Young married couple Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry (Claudette Colbert) are out of luck — unable to find an investor willing to fund Tom’s dream of engineering a suspended airport in the sky, and facing eviction from their Park Avenue apartment. Upon receiving a fortuitous offer, Gerry hatches a half-baked plan to travel to Palm Beach for a quickie divorce, then marry a millionaire so she can funnel funds back to Tom.
A spate of misunderstandings and misadventures ensue in Preston Sturges’s fifth feature, celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, which uproariously posits that money can’t buy love, but having none isn’t necessarily the secret to a long and happy marriage, either. Colbert is magnanimous as Gerry; a tornado of canny charm, and the perfect foil for Tom’s dry cynicism and the earnest sincerity offered up by her wealthy suitor, J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee). The film’s dynamic and quip-filled script cleverly skirts its way around the Hays Code with playful visual innuendos and double entendres aplenty. The Palm Beach Story is a paragon of Classic Hollywood (un)romantic screwball comedy and belongs on the same shelf as The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday.
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