The Lady Eve ***** (no 37)

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 1941 93m) DVD1/2

Positively the same dame

p  Paul Jones  d/w  Preston Sturges  play  Monckton Hoffe  ph  Victor Milner  ed  Stuart Gilmore  m  Leo Shuken, Charles Bradshaw  art  Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegte  cos  Edith Head

Barbara Stanwyck (Jean Harrington/Eve Sidwich), Henry Fonda (Charles Pike), Eugène Pallette (Mr Pike), Charles Coburn (“Col.” Harry Harrington), Eric Blore (Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith), Melville Cooper (Gerald), William Demarest (Ambrose “Muggsy” Mergatroyd), Martha O’Driscoll (Martha), Janet Beecher (Mrs Pike), Robert Greig (Burrows), Luis Alberni, Jimmy Conlin, Al Bridge, Robert Dudley, Arthur Hoyt,

Of all the great Preston Sturges comedies of the early forties, there can surely be none more sophisticated in its insanity than this, or one so romantic.  It’s no coincidence that during the first love scene Rodgers & Hart’s ‘Isn’t it Romantic?’ is heard, because that’s just what The Lady Eve is all about.  It’s Sturges’ paean to the fairer sex, and despite the snake analogy (which in this film is quite apt), it’s also just what Peter Bogdanovich says it is on the DVD intro, “modern and witty.”  Yet though it may be modern, there is no modern talent who could dream of writing something as scintillating as this.

            Colonel Harry Harrington, his daughter Jean and servant Gerald are a group of con artists travelling back from South America to the States on the same liner that is also transporting Charles Pike, an ale magnate’s son, back home after spending a year up the Amazon studying snakes.  Despite the unwanted attentions of dozens of adventuresses, it’s Jean who captures his heart, but rather than take him for what she can get she falls in love with him, only for him to find out what she is…

            To reveal more to the uninitiated would be a crime because this truly is one of the screwiest of screwball comedies, a film of nearly unprecedented pratfall value and with enough sexual innuendo to fill the director’s cut of any Carry On film, only this time subtly.  Like a rattlesnake moving along its merry way, the plot twists and turns back and forth but never once gets disorienting.  When Jean first meets Pike she literally drops something on his head, later tripping him up in the ship’s restaurant.  When he falls in love, he really does fall.  Yet she falls in love with him, too, and though she may earlier have said “I dunno why it is but a sucker always steps on your feet“, she’s later falling for that very thing about him.  The Colonel may say that he is “as fine a specimen of the sucker sapiens as I’ve ever seen“, but she cannot be daunted. 

            Of course, for such a premise to work requires not just great writing but great actors, and The Lady Eve is stocked full of masters.  Fonda may not be the first person you’d think of for such a role, but he’s perfect, showing a comic touch that he too rarely got an opportunity to display.  Coburn (“let us be crooked, but never common“) and Cooper are joyous as the old crooks, Blore a scream as the hammy English con artist posing as a nobleman, Demarest hilarious as the ubiquitous bodyguard Muggsy and Pallette stealing every scene he’s in as the plain-talking ale magnate who memorably answers a phone to find out there’s a party going on in his own home that evening and asks the calling guest what time it starts.  However, this is above all one person’s film; Barbara Stanwyck.  1941 was her golden year (the year also of Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire) and this is her platinum performance, whether deliberately adopting a cornball aristocratic accent as the alter ego Eve Sidwich who gives the film its title or in that superb hand-mirror sequence that ends in Fonda’s first fall from grace.  Best of all, however, may be where she tells Fonda that bad girls are not all that bad and is so in love with Fonda it seems to burst through the screen, before – bump – he tells her he’s on to her and she’s fighting off tears.  It may be a combination of Edith Head’s wonderful wardrobe ensemble, Sturges’ script and the generous playing of her fellow cast members, but she never looked as happy in a movie and it shows.  “Are you sure we’re on the right boat, Sylvester?” a lady says on the boat at the end.  Indeed we are, and I for one have no intention of disembarking.