The Palm Beach Story (1942)

 Preston Sturges' "The Palm Beach Story"

By 1942, Preston Sturges was on a roll in Hollywood with a string of commercial successes. That is until "The Palm Beach Story," which ended up being panned by critics who had felt like the typical Sturges charm had deteriorated with this film into something more bland and banal.

Like most of his films, I suppose you could call "The Palm Beach Story" a screwball comedy. In this film, an inventor, Tom, and his wife, Gerry are down on their luck financially. Gerry decides they both would be better off if she left. Gerry takes a train to Palm Beach where she meets John D. Hackensacker III (an obvious replication of John D. Rockefeller III), who offers to take her on his boat. When they arrive in Palm Beach, Tom is there waiting for her. She pretends that Tom is her brother and more shenanigans ensue. 

I suppose the main thematic pull from this film is its observance of class divisions. Tom and Gerry are both financially despondent and spend the film around wealthy individuals who seem to throw their money around anywhere at anything. The rich live idly as the poor struggle. This notion seems to come directly out of the early 1930s screwball films that seemed to focus on such dynamics. Claudette Colbert, who stars in this film as Gerry, was an actress who was in the founding screwball comedies that arrived post-Depression, such as Frank Capra's 1934 hit "It Happened One Night." These films typically took the class dynamics that were being discussed in Depression-era America and looped them around the screwball comedy format. In this way, I feel as though Claudette Colbert, almost 10 years later, is coming back to her roots, as it were. 

I found the film to be mildly entertaining. I can't say that this is something I will pound the table for or will ever revisit again. However, I thought it was a good screwball comedy in an era in which these types of films were on the edge of decline. It was nice to see Colbert again, as well.