New York. Gerry is sad that her husband Tom, an architect, is struggling financially, so she decides to leave him and marry a rich man so that she can provide money for Tom. On a train, she meets the rich Hackensacker who decides to help her buy clothes that she lost in the train waggon. Once in Palm Beach, Gerry meets Tom again and introduces him as her brother, and immediately Hackensacker’s sister Centimillia falls for Tom. He even agrees to finance Tom’s idea for an airport. In the end, Gerry and Tom make up again. Luckily for Hackensacker and Centimillia, Gerry and Tom how a twin sister and brother, respectively, so the latter marry the rich siblings.
One of Preston Sturges’ lesser films, “The Palm Beach Story” is a rather tiresome comedy based on a forced and a confusing premise. While Claudette Colbert is again charming, she is unable to overcome the lack of inspiration in the storyline. Except for a delicious comedy ‘twist ending’, the jokes are rather thin, as if they were not that well thought out beforehand: the first good joke happens only some 20 minutes into the film, when Gerry wants to secretly leave her husband while he is still asleep, and clumsily pushes a goodbye letter under his blanket, but accidentally wakes him up, ruining the “surprise”. The train sequence, where Gerry cannot sleep because the passangers are partying like crazy, is a mess, with only intermittent sparks of good humor (two hunters trying to shoot a thrown cracker, but only break the glass on the windows with their bullets; the train conductor getting so fed up with the wild passangers that he simply disconnects their train waggon (!), leaving them stranded on the railroad tracks). The film tries to persuade the viewers that Gerry only loves her husband by searching for a rich new husband, but it does a lousy job at it. Overall, thanks to the performances and zany wit, “Palm Beach” is good, but it attests that not every movie from the 30s and 40s is always automatically a classic.
Grade:++
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