The Lady Eve

Director: Preston Sturges

Screenplay: Preston Sturges (based on a story by Monckton Hoffe)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck (Jean Harrington / Lady Eve), Henry Fonda (Charles “Hopsie” Pike), Charles Coburn (Colonel Harrington), William Demarest (Muggsy Murgatroyd), Eugene Palette (Mr. Pike), Eric Blore (Sir Alfred McGlennan-Keith)

MPAA Rating: NR

Year of Release: 1941

Country: U.S.

The Lady Eve Criterion Collection Blu-ray

The Lady Eve is writer/director Preston Sturges’s ode to romance as the greatest con game of all. Sturges, always the ironic satirist with a love of great characters and improbably wild scenarios, dreamt up in The Lady Eve a classical Hollywood screwball comedy with such overt overtones about the appeals of dishonesty and criminality that it’s a wonder the Production Code Administration ever let it through. Of course, Joe Breen and the other moral guardians at the PCA were so wrapped up trying to discern the thinly veiled sexual innuendo in Sturges’s perfectly tuned dialogue that they missed how The Lady Eve breaks one of the cardinal rules of the Production Code: the audience’s sympathy should never be “thrown on the side of crime” and a film should never “throw sympathy against goodness, honor, innocence, purity, honesty.”

This is, of course, exactly what Sturges does by establishing a romance between a beautiful and wily con artist named Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and her prey, Charles Pike (Henry Pike), a naïve young man who is wealthy beyond belief, but only because he was lucky enough to have been born into a family fortune built on Pike’s Ale (“The Ale That Won for Yale”). Charles, nicknamed “Hopsy” in college because of his family background, has little interest in ale. He wants to be an ophiologist, someone who studies snakes, and when the movie opens, he is leaving South America after spending a year “up the Amazon” studying rare reptiles.

To get home, he boards the cruise ship Southern Queen, setting off quite a stir, especially among all the women on board who hope to catch his eye and marry into his fortune (one of the movie’s most inspired scenes involves Jean providing a sardonic voice-over narration while watching in a mirror as woman after woman tries in vain to catch the clearly disinterested Hopsy’s eye). Jean and her father and mentor, “Colonel” Harrington (Charles Coburn), immediately set their sights on Hopsy—they know an easy mark when they see one. Jean goes to work on him at once, but the tables are turned on her when her attempts to seduce Hopsy in order to fleece him develops into real love.

Sturges isn’t satisfied with this simple turn of events, though, so he introduces a new twist by having Hopsy and Jean’s romance turn sour once he learns that she is a professional card sharp. The story then moves off the cruise ship and into the Pike family mansion in Connecticut, where Jean re-emerges disguised as an English heiress named Lady Eve who then seduces Hopsy again and gets him to marry her only so she can devastate him as retribution for his having deserted her earlier.

The Lady Eve, being a screwball comedy, pushes the envelope in terms of plot plausibility, but Sturges’s sophisticated dialogue and the wonderful performances by Stanwyck, Fonda, and Coburn bring us in so close to the characters that we can ignore such utterly far-fetched scenarios as Hopsy somehow not realizing that the Lady Eve is actually Jean (Sturges does exert a great effort to explain why he doesn’t, and he comes close at times to making it credible). However, this is all par for the course in screwball, and we understand that the pleasure in The Lady Eve is not its fidelity to realism and rationality, but rather its rapid pace, witty dialogue, and overall sexiness.

And The Lady Eve is, without a doubt, one of Sturges’s sexiest movies (owing in great part to Stanwyck, who glides naturally between sensual sophistication and girlish excitement). Considering the tenor of the times in terms of censorship, it is understatement to say that Sturges got away with a lot. Weaving in numerous references to the Biblical story of humankind’s fall from grace (it is not by accident that Jean takes the name “Eve”), Sturges foregrounds sexuality in a way that few filmmakers dared at the time. Although it appears relatively tame by today’s standards, Sturges’s use of displaced anatomy fetishes (shoes, stockings, etc.) and his comical employment of the blackout ellipsis to suggest what is happening behind closed doors gives the movie, in Andrew Sarris’s words, its “ribaldry and gusto” without ever being “coarse and tasteless.”

For example, Jean meets Hopsy by purposefully tripping him in the dining room on the cruise ship and then asking him to come down to her cabin to help her pick out a new pair of shoes because her heel broke off. The sequence in her cabin is a moment of sly sensuality that generates great heat with the simple act of Hopsy changing Jean’s shoes. As Parker Tyler has noted, “In the annals of sex symbolism, a lady’s foot is a truly historic fetish,” and Sturges uses Stanwyck’s for all it’s worth. The shoe changing is a deeply intimate moment—especially for two people who just met each other five minutes earlier—but it is also comical in how it works to contrast Hopsy’s awe-struck innocence and vulnerability with Jean’s street-smart confidence and complete control. The tables, of course, will be turned once Jean lets her defenses down when she falls in love.

The Lady Eve features some of Sturges’s most memorable sequences, including my favorite, a card game among Colonel Harrington, Jean, and Hopsy in which the Colonel is aiming to con Hopsy out of all of his money while Jean tries to protect him. Sturges has never been known as a particularly innovative or stylish director visually, but here he constructs an elaborate sequence using editing and camera angles to depict the war of cons between father and daughter as they both cheat for different purposes while Hopsy blindly plays along, thinking he is in the midst of a heated, but perfectly legitimate card game. It’s an interesting scene to view along gender lines, as Jean effectively assumes the typically masculine role of protecting her love interest from harm (in this case, economic harm) and, in a sense, “rescuing” him.

Still, when watching The Lady Eve, despite all its romance and pratfalls, it’s hard to get away from Sturges’ themes about corruption and dishonesty, which he had explored more fully in his directorial debut, The Great McGinty (1940). Sturges never fully defends conning people out of their money as a noble way of life, yet he never condemns it, either. He allows Colonel Harrington and Jean to stand on their own merits as human beings, and even though their means of earning a living would be considered “dishonest” by most, even “criminal,” Sturges draws them as such interesting and deeply felt people that it’s impossible to pass judgment on them. On the other side, it’s hard not to feel that naïve saps like Hopsy are simply asking for it when they get taken advantage of. Sturges’s sly commentary seems to be a form of economic Darwinism, in which con artists like Colonel Harrington and others simply feed off the system that makes some people obscenely wealthy. Conning, like any other form of business, is a skill that has its economic rewards in the capitalist system.

Yet, the movie wouldn’t work if Sturges weren’t such a good writer who could infuse traditional genre material with such thematic concerns. On the surface, The Lady Eve is a wonderfully enjoyable madcap farce, even though its weakest moments are its most obvious, including a series of pratfalls and slapstick moments that seem almost superfluous when compared to the comical brilliance of the dialogue. The Lady Eve was released in 1941, near the beginning of Sturges’ amazing seven-movie run between 1940 and 1944, in which he seemed to exhaust his creativity in what is still one of the most amazing periods of success for a single filmmaker. Even though his career slowly deteriorated after those five years, during that time Sturges produced a lasting body of work that, at least since the 1970s, has elevated him to the highest ranks of American auteurs. The Lady Eve is but one testament to his cinematic brilliance and lasting impact on the Hollywood comedy.

The Lady Eve Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio	1.37.1
Audio	English Linear PCM 1.0 monaural
Subtitles	English
Supplements	Audio commentary from 2001 by film scholar Marian Keane Introduction from 2001 by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich Video conversation among writer-director Preston Sturges’s biographer and son Tom Sturges; Bogdanovich; filmmakers James L. Brooks and Ron Shelton; and critics Susan King, Leonard Maltin, and Kenneth Turan Video essay by film critic David Cairns Costume designs by Edith Head Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1942 featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Ray Milland Audio recording from 2013 of “Up the Amazon,” a song from an unproduced stage musical based on the film Trailer Essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a 1946 profile of Preston Sturges from Life magazine
Distributor	The Criterion Collection
SRP	$39.95
Release Date	July 14, 2020

COMMENTS
Criterion’s Blu-ray of The Lady Eve has been a long time coming. Originally released on DVD back in 2001, Criterion technical director Lee Kline had been searching for years for the best possible materials for a new transfer, finally settling on a 35mm fine-grain master positive held by Universal. The print was scanned in 16bit 4K and more than a year was spent restoring the image, which has removed virtually all traces of age and wear, while careful color grading has brought out the contrast and grayscale in ways that the DVD transfer lacked. The general softness of DVD transfer has been replaced by an impressive sharpness that still retains a decided celluloid feel, and detail is consistently impressive. The image is also demonstrable brighter, which brings out more nuance and enhances the contrast in ways that are quite beneficial. The soundtrack, which was mastered from the same 35mm fine-grain master positive, sounds very good for its age. All the dialogue and sound effects are clear and crisp. The supplements are quite impressive and extensive, bringing in almost all the material from the 2001 DVD and adding some new material, as well. From the DVD we get an excellent audio commentary by Marian Keane, who was then an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Colorado who had also done a great deal of work on Hitchcock (including recording a commentary for Criterion’s DVD of The 39 Steps). Keane was obviously deeply familiar with the film, and she makes a number of solid points that deepen the film’s meaning and make us that much more aware of what an accomplishment Sturges' best work really is. Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich provides an eight-minute video introduction to the film, pointing out his favorite scenes and what he thinks sets the film apart. Also repeated is the complete Lux Radio Theater adaptation that was broadcast in 1942 with Barbara Stanwyck reprising her role as Jean and Ray Milland filling in for Henry Fonda’s role. Although not nearly as good as the movie itself (it had to be trimmed down to 45 minutes so it could be squeezed in before President Roosevelt made a war-time radio address), it is a fun reimagining of the story that works quite well even without the visuals. Another section titled “Edith Head’s Costume Designs” features photographs of Stanwyck in her various costumes along with Head’s original design sketches interspersed with direct quotes from Head taken from Paddy Calistro's book Edith Head’s Hollywood. This section includes two of Stanwyck’s costumes that were designed and created, but never used in the film. The one thing that has been dropped from the DVD is a scrapbook of still images that include production photographs, behind-the-scenes stills, personal correspondence, and even the sheet music used for the movie's theme. Of particular interest were a series of inner-office memos distributed during the film’s preproduction that warned of potential problems with the Production Code Administration regarding the sexual innuendo in the dialogue. Interestingly enough, most of it ended up staying in the film exactly as written. And now, on to the new stuff! There is a 40-minute recording of a video conference (it is the era of COVID, after all!) among Tom Sturges, writer/director Preston Sturges’s son; filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich; film historian Susan King, a former entertainment writer at the Los Angeles Times; film critics Kenneth Turan and Leonard Maltin; and filmmakers Ron Shelton and James L. Brooks, all of whom bring their own unqiue perspectives to bear on this very unique film. We also get a new 30-minute insightful video essay by critic and filmmaker David Cairns. And, finally, there is a 5-minute recording of by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks of “Up the Amazon,” a song composed by songwriters Rick Chertoff and David J. Forman as the opening number of a theatrical musical they developing based on The Lady Eve.

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

Overall Rating: (4)