The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)

 

The Lady Eve: Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) and Jean (later Eve) (Barbara Stanwyck): “You’re certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet who’s just been up the Amazon for a year.” 

The first time I saw The Lady Eve (directed by Preston Sturges, 1941), I loved the basic premise, of the naïve explorer who is seduced by a confident trickster. After all, he has been up the Amazon for a year, and she is asking him to change her shoes. 

On watching it again, I still enjoyed that part. I watched it to try to remember what happened later, and, to be honest, it was a disappointment. This is a film that is magic for twenty minutes. Perhaps for once my memory actually did the right thing: I remembered the best bit, and forgot about the remainder. 

Yet this is the film that opens Stanley Cavell’s famous book about Hollywood comedies, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981). Cavell’s book makes a very good fundamental point, that several of the best Hollywood comedies of the forties and fifties are about married couples coming back together. But, my goodness, how he labours the point. His chapter about The Lady Eve is almost unreadable for its heavy-handed interpretation of what is designed to be a very light film. 

Let’s summarise the plot, which divides into two parts, or acts. The first act is on a liner. Charles Pick, known as Hopsy (Henry Fond), is a fabulously rich but innocent heir to a brewing fortune. He is accompanied by a minder, a kind of personal security guard, to prevent him being exploited. Hopsy is returning from a year “up the Amazon” (a phrase he repeats with an attempt to justify how he is being swept off his feet), collecting snakes (he has a snake in his cabin). He is expertly manipulated by a pair of card sharks, "Colonel" Harrington (Charles Coburn) and his ostensible daughter Jean (Barbara Stanwyck), and falls head over heels in love with her; in fact, he proposes marriage; but when he discovers their true identity, he recognizes he has been exploited, and rejects her totally. 

Actually, the plot is slightly more complex, a twist that is important for the remainder of the film. Stanwyck sets out to cheat Fonda at cards, but finds herself falling in love with him – and she tells him as much. When she shows him a photograph that reveals her to be a confidence trickster, he is upset (as you would be), but, crucially, fails to recognise that she is genuinely in love with him. 

In the second act of the film, on land, Stanwyck pretends to be an English aristocrat called (conveniently) Lady Eve. He fails to recognise her (and doesn’t seem to notice her unconvincing English accent). She ridicules Charles, and he repeatedly falls over in front of her. Charles accepts her unlikely story that this is the sister of Jean, who he met on the boat, and they get married. Jean/Eve has already stated she is only doing this out of a desire for revenge. 

Once married, on their honeymoon trip, on a sleeper train, she teases him with tales of her premarital affairs, and he jumps off the train, distraught. However, she refuses a money-making divorce offer. 

Finally, we see Charles back on the ocean liner again, where he rediscovers what he believes is Eve, the first woman he met, and they head off to bed, back in love again. He still doesn’t acknowledge, or perhaps even realise, that she and the English aristocrat were the same person. 

What kind of resolution is that? Sturges would like the knowing viewer to spot the references to Freud (the snake in the cabin), and Cavell would like the knowing viewer to spot the references to Shakespearean comedy (Connecticut as the Green World, the equivalent of the Forest of Arden, as outlined by Northrop Frye). 

So there’s the film. Charles/Hopsy is totally manipulated: even at the end he has no idea what is really going on. She marries him and so becomes fabulously wealthy, exactly what she and her “father” set out to do in the first act. Charles the simpleton has learned nothing. He didn’t realise when a woman was genuinely in love with him; he didn’t recognise her when she pretended to be someone else. 

What about the Shakespearean parallels so carefully and painstakingly brought out by Stanley Cavell? I’m afraid the film inhabits a rather different territory to a Shakespearean comedy. The reality of the film that Cavell doesn’t mention is:

• We enjoy the con-artists doing their stuff in act one.
• We find Stanwyck far more entertaining when she is playing a seductive card shark than when she appears to be sincere. As soon as she states she is genuinely in love, she loses the glorious wise-cracks.
• In the first act, the eroticism combines with the manipulation. Quite simply, this is one of the great erotic moments in Hollywood film, Yet In the second act, the pratfalls take over, and there is no serious plot behind it: it’s just fall after fall. It’s as if the film-maker, having set up his elaborate plot, can’t think of any way of developing it except by repeating the slapstick. Entertaining, but hardly a great film.
• The most important problem is that Fonda never becomes aware of his innocence. Even Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot realises the situation and accepts it, at the end of the film; but Fonda remains blind throughout. He is blind to her manipulation, just as he is blind to her sincerity. He is far more entertaining when overwhelmed by events than when he is trying to act sensibly.
• In terms of funniness, the first act is many times funnier than the second, although the second act has more jokes. That can’t be right!
• There is another post to write about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which may be a great poem, and full of wonderful lines, but which doesn’t, in my opinion, make a great play in performance. It has none of the theatricality of Othello, or the set-pieces of Much Ado about Nothing. The young characters are simpletons, in love with the idea of love. The old characters are evil and manipulating (Prospero) or scheming and power-grabbing (Antonio, Sebastian, Trinculo). But that’s for another time.

So I will treasure my memory, of about twenty minutes into the film, with Fonda trying to put Stanwyck’s shoe back on, while she teases him. Not surprisingly, he is all fingers and thumbs.