The Palm Beach Story premiered in Greenville, SC on 9 December 1942.
Coming less than a year after Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’ 5th film as director reunites him with Joel McCrea, but the film belongs to Claudette Colbert (as Stephanie Zacharek wrote in the Criterion essay on the film, McCrea’s role is “to gawp in astonishment at the ever-flowing waterfall of half-cockeyed, half-brilliant observations and double entendres that tumble from her lips). In fact, the Hays Office rejected Sturges’ initial script due to "sex suggestive situations...and dialogue” as well as its overt parody of John D. Rockefeller in the character of John D. Hackensacker (Rudy Vallée).
Colbert received top billing, and top pay. Her salary was $150,000 (about $2.7 million in today’s value) compared to the $60,000 (about $1 million in today’s value) paid to McCrea.
Zacharek describes the film as “the diamond bracelet of romantic comedies: glittering, extravagant in feeling and in laughs, representative of all the things you might buy in the moonlight and come to regret the next day.”
