US 88m Dir: Preston Sturges Key Cast: Claudette Colbert
I've feel like I've been stuck in this run of Preston Sturges penned and directed screwball comedies for an age now. Fortunately I found this one more enjoyable and generally more sophisticated than the others even if it still feels like another cliched example of the genre.
The film opens with the marriage of Gerry (Claudette Colbert) and Tom (Joel McCrea) and then we get the excellent title cards saying "they lived happily ever after.../ Or did they?". Five years into their marriage and Tom is failing to make any money so Gerry decides to get a divorce and runs away to Palm Beach. Along the way she meets John Hackensacker (Rudy Vallée) who turns out to be one of the richest men in the world. Tom pursues her to Palm Beach and tries to stop this relationship whilst also getting entangled with The Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor).
The films is basically the classic screwball comedy plot of a couple splitting up and trying to damage each other's new relationships before inevitably falling in love again by the end. I felt this was a strong example of the plot and unusually the emotions weren't as equal as they usually are with Gerry wanting to end the relationship and Tom not wanting to. Like Sturges other films, there is more of a sexual element than most films of the time and there's even a discussion about sexual attraction at the start which must surely have felt close to the line of what was acceptable at the time.
There's a fair bit of social commentary here, especially with Hackensacker being a not so subtle parody of Rockefeller. Even this was reduced thanks to the Hays Office Censors so I can only imagine just how overt the original script was. On the whole the script does feel more sophisticated than many other screwball comedies, relying much more on witty dialogue than co-incidences and pratfalls, though they are of course a handful of those here.
I thought the ending was appalling- we know that the lead couple will re-unite, that's what these films do. But in order to secure a happy ending they must leave Hackensacker and the Princess with partners too and suddenly it's revealed that both of the leads have an identical twin sibling. It feels like an easy get-out which is only vaguely hinted in the opening titles and is such an outdated idea you can easily trace it right back to Shakespeare.
I would say this is a better than average screwball comedy which does everything you'd expect from the genre particularly well.
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