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The Lady Eve (1941)
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The screwball comedy genre is a strange one: it
straddles the lowbrow/highbrow divide with one foot planted firmly in each camp. It asks
the audience to keep up with a dizzying pace of contrived plot and breathless dialog,
while at the same time inviting us to laugh at some of the hoariest sight gags cinema has
to offer. It contains scenes of lyrical tenderness right alongside some of the most
caustic and cynical investigations of the battle of the sexes. All in all, it is often
exasperating, but in the right hands there’s nothing to beat it. Along with Howard
Hawks, Frank Capra, and others, Preston Sturges is usually cited as one of the greatest
practitioners of the genre, and his film, The Lady Eve, has come to be regarded as
among the most quintessential examples of screwball done right.
The Lady Eve is a relatively late addition to the screwball
canon, and although it contains many of the same elements as earlier films like Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey and others, its mood is a little darker
than its predecessors. Part of this may be due to a general darkening of the national
mood, with World War II looming on the horizon, but it almost feels like a natural
progression for the genre, as if the cynicism that always lay at its heart had curdled and
begun to overwhelm the fizzy sweetness.
The Lady Eve is neatly divided into two halves, both dealing
with the theme of honesty and deceit in relationships between men (as represented by Henry
Fonda) and women (as represented by Barbara Stanwyck). In a rare comedic role, a youthful
Fonda plays Charles Pike, the Shy, Bumbling Scientist who crosses paths aboard an ocean
liner with Stanwyck’s Jean Harrington, the Fast-Talking Con Woman. To what degree the
film views these two as archetypal examples of their gender is up for grabs, but there is
certainly a good deal of Garden of Eden symbolism around (apart from the film’s
suggestive title, Fonda has been “up the Amazon” studying snakes, and
Stanwyck’s first act upon seeing Fonda climbing aboard is to drop an apple onto his
pith helmet from a high railing) to suggest that Sturges may have some broader themes in
mind.
The power games begin early. In an excellent scene (ripped off, along
with a good deal of the rest of the film, by the Coen Brothers for The Hudsucker Proxy), Stanwyck watches in her compact
mirror and narrates as Fonda – who is not only a scientist but also a millionaire
bachelor – sits alone reading, oblivious to the fact that he is practically besieged
by hordes of available and desperate young women. This scene, with Stanwyck literally
holding Fonda in the palm of her hand, neatly reverses the usual power dynamic of the
predatory man observing his naive female target, although it is made clear early on that
Jean’s primary interest is money. (Fonda’s Pike is depicted throughout as being
utterly guileless and awkward, not quite slow-witted but certainly not sexy.)
After tripping him on his way out and making him escort her to her room
for a change of shoes, Stanwyck embarks on one of the most overt and ludicrous seductions
ever to squeak its way past the Hays code. As he kneels in front of her, slipping her
shapely feet into a pair of evening shoes, Fonda’s Pike is utterly besotted. He
clumsily mumbles about having been “up the Amazon” and appears practically
hypnotized by her perfume. It is hardly surprising when Stanwyck and her con man father
are able in the next scene to dupe him into a game of cards – losing $600 to him as
bait for a later big scam.
As in all good screwball, chaos rears its head in the form of sex. In
the film’s memorable central scene, Fonda leans his cheek against Stanwyck’s in
a single, static, three-minute close-up, and the two of them just, well, chat. The
talk gradually becomes flirtatious, and by the time a steamed-up Fonda rises and returns
to his room (for a cold shower, by the looks of things), Stanwyck’s scam has been
totally derailed by the fact that she has fallen for her mark.
The shipboard section of the film ends when Stanwyck foils her
father’s attempt to fleece her newfound love, and Fonda then discovers her true
intentions and is unable to forgive her for her mendacity. He tells her (untruthfully)
that he was on to her scam from the start, and she is outraged that he would string her
along so callously. The two part on bad terms, with a seething Stanwyck vowing revenge.
The second act, then, is the more intriguing, as Jean swans blithely
back into Fonda’s midst, posing as the Lady Eve Sidwich, with absolutely no attempt
to disguise herself aside from her clipped English accent. These scenes are, on the
surface, very funny, but the elaborate deceit at their core gives them a sour aftertaste.
It is almost as though Jean, bent on revenge but paralyzed by love, has created a phantom
self through which she can avenge her humiliation and punish her hapless paramour. The
fact that she poses as a high-society lady only serves to underline the class resentment
that set her against Pike in the first place.
Fonda is utterly bemused, and spends most of the second hour of the
film falling over the furniture. These pratfalls, while comic, become a little grating,
although they form an interesting point of comparison with today’s romantic comedies,
in which the man gets the brains and all the good lines, while the woman (usually Cameron
Diaz, Drew Barrymore or Julia Roberts) gets to walk headfirst into opening doors or fall
over the set decoration. So clumsy and helpless is Fonda in these scenes, that
Stanwyck’s ruse begins to look almost cruel – the effect is a little like
watching a skillful parent reveling in thrashing a slow-witted child in a game of
Monopoly.
So her disguise enables Jean to exact her revenge on Charles; she
breaks his heart by taking advantage of the stuffy Puritan streak that caused him to break
hers in the first place. The two wounded souls are finally reunited in the bittersweet
finale, with Fonda’s Charles blissfully unaware of the grand deception that has been
wrought upon him, and with Jean apparently feeling much better disposed to him now that
she has evened the score. Both are laden with guilt (him for judgmentally dumping her, her
for deceiving him not once but twice), and the audience is left hoping the couple’s
future will be a little less of an emotional roller-coaster than their past.
As a writer/director, Sturges is certainly a force to be reckoned with.
The script crackles with a level of wit and sexual innuendo that makes you wish they still
made sex comedies for adults. Fonda does his best with a somewhat limited role, but it is
unquestionably Stanwyck’s movie. She plays each layer of her character with a
vibrancy and intelligence that makes it easy to understand Fonda’s infatuation. If,
in the end, the film is a little unsatisfying, perhaps that is because its message is not
a reassuring one: love itself is an imperfect thing, and the most we can hope for is not a
perfect partner but one who is just as flawed as we are.
- Ben Stephens
