The Palm Beach Story

The Palm Beach Story is a 1942 screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, and starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor and Rudy Vallée. Victor Young contributed the musical score, including a fast-paced variation of the William Tell Overture for the opening scenes. Typical of a Sturges film, the pacing and dialogue of The Palm Beach Story are very fast. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures. Plot Inventor Tom Jeffers and his wife Gerry are down on their luck financially. Married for five years, the couple is still waiting for Tom's success. Anxious for the finer things in a life, Gerry decides that they both would be better off if they split. But before she can act, she ends up entangled with the Wienie King, a strange older man being shown around her apartment with his wife by a building manager anxious to rent it out from beneath his delinquent tenants. Sympathetic to her plight – and utterly taken by her youth and charm – the man gives her $700 from a giant roll of cash he keeps in his pocket. This is enough to get their rent current, pay off their most urgent bills, buy a new dress, take Tom to an expensive dinner, and still leave $14 and change in pocket money for Tom, and then she says she's leaving him. In spite of a night of amour following their tipsy return home after their dinner, she awakens early, packs a bag, and makes for the train station. Bound for Palm Beach, Florida, her plan is to get a divorce, meet and marry a wealthy man who can both give her what she craves and also help Tom. Penniless, and repeatedly escaping from Tom's clutches, she is finally invited to travel for free as a guest on the private car of the well-to-do and soused Ale and Quail Club. When the Club proves too rowdy and repeatedly fire off hunting rifles in the private car, nearly killing their bartender, she flees to the upper berth of a Pullman car, in the process meeting the meek, eccentric, amiable, and bespectacled John D. Hackensacker III (played by Rudy Vallée), who immediately falls for her.