The story is pure Preston: newlywed Claudette Colbert intends to find another husband, preferably a millionaire, so she can bankroll her genius husband's new style airport.

Of course, husband Joseph McCrea doesn't like his wife hawking her wares for him, and pursues her as she makes for Florida and into the arms of a loveable sausage meat baron Rudy Vallee. But, in "divorce capital of the world" Palm Beach McCrea becomes the focus of Vallee's sharp-witted sister, Mary Astor.

Will Colbert and McCrea, clearly made for each other, make a fatal blunder and go for the big money?

A screwball comedy of the screwiest variety, The Palm Beach Story is a masterpiece of witty banter, broad farce, and sharp performances.

Colbert is as good here as in her Oscar-winning turn in It Happened One Night, and McCrea, fresh from Sturges Sullivan's Travels, makes for a winning, straight-laced foil.

Among the standout supporting cast, Mary Astor is scintillating as a quick-tongued, acerbic man-eater, the polar opposite of her "maybe good girl" performance the year before in The Maltese Falcon.

In Preston Sturges films however, performances were invariably standout. Sturges wrote dazzling comedy, as warm as it was acidic (although adorable, Colbert could dump her decent husband for a richer man), crammed with one-liners, put-downs and put-ons that could sit in any date movie made today.

As with Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century, The Palm Beach Story may be too noisy for everyone's tastes, but this is first class filmmaking.

Sturges deftly handles the cosmic coincidences that come with the genre and closes with a trick shot that is as wonderful as it is daft. And like all great comedy, The Palm Beach Story also carries a tinge of pathos.

The film was made in 1942 while Sturges was the toast of Tinseltown, but by the end of the decade, after a number of box office disappointments, he was washed up. Sturges died in 1959 aged 60, but still had one last laugh; at the time he was working on his memoirs, entitled "The Events Leading Up To My Death."

Rob Daniel