Comedy legend Mel Brooks has named Preston Sturges's 1942 screwball classic The Palm Beach Story as one of cinema's most underrated films, praising it as a key influence on his own filmmaking style. While Brooks reveres Alfred Hitchcock as the greatest director of all time, he singled out Sturges as his favourite runner-up, crediting the director's freewheeling, fast-paced comic sensibility with shaping his own anarchic approach to filmmaking.

Brooks, an EGOT-winning veteran now over 100 years old, has long drawn on influences ranging from horror classics and Golden Age musicals to the Marx Brothers and mentors Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner. He described Sturges as giving him "freedom to go crazy," and though The Palm Beach Story underperformed with critics and audiences on release in the early 1940s, it has since gained wider recognition, with Brooks arguing its comic style fed directly into works such as The Producers and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.