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.

But before she can act, she ends up entangled with the Wienie King, an older man being shown around her apartment with his wife by a building manager anxious to rent it out from beneath his delinquent tenants.

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 eventually invited to travel for free as a guest on the private car of the well-to-do and soused Ale and Quail Club.

This takes a turn towards extravagance during a shopping spree for ladies' finery he instigates in Jacksonville, swirling from trifles to haute couture and expensive jewelry.

Only when Hackensacker hands the store manager a card telling him to charge it all to him is it revealed he is the third richest man in the world and owner of the Erl King, a yacht, which the twosome board for the final leg of the journey to Palm Beach.

Back in New York, the now despondent Tom receives the same kind of charity from the Wienie King he had accused Gerry of trading sexual favors with, which helps clear his mind.

Not only had he shuttled back and forth to Europe as a young man, his ex-wife Eleanor Hutton was an heiress who moved among the European aristocracy, and had once been wooed by Prince Jerome Rospigliosi-Gioeni.

[4] This was Sturges' second collaboration with Joel McCrea, following Sullivan's Travels from the previous year, and they worked again on The Great Moment, filmed in 1942 (but released in 1944).

The movie was Rudy Vallee's first outright comedic role, and he gained a contract with Paramount,[4] as well as an award for Best Actor of 1942 from the National Board of Review.

"[9] Variety described the film as a "tongue-in-cheek spoofing of the idle rich" and predicted that the escapist nature of the story "will prove a welcome change of pace in theaters that have perhaps been overloaded with strictly war output.

Reporting a few hours after its release in the Rivoli Theatre, Ed Sullivan concluded: "The cinema reporters did not like The Palm Beach Story...The reason that the critics felt let down by this flicker, obviously, was that they have come to look for something special from Sturges--wit, irony, undertones, the unconventional in a medium that often is conventional to the point of triteness...The Palm Beach Story, they felt, was third-rate Sturges and they announced the verdict, not with malice, but because they were rooting for another home run.