Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel

THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942)

Written (in three months starting August 1941) and directed by Preston Sturges, one of the genuine geniuses of American comedy. Camera, Victor Milner, Music, Victor Young. With Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee, William Demarest, et al.

Colbert uses unorthodox methods to help her unsuccesful architect husband Joel McCrea . She starts fortune hunting and gets involved with very odd millionaires Astor and Vallee ( whom Sturges added to his script half-way through the writing. ) There are off-the-wall, demented, complicated situations . This mad comedy-farce is a must. The satire on the idle rich is delicious and there is a plethora of unexpectedituations and lines The opening scenes summarize humorously, like a serial, the previous, shaggy-dog adventures which led to the Colbert-McCrea marriage. They end with "And they lived happily ever after --or did they?" and the film proper begins. Then comes the sequence of the stone-deaf Texas weenie king (Robert Dudley) who visits the Park Avenue apartment -- which the couple can no longer afford -- and gives money to Colbert, a total, but attractive stranger. The opening is a gem of inventive, screwball humor. (Edwin Jahiel)