The Prodigal Cinephile

I don’t think I’ve ever made it to *February* 15 without filing my taxes, let alone Tax Day, but April is nonetheless a fine time to celebrate one of my all-time favorite movie props, the notebook in which J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) aka “Snoodles” from The Palm Beach Story writes down all of his expenses:

In honor of the Ale and Quail Club that he and Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) encounter on their way to Florida, this month’s drink is my favorite beer cocktail, the Campari & IPA Spritzer. I know about this elegantly simple concoction thanks to Anjali Prasertong from The Kitchn. She, in turn, spotted it in a 2011 New York Times article called “Summer Cocktails Made Simpler” in which author Robert Willey attributes it to Tucson bartender Cieran Wiese. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Simon pointed out on Instagram that the cult favorite summer sipper the NASCAR Spritz follows the same formula. I suppose one of the lessons here is that the provenance of a highball is always going to be murky! Another is that the specific ingredients you choose count for a lot when there are only two (or three of you include the garnish) total, and to me this is the perfect showcase for my original favorite beer, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which emerged as a star of the American craft brewing scene right as I came of drinking age. Here’s how you make it:

1 1 /2 ozs. Campari
6 ozs. IPA (Dogfish Head 90 Minute)

Add Campari to a chilled glass containing two or three ice cubs. Slowly pour in the beer and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.

You don’t want just any IPA here–you need something with a lot of character to stand up to the Campari. You’re also looking for citrus, but not too much. Enter 90 Minute IPA, which is malty and piney and delicious on its own, but even better with a boost of sweetness and texture. While this definitely is a refreshing beverage, the high ABV and strong flavors will keep you warm when a cool breeze blows, which makes it perfect as a way to unwind after work on a spring evening or for a rainy night like the one Hackensacker and Gerry travel south on. But first, here’s a picture of my Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection DVD box set by Universal:

The Palm Beach Story is also available for rental on a variety of streaming video platforms.

The seeds for that fateful train journey are planted years earlier. The Palm Beach Story begins with one of cinema’s great opening credits sequences, a silent retelling of the frantic hours leading up to Gerry’s marriage to Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea), who may or may not be the man she intended to wed. You see, although it concludes with the two of them about to exchange vows:

They both had to beat a doppelgänger to the church. Gerry accomplishes this by locking hers in a closet:

While Tom (dark tie) and his best man (no mustache) may just have had better luck with cabs than their counterparts (light tie, no mustache):

As Lisa Sternlieb writes in her American Shakespeare article “He Isn’t Exactly My Brother”: Shakespearean Illogic in The Palm Beach Story,” when these identical twins reappear at the end of the film following Tom’s comment “that was another plot entirely,” we are meant to suspect that he’s referring to the idea that “the Claudette Colbert who is gagged and locked in a closet has wanted to marry the Joel McCrea who marries her sister while the Joel McCrea who doesn’t make it to the church on time has wanted to marry the Claudette Colbert who marries his brother.” So who knows if Tom and Gerry (yes, like the cartoon cat and mouse) intended to marry each other at all? Given these uncertain beginnings, it’s hardly a surprise that the shot of the two of them is followed by title cards that say “and they lived happily ever after . . . or did they?”

These are followed additional titles in the same font which establish the year of the main action as 1942, five years after the wedding we just witnessed, and two dissolves to first a sign advertising an apartment for rent, and then a group of people getting off an elevator:

One of them is an old man played by Robert Dudley who, seemingly detecting that the apartment isn’t empty, uses what Stuart Klawans calls “his dog’s senses” in Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges “to track the female presence he picks up”:

When she finally confronts him, he reveals that he’s the inventor of the Texas wienie (“lay off ’em, you’ll live longer”) and thus in possession of a bankroll that Preston Sturges’s screenplay (as published in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges) describes as big enough “to choke a crocodile”:

He gives her enough money to take care of all her debts because it makes him feel young again “to do a little favor for such a beautiful lady.” She can’t wait to tell Tom the good news, but he fails to appreciate it as such: “I mean, sex didn’t even enter into it,” he says sarcastically, to which Gerry replies, “but of course it did, darling!” And then, “sex always has something to do with it. From about the time you’re about so big . . . “

” . . . and wondering why your girl friends’ fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden.” She is, of course, talking about The Look: “you know, ‘how’s about this evening, babe?'”

Their night eventually ends as all nights should with a boozy dinner and lovemaking, but she wakes up the next morning determined to capitalize on her youth and good looks while they still last to secure a more comfortable future her herself and her husband. After a bit of business with a round pivot window that Chevy Chase and National Lampoons’s Christmas Vacation (the subject of my December, 2023 Drink & a Movie post) director Jeremiah S. Chechik were presumably familiar with:

Gerry’s off to Palm Beach to secure a divorce courtesy the wealthy members of the Ale and Quail club, who, given enough “subtle” hints, would never leave a lady stranded. One of them is even chivalrous enough to loan her the pajamas that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Here they are serenading her with “Sweet Adelaide” later that evening:

Then engaging in some harmless indoor trap shooting:

And finally, their sexual hopes frustrated, turning into what Klawans calls “a parody of a lynch mob”:

This sequence, which Alessandro Pirolini aptly describes in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study as being “as narratively useless as it is visually exhilarating,” ends with the conductor of the train cutting the Club’s private car (and all of Gerry’s clothes) loose:

Luckily, by this time Gerry has already met cute Hackensacker, a thinly-veiled caricature of John D. Rockefeller III, by crushing his pince-nez glasses while attempting to climb into the sleeping car bunk above his:

“Just pick off any little pieces you see, will you?” he says, ever the good sport. It’s at breakfast the following morning when we meet his notebook. Having turned her borrowed pajamas and a Pullman blanket into an almost presentable ensemble, she finds him in the dining car pouring over the menu.

“The thirty-five cent breakfast seems the best at first glance, but if you analyze it for solid value, the fifty-five center is the one.” They eventually settle on one seventy-five cent breakfast each with a la carte prairie oysters to start–“make mine on the half-shell,” he instructs the waiter.

While they wait for their food, he proposes that they get off the train in Jacksonville to buy her “the few little things” she needs, then proceed the rest of the way to Palm Beach (where he is going as well) by boat. Hackensacker dutifully records each purchase in his book:

Including a piece of jewelry that the screenplay describes as “a ruby bracelet and then some”:

The dissonance between Hackensacker’s profligacy and scrupulousness understandably makes Gerry nervous. “I keep feeling that two men with butterfly nets are going to creep up behind you and lead you away,” she worries. The revelation that he’s actually the richest man in the world is followed by a punchline which hits close to home for someone like me who can’t ever quite manage to stick to a budget: “I write things down, but I never add them up.”

Meanwhile, following his own encounter with the old man who Manny Farber described (in a New Republic essay included in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber) as possessing “the quality of a disembodied spirit, believably a pixie–or ‘The Wienie King,'” Tom is en route to Palm Beach himself via plane to intercept Gerry. The “enchanted figures who continually grant Tom and Gerry’s spoken and unspoken wishes” are just one of the ways that, per Sternlieb, “The Palm Beach Story intricately engages with the mechanics and actively opposes the logic of Shakespearean comedy, particularly its obsession with transformation and metamorphosis.” Gerry and Hackensacker meet Hackensacker’s sister, Mary Astor’s Princess Centimillia (an underrated Sturges name!) aka Maud and her hanger-on Toto (Sig Arno), and Tom is waiting on shore as all of them disembark. Gerry introduces Tom as her brother, prompting more than one person to comment on their supposed familial resemblance. To again quote Sternlieb:

In order to love Shakespeare’s comedies, we must continually suspend our disbelief so that we can fully appreciate boys dressed as girls dressed as boys or love at first sight or soliloquies that can’t be overheard on stage, but Sturges asks the opposite of us. He asks us to notice that people are always willing to believe anything, always eager to create their own reality, always ready to form opinions of us based on nothing at all. He asks us to notice that most of us are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and in Cloud Cuckoo Land people will always see what isn’t there. When Gerry introduces the Hackensackers to her ‘brother’, first Maud then Snoodles exclaims, ‘You look exactly alike’. We are constantly performing or being asked to perform to meet others’ uninformed expectations, but what a relief when we can finally be ourselves.

From here it’s not long before we’re basically right back where we started. The Princess wants to make Tom her eighth husband (“I’m thinking of an American–at the moment, it seems more patriotic”), but he has eyes only for Gerry, who Hackensacker attempts to seduce by singing to her outside her window:

Unfortunately for him, it just drives Gerry back into Tom’s arms:

They come clean about their true relationship the next morning. “I don’t suppose you have a twin sister. . . . ” Hackensacker says mournfully to Gerry, but of course she does! And Tom has a twin brother. Cut to all of them (and Toto, in a nice touch) at the altar:

The shot which follows is deceptively advanced for its era, as discussed by VFX artists The Corridor Crew starting at the 10:26 mark of this video–there’s a fairly straightforward duplicated shot (you can see the seem easily here because part of Rudy Vallee’s shadow is missing), but the camera is moving in a way that would have been difficult to coordinate with 1940s technology. Anyway, neither Gerry’s sibling nor Tom’s looks particularly happy to be here:

And as the camera tracks back, The Palm Beach Story ends with the same two title cards that set its plot in motion:

‘Round and ’round and ’round we go! Sturges originally wanted to call the film Is Marriage Necessary? That title didn’t survive the Hayes Office, but the sentiment did surely did. His cynicism, like the bitterness in a Campari & IPA Spritzer, goes down easy, though. So hit play again, why don’t you, and pour yourself another! It’s good for what ails you.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

My Loving Wife is a proud graduate of Duke University, so the Tobacco Road recipe by Joe Bolam of Char Steak and Lounge in nearby Rochester, New York in the booklet which came with my new bottle of Fee Brothers Turkish Tobacco Bitters immediately caught my eye. When it turned out to taste like something these guys would love:

I knew I had my drink and a movie pairing for March! They are all panelists on the television program The Sports Writers on TV, and the person they are talking about is William Gates, who along with Arthur Agee is one of the two main subjects of the documentary Hoop Dreams. The sport they both play is basketball, which our household becomes fairly obsessed with each year at this time as the Atlantic Coast Conference (I’m a Pitt grad) regular season wraps up and we head into the postseason. Here’s how to make this month’s cocktail:

1 1/2 ozs. Basil Hayden Red Wine Cask Finish
1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
1/2 oz. Averna
1/2 oz. Carpano Antica
2 dashes Fee Brothers Black Walnut Bitters
2 dashes Fee Brothers Turkish Tobacco Bitters

Stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

The Tobacco Road is a rich drink thanks to the Carpano Antica and Cherry Heering, so we left it ungarnished, but as a Black Manhattan variation, a Maraschino cherry would not be out of place. It has a lot of fruit on the nose, chocolate and coffee on the sip, and an almost sherry-like finish which suggests that it would go great with a cigar like the one Bill Gleason is smoking above in the image on the right.

On to Hoop Dreams! Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:

It can also be streamed on a wide range of platforms, including both The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Hoop Dreams is a longitudinal documentary which follows Agee and Gates over a five-year period which begins with them being discovered on the streetball courts of inner city Chicago and recruited by St. Joseph, an elite prep school in the suburbs, and ends shortly after the conclusion of their respective high school basketball careers. At the start of the film, Gates is ascendant: the excerpts from The Sports Writers on TV that I began this post with are from the “Freshman Year” section of Hoop Dreams and in them Bill Gleason compares him to Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas. Agee, on the other hand, is kicked out of St. Joseph his sophomore year after his family falls behind on their tuition payments. Gates suffers two major knee injuries during his junior year, though, and is therefore never able to lead St. Joseph to the promised land of the Illinois state championship tournament while Agee blossoms as an upperclassman and leads Marshall Metro High School on a Cinderella run to the semi-finals of the same event. The movie concludes with end titles indicating that both players are now seniors in college playing for Marquette and Arkansas State respectively, but noting that Gates has grown disillusioned with basketball.

Agee and Gates represent the millions of youth athletes in the United States fighting for a shot to become one of the roughly 500 professionals who appear in an NBA game each season. Competition is part of the film’s DNA, so it’s understandable that for many critics it’s of paramount importance to determine who its “winner” is. To bell hooks, writing in Sight & Sound in 1995, “the triumphant individual in the film is (the young) Arthur Agee, who remains obsessed with the game” while Gates “is portrayed as a victim” despite the fact that (or because) he “learns to critique the ethic of competition that he has been socialised to accept passively within white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Kimberly Chabot Davis argues against this interpretation in a South Atlantic Review article called “White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in Hoop Dreams and Paris Is Burning“:

Hooks sees William Gates as the loser of the film because he eventually decides to reject the basketball dream, and she is upset that “his longing to be a good parent, to not be obsessed with basketball, is not represented [by the filmmakers] as a positive shift in his thinking,” whereas Arthur Agee, who never questions the dream, is represented as ‘the triumphant individual.’ In direct opposition to hooks’s reading, I came out of the film thinking that the filmmakers indirectly criticize Arthur Agee’s blind pursuit of the NBA dream and attempt to portray William Gates as the real winner because he learns that education and family responsibility are “truer” measures of success.

Comments made by filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert in the short documentary Life After Hoop Dreams included on the Criterion Collection DVD as an extra suggest that the latter may track more closely to their actual feelings, but the genius of the film is that it supports both readings. As John Edgar Wiseman notes in his essay “Serious Game,” its final cut “seems not based on assumptions the filmmakers formed before they encountered the actual lives of their subjects but a story that evolved naturally as footage accumulated.” While Hoop Dreams doesn’t insist on a moral, it definitely does have a point of view. Take, for instance, the transition between its first two sections. “Freshman Year” ends after St. Joseph’s varsity team is eliminated from the playoffs with voiceover narration by James that says, “despite the loss, William’s gutty performance bodes well for next year.”

“Sophomore Year” then begins with him in class:

James notes that he and Agee are both on partial scholarships which aren’t big enough to cover a recent tuition increase. Cut to Patricia Wier, President of Encyclopedia Britannica explaining how in response to a solicitation by St. Joseph she and her husband decided to sponsor a student, who turned out to be Gates. There’s a shot of Wier and husband in the stands watching a game:

Followed by one of them introducing Gates to their friends:

James’s narration explains that “with continuing support from Patricia Wier, William is assured that his entire education at St. Joe’s will be free.” This is immediately succeeded by a series of interviews with Agee, his mother, and St. Joseph basketball coach Gene Pingatore describing the chain of events that led to Agee being dismissed from the school. “I thought Pingatore and them would help me out, but. . . . ” Agee says, shaking his head:

Pingatore, Agee, and Agee’s mother then all speak in turn: Pingatore defends the school’s decision on the grounds that St. Joseph is dependent on tuition dollars to function, Agee speculates that Pingatore was concerned about his height, and Agee’s mother states that she never would have enrolled her son at St. Joseph in the first place if she had known he might experience the anguish of being forced to change schools in the middle of the year. The scene ends with a four-shot montage sequence: it begins with empty desks and a row of padlocks:

Followed by a statue of Saint Joseph himself:

And then a shot of a sort of shrine to Isiah Thomas, who attended St. Joseph, in the school’s lobby which is shown multiple times throughout the movie:

Whatever the filmmakers think of Agee’s and Gate’s choices and values, they clearly don’t believe that St. Joseph has treated the two boys equally and have a theory why not. Another thing I like about Hoop Dreams is the way it utilizes repetition effectively. Robert Greene discusses one great example in his essay “The Real Thing.” A one-on-one game between Agee and his father which takes place at the beginning of the film:

Is echoed by second near the end which, because of everything that has happened in between, “has the cadence and expressive power of an epic showdown.”

Another is the way the filmmakers leverage a recurring establishing shot of the Agee’s apartment at night with its lights on to efficiently communicate that their power has been turned off:

Speaking of efficient, James’s narration does a marvelous job of concisely telling the story of important basketball games, such as this one in which Agee and his teammates force a taller but slower opponent out of its comfort zone by holding the ball late into the shot clock:

And I love the way the film lets us into spaces we may never otherwise get to see such as a D1 recruiting visit:

And a nurse’s assistant graduation:

However, I was surprised to find that what I appreciated most after recently spending time with Criterion Collection edition of this film were the commentary tracks. The one featuring Agee and Gates comes closer to being “essential” than any other I’ve ever listened to: anyone willing to spend nearly three hours of your life watching Hoop Dreams absolutely will want to hear what its subjects have to say! The commentary track with James, Marx, and Gilbert is full of insights as well and the two sometimes work in tandem to show parts of the movie in a new light. To go back to St. Joseph’s treatment of Agee, both groups believe that school didn’t just treat him unfairly, but in fact acted contrary to its own best interests. The former players observe that it was a bad basketball decision:

ARTHUR: But they was just, like, “I guess we got room for one guy. And this one guy is gonna take us down state, like, we’re gonna put everything in him. We don’t need another guy that HE needs.” And they didn’t know that William needed me to take that pressure off of him.

WILLIAM: I mean, if there was somebody that understood me at St. Joe’s, it was Arthur. Because at that particular point I really felt like the only person who could have understood me out there was him. And I felt like not only did I lose a best friend at the time, I felt like a part of me was gone.

While the filmmakers express bewilderment that St. Joseph could be so un-PR-conscious to kick Arthur out of school knowing that he was the subject of a movie. At other times, illumination comes from the distance between the commenters’ different experiences of the same event such as when James and company lament not being told earlier that Gates had a daughter with his girlfriend, while he says this can’t possibly be true because the St. Joseph school newspaper ran a story about it. They also both note that Pingatore changed after the film but have different explanations for why: Agee and Gates think it’s because he learned from watching himself on screen and began yelling less and giving his players more freedom, whereas the filmmakers ascribe his more relaxed demeanor to finally winning a state championship in 1999, not anything to do with Hoop Dreams.

Mostly, though, it’s amazing to just listen to Agee and Gates relive pivotal moments in their lives like the two free throws that Gates misses at the end of his junior year which lead directly to a St. Joseph loss in the playoffs.

He explains that he heard his cartilage tear earlier and therefore didn’t want the ball at the end of the game. As Gates watches himself go to the line, he observes that he shot 100% from the line in the games leading up to this one and that “all of these games are high-pressure games. None of them are more high-pressure than the others.” To him, the reason he missed those two shots was simple: he couldn’t bend his knees and never should have let himself be inserted back into the game. “People think I’m disappointed because I missed the free throws,” had adds. “No, I’m disappointed because I wasn’t honest with myself or my teammates. I let my team down that year.”

If you do watch the film, both commentary tracks, and Life After Hoop Dreams, you will have spent more than 12 hours with Agee and Gates by the time you finish. The cumulative effect is that of revisiting your own sports memories, the way we Horbals like to break out our video recording of my little brother’s 4×800 relay team winning a Pennsylvania state track title in 2005. And that, I think, is the real achievement of the Criterion Collection’s presentation of Hoop Dreams: it makes these two young men and everyone in their lives seem like family.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.