It is 1942: the real world is engulfed in the flames of war, and Sturges, Paramount's kingpin, responds not with saccharine patriotism, but with this pure distillation of luxurious cynicism, an escape from reality so self-aware that it becomes meta-cinema. The entire thesis of the film is in its opening credits: a surreal sequence of wedding chaos, suitcases, shoes, tuxedos, and veils chasing each other in a feverish montage, all labeled with enigmatic captions (“And they lived happily ever after... or did they?”), culminating in a wedding. Sturges doesn't start with the fairy tale; he starts with the disaster, showing us the “happy ending” only to spend the next 80 minutes dismantling it piece by piece.

At the center of the tornado is one of the most anti-romantic premises ever conceived. Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert, at her sophisticated pragmatist peak) is madly in love with her husband, the idealistic inventor Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea). She is so in love that she decides to leave him. Her logic is ironclad, and totally Sturgesian: she is dead weight, a luxury that her penniless genius cannot afford. The only solution? Flee to Palm Beach, get divorced, snag one of the millionaires who infest the Florida coast like elegant mollusks, and use her new husband's money to finance her old husband's inventions. It's not greed; it's capitalist altruism. It's the ultimate parody of the American Dream, where marriage is not a sacrament but a venture capital strategy. Sturges sneers at the Hays Code, presenting a woman whose virtue is so strong that it drives her to an act of marital prostitution for the sake of the man she loves. Her escape is financed by a literal Deus ex Machina: The Wienie King, an elderly junk food magnate who gives her $700 on the train, a guardian angel of the absurd logic that governs this universe.

The train journey to Palm Beach is a masterpiece of orchestrated chaos, a microcosm of the madness of the world. Gerry, in order to escape the ticket inspector, finds herself held hostage in a sleeping car requisitioned by the “Ale and Quail Club,” a coterie of drunken, rifle-wielding millionaires who turn the train into a miniature war zone. It is slapstick elevated to social commentary: they are the embodiment of destructive and noisy male idiocy, from which Gerry must escape (disguised as a porter) to reach his financial utopia. But Palm Beach turns out to be just a quieter, but equally absurd, aquarium. It is here that he meets his target: J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallée, in a performance of sublime vacuity). Hackensacker is not a man; he is a walking checkbook, a being so rich and boring that his only passion is meticulously noting insignificant expenses (“Nektar... 15 cents”). He is the exact polar opposite of the virile and creative (but poor) Tom. His courtship of Gerry is a masterpiece of surreal dialogue, especially when Sturges introduces “Topic A”—sex—a subject that the Hays Code prohibited, and which Sturges circumvents by making it the center of the conversation, a maze of double entendres in which Hackensacker believes that Gerry's “Topic A” is simply her “favorite subject,” while she is talking (literally) about her husband.

Sturges populates this world with his usual stock company of lovable lunatics, among whom The Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor), Hackensacker's sister, stands out. She is a devourer of men and clichés, collecting husbands with the same carelessness with which her brother notes down expenses. But the perfection of Sturges' comic machine lies in his refusal to take himself seriously, to the point of self-harm. When Tom, arriving in Palm Beach in pursuit of Gerry, irreparably complicates the love triangle, Sturges finds himself faced with an insoluble narrative knot. His solution? Not a solution, but an act of dramaturgical hooliganism. He pulls not one, but two identical twins (Gerry's sister and Tom's brother) out of his hat, resolving every conflict with a twist that is not only implausible, but a blatant mockery of narrative conventions, from Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors) onwards. It is Sturges who breaks the fourth wall and says to us: “You believed this madness for 80 minutes? Then you deserve an ending like this.” It is the definitive auteur statement: cinema is not life, it is a game, and he dictates its absurd rules. The Palm Beach Story is the pinnacle of screwball comedy precisely because it exposes its foundations, laughing at its own magnificent artificiality.