The Palm Beach Story (Blu-ray)

This wild tale of wacky wedlock from Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve) takes off like a rocket and never lets up.

Joel McCrae (Sullivan’s Travels) and Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night) play Tom and Gerry, a married New York couple on the skids, financially and romantically. With Tom hot on her trail, Gerry takes off for Florida on a mission to solve the pair’s money troubles, which she accomplishes in a highly unorthodox manner.

A mix of the witty and the utterly absurd, The Palm Beach Story is a high watermark of Sturges’s brand of physical comedy and verbal repartee, featuring sparkling performances from its leads as well as hilarious supporting turns from Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor as a brother and a sister ensnared in Tom and Gerry’s high-jinks.

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with writer and film historian James Harvey about director Preston Sturges
• New interview with actor and comedian Bill Hader about Sturges Safeguarding Military Information, a 1942 World War II propaganda short written by Sturges
• Screen Guild Theater radio adaptation of the film from March 1943
• PLUS: An essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek