PALM BEACH STORY
(Paramount)
‘| HERE is not much on the surface of this latest Preston Sturges picture to explain why there now exists. among keen picturegoers a kind of
Preston Sturges cult. And that, of course, is a good sign, because a cult is a self-conscious thing, and there is nothing particularly self-conscious about Preston Sturges. Palm Beach Story does not impress me as being Sturges’s most notable achievement. At the same time, it is the kind of picture that is either a flop or a success-and thanks to the director, it is a success. For Sturges is one of the few real wits in Hollywood; and it is wit with a dash of satire that keeps Palm Beach Story from being just another of those tiresome crazy comedies, and turns it instead into as lively and beguiling a piece of foolery as you could hope to find in six months of theatregoing. If you tried to analyse the story, it would fall to pieces, being nothing but some nonsense about a wife who wants a divorce, a husband who doesn’t, a multi-millionaire who .wants the wife, and a trip to Florida. Everybody is absorbed by what one of the characters describes as "Topic A’"-in other words, sex. But it is sex treated with. wit, sophistication, and good manners; a bedtime story for grown-ups. Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea play their parts with skill and as if they enjoyed them, but the big sur--prise of the picture is Rudy Vallee. As the absorbed and be-spectacled multimillionaire, he is (in my perhaps rather biased opinion), at least one hundred times better as an actor than he has ever been as a crooner. He sings only once in Palm Beach Story, and even then Preston Sturges makes a joke of it, as he makes a joke of everything else that happens from the first credit title to the final fade-out.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19431008.2.30.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 224, 8 October 1943, Page 13
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318PALM BEACH STORY New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 224, 8 October 1943, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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