Palm Beach Story

Claudette Colbert is charming as the wife who would be a golddigger for her dreamy architect of a husband, Joel McCrea. After a wild night with the bumptious Ale & Quail Club on the train to Florida, she falls in with quasi-Rockefeller scion Rudy Vallee. Hubby flies down to retrieve her and makes a fourth with rich sister Mary Astor. Sex finally proves more attractive than money, but everyone ends up happy . . . or do they? For my money, however, the noise in this film drowns out the wit and The Lady Eve remains the one true classic that Preston Sturges wrote and directed in his shooting star streak across the Hollywood sky during WWII. (1942, dvd, r.) *6*