Blu-ray, DVD Release: The Palm Beach Story

By
Laurence
– October 27, 2014Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 20, 2015
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion

The Palm Beach Story, a wild 1942 movie of wacky wedlock from Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve), takes off like a rocket and never lets up.

The Palm Beach Story movie scene

Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert star in The Palm Beach Story

In this classic comedy, Joel McCrea (Foreign Correspondent) 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 (So This Is New York) and Mary Astor (Meet Me in St. Louis) as a brother and a sister ensnared in Tom and Gerry’s high jinks.

Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film include the following:

• 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
• An essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek

Buy or Rent The Palm Beach Story
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.