hearing who doles out travel money, first to Gerry and then to Tom, a deus ex godmother in a ten-gallon hat. Without the Wienie King, Gerry wouldn’t be able to board a train to West Palm and Tom wouldn’t be able to hop on an “aerioplane” (the King’s word) to win her back. Without the daffily-stuffed up patrician hotel manager (Franklin Pangborn—who else?) trying to rent the apartment out from under the film’s romantic leads, the King would never have come upon a bemused Gerry in her bathroom. Gerry would never actually get past Penn Station if she weren’t handed a ticket and adopted by the Ale and Quail Club, surely among Sturges’s screwiest inventions: a ballasting chaos machine composed of a roving blob of golden age character actors—Robert Warwick! Torben Meyer! William Demarest!—as noodly gun aficionados on holiday.
Rather than labeling these looney, toothy supporting characters happily unessential to the story’s forward momentum, Sturges makes them a matter of fact and essentialness. It’s the leads who find themselves removed from caring too much; it’s easy to miss or mistake Gerry’s motivations as she heads south, as she shacks up with Hackensacker, as she keeps trying to give Tom something in this divorce she seems only cursorily interested in. Like a noir—another mode sometimes mistaken for a genre, another symptom sometimes mistaken for root cause—the logistics of logic get foggy. What does Claudette Colbert want? If she wanted it too much, the lines might not zing the way they do. McCrea in particular plays the hale-if-vanilla Tom only a little able to keep up with the plot—Harrison Ford owes this man residuals when it comes to conjuring the handsome-gruff. When Tom and Gerry do finally renew their love at the film’s end, it feels a little perfunctory—what does Sturges want us to think of love if it can be pranked and faked and walked away from and then picked up and dusted off like any number of “Gowns by Irene”?
Historically and histrionically, we say “screwball” to invoke an exercise in stretching the allowable reality of a situation. There’s a reason that the classical screwball comedy period emerges from the mutable and mutating (good) terrain of Hollywood’s Pre-Code era, itself a misleading designation that encompasses both the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 as well as the first four years of its mutable and mutating (less good…) authority. This is all to say: the Pre-Code Era includes a fraction of just-Post-Code time—a screwy reality if ever there was one. Mostly though, the screwball is a spectrum of getting away with the sub- and per-versive, a game of inches and acks. Films like Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931) and Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) aren’t outright pornographic enterprises, but they get away with a certain frankness of eros that the same filmmakers’ It Happened One Night (1934) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) have to re-approach and reinvent.
The tension of the screwball lies in how it only temporarily rearranges the stakes of patriarchal American reality. The Palm Beach Story replicates the familiar indicators, as well as the familiar recapitulations. Colbert walks and talks all over McCrea and the reality she moves through, even if she must always literally travel by way of a man’s wallet (the Wienie King, the Ale and Quailers, Hackensack, etc.). Sturges even smuggles Will Hays’s nightmare word into the screenplay two times (“Sex didn’t enter into it?” “Sex always has something to do with it, dear.”) and Tom and Gerry clearly have sex, but always offscreen and on the dissolve. Most plastic is how class enters into and exits the film: Hackensacker and The Princess are to some extent targets of Sturges’s pen, but they’re by no means unreformable. A certain fascination—and so, pleasure—pervades in Colbert’s ability to use her wiles and cheekbones to attain agency and so, solvency. But that solvency depends upon an observable generosity—and so, nobleness—of the film’s genteel class. Rather than outright buffoons, it’s Vallée and Astor who come closest to playing desiring bodies desiring others. We understand why they ache for Colbert and McCrea, who in turn, don’t exactly write them off. “If I weren’t a little bit mixed up at the moment, I’d take you up on a few of your dares and make you say ‘Papa,’” Tom says, only half in-character as Gerry’s made-up brother, “Captain McGlue.” And what does Astor do? She bites her lip: “Papa.”
The Palm Beach Story is an exemplary screwball in how it moves what it is all around the film’s frame. And it’s an exceptional screwball—maybe even an aberration of one—in the conclusions it draws and how it draws them. I suppose there’s a way to read it as a send-up of romantic love and coupling off more generally. In the discombobulating opening credits sequence that introduces Tom and Gerry’s twin siblings to us without our knowledge and then again as a button to its final triple wedding punchline, The Palm Beach Story offers a theoretical: “They all lived happily ever after…or did they?” Early titles Sturges considered for the project even included Is Marriage Necessary? and Is That Bad?, the former of which certainly raised a few eyebrows at the Will Hays office. Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) offers a plausible, desirable hinge of erotic possibilities to Hepburn’s Tracy. Sturges’s own The Lady Eve (1941) reimagines cinematography itself as writeable in smudgy, gooey close-up. The Palm Beach Story proves that desire has a gravity all its own, and then struggles to live in the proof it’s drawn.
I used to think that there was something uniquely immediate about the moving image. That more than its cousin arts—more than the theater and the novel, more than painting and poetry—cinema sought out the predicaments of our glittering and brute modernity with keener insight and sharper instinct. Surely, there is something more technological about it, beholden as it is to advances in and access to the machine itself. Surely, you can’t have a cinema without a power source, an electric shock of Edison’s dream-on-demand. There is no Dream Factory without fungally unfettered American capitalism, no Hollywood without the alienation of labor and the consolidation, withholding, and weaponizing of wealth. Call them aberrations, glitches, or capitulation: video games and smartphone cameras and social media streams and selfies bending in digital infinity are all traceable to cinema. I used to think that, to most effectively decode the unutterable today all around us—and what else could we say is the work of art?—all you needed was (excuse the gendered language) the man and the movie camera.
Why did I think this? Once you see desire truly filmed and transmitted back to you, something in your body sproings up like a bunk mattress. And all of a sudden, cinema feels the closest we have to a genuine contraption designed to archive and grow our desire. In order for cinema to exist, in order for the image to arrive with something like truth attached to it, someone had to want to look in order to show. In turn, an audience of other someones had to want to look in order to see. To paraphrase another American joker: I used to think these things were true. I still do. But I used to, too.
In the American 30s and 40s—as in the American now—artforms that chart our desires possess immediacy. They crave, which is to say they crave a future. Sturges is an exceptional penman of American desire not because he lusted after a future, but rather because his prose and direction seizes on every present moment presently. He overloads his screen shadows with too many words, too particular gestures, too familiar glances. There is something of Shakespeare’s late comedies here, the “problem plays,” as your undergraduate lecturer would cry, not at all undeservedly. I say “The Palm Beach Story” and I salivate at how full of life its ensemble is and how swervy the air in front of the camera feels. It shows us love and it shows us lust in the great slipping shell game of society. And when it pulls back, it reveals a kink, a block, a stumble in the body. Maybe love is half-enough. Maybe we need to see a new way to showing it. Maybe seeing isn’t enough yet.