Normally I probably would have hit the local multiplex this past weekend, but I had papers to grade. I mean, I legitimately do want to see Knock at the Cabin. I just haven’t yet. But I also know if I just sit down and grade nonstop, my brain turns to mush and my grading suffers as a result, with students whose papers are near the bottom of the stack benefiting from my lack of focus. I mean, I can only stay focused for so long without taking a break here and there no matter how short the individual papers were.
So, I decided to check out Preston Sturges’s screwball comedy The Lady Eve.
Charles “Hopsie” Poncefort Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to a large ale brewery, but his real passion is snakes. After spending a year studying them in the Amazon, he’s on his way home via a cruise ship. However, on board is the father-and-daughter con team of “Colonel” (Charles Coburn) and Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck). They’ve got their sights set on him as an easy mark, using the Colonel’s cardsharp skills and Jean’s general beauty to catch his attention and take him for what they can before the boat arrives back in the States. There’s just one problem: Jean legitimately falls for the clumsy Charles, and the two plan to marry despite the fact that Charles doesn’t really know Jean’s true identity. Sure, she’ll block him from her father’s attempts to take money from him at the poker table, but she truly does want to marry this man whose sole interest prior to meeting her was snakes.
Of course, Charles does find out and calls off the engagement. Jean doesn’t take too kindly to that and invents a new identity, one Lady Eve Sidwich, to get back at the man she now hates as much as she once loved him. Or does she? Her disguise is basically an English accent and a new name, and yet it still manages to fool the socially awkward Charles whose confusion results in more physical awkwardness. Will the two find love? Or will Charles ever know who Jean/Eve really is?
A movie like this one only works if the audience can buy how stupid the male lead can be. Fortunately, Fonda doesn’t quite come across as stupid so much as naive, and in that role, he largely succeeds. Even as Charles’s minder Muggsy (William Demarest) keeps pointing out the obvious, that Eve and Jean are the same woman, he just can’t quite believe it because Eve said she wasn’t Jean. It’s a screwball comedy, so having a socially awkward guy match wits with a fast-talking woman is par for the course. But Sturges is something of an expert at this, and my only other experience with Stanwyck was in the fantastic Double Indemnity, a movie she was reluctant to do because it went against her “good girl” image. So, seeing her in one of those “good girl” roles was a nice experience. She may have been a con artist, but she was a rather honest one in many ways.
Plus, I gotta say, this movie sure did know how to sneak stuff past the censors. Stanwyck’s Jean knows how to play at being sexy and suggesting sex without actually doing anything like that on screen. While other aspects of the movie have maybe not aged as well, like how “Eve” ruins Charles’s view of her by suggesting she had a lot of ex-boyfriends But overall, this was a fun film. I really need to track down more of Sturges’s comedies.
Grade: A-
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