Preston Sturges (1941)
In this case, the conventional wisdom is right: The Lady Eve is a glorious blend of verbal and slapstick comedy. In that respect, it has the edge on The Palm Beach Story but the two films share the pleasurable suspense of wondering how Preston Sturges will achieve an upbeat ending without a loss of satiric edge. They share too the delight of watching him succeed. In The Lady Eve, the hero and heroine eventually prove that they’re made for each other but it takes a good deal of foul play to clinch the deal. You come out of the cinema feeling happy. You feel happy because the leads end up in each other’s arms and because Sturges’s blithe misanthropy has survived intact.
The story begins in the Amazon jungle, where Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) has spent the last year studying snakes. He takes his leave of other members of the expedition and starts his journey home on a small boat. We next see Charles on an ocean liner, where he sits alone in the bar with his nose in a book called ‘Are Snakes Necessary?’ (This anticipates ‘Is Marriage Necessary’ – Sturges’s working title, which he was forced to abandon, for what became The Palm Beach Story.) As well as being an ophiologist, Charles is the heir to the Pike Ale fortune – ‘The ale that won for Yale’. The ship’s bar is inundated with requests for the stuff from all the female passengers who fancy their chances with Charles. One woman isn’t drinking Pike ale, however. She’s observing Charles through her handbag mirror and she offers a running commentary on the futility of the efforts of others to pique his interest. Her attention-getting tactics are different: when Charles walks past her table, she stretches out her leg and trips him up. She then immediately complains that, thanks to his clumsiness, she’s broken the heel on her shoe. This woman is Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and she’s a con artist. Charles is soon enjoying a game of poker (or something) with her and her card-sharp father, ‘Colonel’ Harrington (Charles Coburn). Their partner-in-crime Gerald (Melville Cooper) is playing cards at another table with Charles’s hyper-wary valet-cum-minder, Ambrose ‘Muggsy’ Murgatroyd (William Demarest).
Charles’s passion has always been for science rather than money and, until now, for snakes rather than sex. When they’re together in his cabin, Jean ruffles Charles’s hair and asks him to describe his romantic ideal. He nestles against Jean and obliges, sketching out this theoretical woman even as he’s experiencing her reality. Charles is quickly smitten with Jean; she’s startled to find herself falling too, for the man she set out to swindle. When Charles discovers the true identity of Jean and her companions, he refuses to believe she really feels something for him, and he dumps her. Infuriated by his rejection and at having allowed her heart to get the better of her head, Jean plans revenge. With the help of a conman acquaintance (Eric Blore) whose current identity is the English aristocrat Sir Alfred McGlennan, Jean pretends to be his niece, Lady Eve Sidwich. She gets herself invited to a ball at the Pike family home. Charles is sure they’ve met before; ‘Eve’ insists they haven’t. She beguiles Charles’s father (Eugene Pallette) and bewitches his son. After a brief courtship, she and Charles marry. On the train taking them on honeymoon, Eve starts to reel off the names of a long list of her former lovers. Charles is scandalised all over again and jumps off the train.
The marriage is over but so is Jean’s pleasure at avenging herself. Although her father and lawyer urge her to make a financial killing through the divorce settlement and Charles’s family are keen to agree terms as quickly as possible, Jean decides she doesn’t want money. She only wants Charles to tell her to her face (again) that they’re finished. He refuses even to see her. He boards an ocean liner to take him back to snakes and far away from women. Jean books passage on the same ship and gets Charles to notice her just as he did on their first meeting, by tripping him up. After Eve’s extravagant treachery, Jean’s subterfuge on the earlier voyage now seems to Charles a pretty trivial deceit. Honest fellow that he is, he also feels compelled to admit to her that he’s married. Jean reassures him. ‘So am I, darling,’ she replies. That’s the happy ending.
Characters who assume a different identity with ulterior motives are a venerable tradition of stage comedy. Preston Sturges makes a comic virtue of the relative difficulty of making a screen disguise credible. He centres the unmasking of Jean/Eve throughout on William Demarest’s marvellous Muggsy – a man who scores top marks for loyalty and suspiciousness but less well for deductive reasoning, and who keeps trying and failing to convince his love-blind master that ‘it’s the same dame’. As Charles, Henry Fonda has a deep innocence that’s as funny as it’s charming. Fonda is on the receiving end of most of the slapstick – he must have at least half a dozen pratfalls in the course of the film. What’s remarkable is that these get funnier, thanks to a combination of Preston Sturges’s inventiveness and Fonda’s playing straight. (Charles repeatedly picks himself up, dusts himself down, starts all over again …) Because good-natured Charles is rarely roused to anger, the occasional moments when Fonda’s voice hardens in exasperation have hilarious impact – especially when Charles uses the phrase ‘sweet forgiveness’, Jean/Eve asks him to say that again, and he does so with asperity.
Like Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, the film pairs a serious leading man who keeps looking silly with a playful, self-possessed woman. In The Lady Eve, though, the woman’s sang froid turns out to be as deceptive as her stratagems. Sturges dramatises much more richly in this movie than in The Great McGinty the moral theme of that earlier film – that it’s not a good idea for a leopard to change its spots (or, in this case, for a snake to slough off its old skin). Jean Harrington’s life gets a lot more complicated once she’s no longer pretending to be in love with the man she meant to fleece. Barbara Stanwyck has the opportunity here to act in the sense of putting on an act, as well as creating a character. She takes that opportunity and she gives huge pleasure. Her ability to fuse glamour, tough-minded wit and emotional range and depth is more than ever evident but the role that Sturges has written for Stanwyck enables her to do less characteristic things, like affecting a posh English accent that’s a triumph of spirit over letter. There are no other female roles of significance in The Lady Eve: that and the quality of Stanwyck’s performance combine to make Jean/Eve memorable.
The sophisticated acting of the leads is perfectly complemented by the relatively broad contributions from Sturges regulars – especially Demarest, Eric Blore and Robert Greig, as the continually irritated butler at the Pike family residence. All these three play with splendid comic verve. So does Eugene Pallette, who has a great bit when Mr Pike doesn’t get the breakfast he’s expecting, and registers increasingly infantile dissatisfaction. Sturges’s intercutting between inside and outside the honeymoon train – the dark tunnels seem to get longer with each new ex-boyfriend’s name that Eve mentions to Charles – is dramatically funny. (The cinematographer was Victor Milner and the editor Stuart Gilmore.) Charles and Eve go out riding and it’s during a short break in this excursion that he proposes marriage to her. He’s interrupted several times by one of the horses, whose head literally butts in between the two humans. This equine intervention may be the comic zenith of The Lady Eve but it’s a wonder of the film that Sturges keeps on hitting the heights, as well as bringing Henry Fonda repeatedly down to earth. The fall of man is an essential theme right from the start: Leon Schlesinger’s enjoyable opening titles feature animations of a top-hatted serpent and forbidden fruit.
16 February 2016
