THE PALM BEACH STORY—fifth of seven hits in a row for director-writer Preston Sturges, this one bringing sorely needed laughs to a bleak 1942.  “You will care for me, though. I grow on people. Like moss.”

Frustrated inventor ‘Tom Jeffers’ (Joel McCrea) needs money to bankroll his Big Idea, an airport suspended by wire over a city.  Understandably taxed after five years of Tom not having success, wife ‘Gerry'(Claudette Colbert) takes a drastic step. She’ll divorce him, head to Florida and marry a millionaire to get Tom the dough for the project. What could go wrong?

“Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That’s hard to say with false teeth!”

“I was broke too when I was about your age, but I didn’t have a figure like you’ve got. I had to use my brains. You’ll get over it. You’ll get over being young, too. Someday you’ll wake up and find everything behind you. Gives you quite a turn. Makes you sorry for a few of the things you didn’t do while you still could.”

En route to Florida and wealth she must deal with the strange little man known as ‘The Wienie King’ (Robert Dudley—“I’m the Wienie King! Invented the Texas Wienie! Lay off ’em, you’ll live longer”), the boozed-up and certifiably wacko ‘Ale and Quail Hunting Club’ and then a madcap shopping spree courtesy of ‘John D. Hackensacker III’ (Rudy Vallee), zillionaire eccentric.  Tom follows and gets ensnared by ‘Maude “Princess” Centimillia’ (Mary Astor), Hackensacker’s daffy sex-crazed sister. Great fun, rocket-paced, with racy double-entendres, droll deadpans and charged physical gags. Everyone is in top form.

GERRY: “I may not even get married again. I might become an adventuress.”   TOM: “I can just see you starting for China on a twenty-six foot sail boat.”   GERRY: “You’re thinking of an adventurer, dear. An adventuress never goes on anything under three hundred feet with a crew of eighty.”

“Nothing is permanent in this world except Roosevelt, dear.” One of Sturges best, sprinting a breathless 88 minutes, with Sig Arno, Robert Warwick, Torben Meyer, William Demarest, Roscoe Ates, Chester Conklin, Franklin Pangborn, Alan Bridge, Jimmy Conlin, Snowflake, J. Farrell MacDonald and Frank Faylen. It was #50 at the box office, a $4,900,000 gross banishing the $950,000 price tag. “And they lived happily ever after. Or did they?”