The Palm Beach Story
1942, NR, 90 min.
D: Preston Sturges; with Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea.

Sturges on the importance of money, sex, and guns – not necessarily in that order. Colbert plays yet another runaway heroine (a role she trademarked) in a screwball comedy, but with Sturges’ usual subversive spin, she’s running away from the man she loves so she can marry someone for his money. This is Sturges at his pithiest, with his choicest cast of supporting loons: the Wienie King, Rudy Vallee’s hilariously understated John D. Hackensacker, the Princess Centimillia, Toto, and – yipes! – the Ale and Quail Club. The sequence under the opening credits is one helluva gag, with a shameless payoff in the final shot. Check out the Chronicle‘s story on the Austin Film Society’s film festival www.auschron.com/issues/dispatch/2000-01-14/screens_feature.html; Unfaithfully Yours: The Satire of Preston Sturges.

This article appears in January 28 • 2000.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.