Overboard is kind of like a mashup of a coupla Preston Sturges movies, with Capra's It Happened One Night thrown in.
The rich person forced into the life of a peasant is like Sullivan's Travels, even though John Sullivan never really has amnesia, but is temporarily out of it due to a blow to the head.
Then there's the spoiled yet spunky gal jumping off the yacht in full evening dress from, uh, Happened, I think. Clearly Edward Herrmann's upper-class twit in a captain's hat is an allusion to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, only Herrmann's Grant Stayton III is a dickhead, and Vallee's character is actually very sweet, not to mention frugal.
I only got to thinking along these lines because I saw it as part of a double-feature on amnesia, where it followed I Love You Again, in which William Powell's tedious small-town Rotarian gets whacked on the head in the first reel, which cures his amnesia, returning him to his forner personality as a rakish con man, who impersonates the Rotarian on his return home, where he finds his wife ready to divorce his boring ass, and they fall in love all over again. Oh, and of course the wife is played by Myrna Loy, and it was directed by Woody Van Dyke.
I'd also spent most of the day exploring the life and work of Thorstein Veblen. I'd never heard of him before, but a passing reference to him in a Daily Kos diary led, as is the passing reference's wont, to Google, to Wikipedia, to.... Well, Google him y'ownself (I already gave you the link!), but suffice it to say I'd spent hours pondering the uselessness of the idle rich and the beauty of solid craftmanship and the evil of Calvinist thought, which produced the perversion that is Social Darwinism, which continues to fuck up our society to this day.
