Matt Patton
The Lady Eve (1941)
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) studies snakes. Very devotedly. To be honest, he's more comfortable with snakes than people. That lack of experience makes him an easy mark for Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a cardsharp working the pre-war cruise ships with her father 'Colonel' Harrington (Charles Coburn). Neither counted on falling for each other like a ton of bricks or on Pike's sort-of bodyguard Muggsy (William Demarest) discovering the truth about Jean and her father. Needless to say, it ends badly--she goes back to fleecing suckers, he goes back to his snakes--but when the chance to get even arises, she goes for it with a vengeance, after all, there's no one who gets you as mad as the person who got you to fall in love . . .
How Preston Sturges got away with some of his best films, which deal in sexual duplicity, unmarried pregnancy, and a generally unblinking look at adult behavior, often at its worst, is still a subject of amazement to me. Equally amazing is how smart and sophisticated and complicated his scripts were, not just in terms of plot twists, but also emotionally. His characters are often wonderful and awful in equal measure and put each other through the emotional ringer with great force. They stumble to the happy endings dented but somehow triumphant, as imperfect as ever, and the audience often finds it has been moved to tears as often as laughter.
He got a lot of help from his cast here. More than most directors, Sturges brought out the coldness beneath Fonda's earnest demeanor and exploited it brilliantly, particularly in the scene where Charlie gives Jean the brush-off despite her desperate pleas to him. As for Stanwyck, she runs the gamut with out a trace of effort or hyperbole; cool amusement, tenderness, icy rage, and utter desolation. I've always been of the opinion that Stanwyck had the chops to tackle the stage classics of both farce and tragedy, and this performance just strengthens that belief.
And what a supporting cast! Charles Coburn as Stanwyck's father, a calculating con one moment, a loving father the next, and keeping both sides of the character's personality believably in balance, Eugene Pallette as Fonda's unintentionally terrifying father, Eric Blore as a working-class Englishman doing the To The Manor Born routine in the heart of "The Contact Bridge Belt" ("We have them by the year--like a lease"), and of course William Demarest, who takes his trademark pugnaciousness close to the level of mental imbalance and throws in some fearless physical comedy on top of it. All in all, truly a thing of comic beauty, complete with all of the human ugliness that's a part of such beauty.
The Lady Eve (1941)
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) studies snakes. Very devotedly. To be honest, he's more comfortable with snakes than people. That lack of experience makes him an easy mark for Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a cardsharp working the pre-war cruise ships with her father 'Colonel' Harrington (Charles Coburn). Neither counted on falling for each other like a ton of bricks or on Pike's sort-of bodyguard Muggsy (William Demarest) discovering the truth about Jean and her father. Needless to say, it ends badly--she goes back to fleecing suckers, he goes back to his snakes--but when the chance to get even arises, she goes for it with a vengeance, after all, there's no one who gets you as mad as the person who got you to fall in love . . .
How Preston Sturges got away with some of his best films, which deal in sexual duplicity, unmarried pregnancy, and a generally unblinking look at adult behavior, often at its worst, is still a subject of amazement to me. Equally amazing is how smart and sophisticated and complicated his scripts were, not just in terms of plot twists, but also emotionally. His characters are often wonderful and awful in equal measure and put each other through the emotional ringer with great force. They stumble to the happy endings dented but somehow triumphant, as imperfect as ever, and the audience often finds it has been moved to tears as often as laughter.
He got a lot of help from his cast here. More than most directors, Sturges brought out the coldness beneath Fonda's earnest demeanor and exploited it brilliantly, particularly in the scene where Charlie gives Jean the brush-off despite her desperate pleas to him. As for Stanwyck, she runs the gamut with out a trace of effort or hyperbole; cool amusement, tenderness, icy rage, and utter desolation. I've always been of the opinion that Stanwyck had the chops to tackle the stage classics of both farce and tragedy, and this performance just strengthens that belief.
And what a supporting cast! Charles Coburn as Stanwyck's father, a calculating con one moment, a loving father the next, and keeping both sides of the character's personality believably in balance, Eugene Pallette as Fonda's unintentionally terrifying father, Eric Blore as a working-class Englishman doing the To The Manor Born routine in the heart of "The Contact Bridge Belt" ("We have them by the year--like a lease"), and of course William Demarest, who takes his trademark pugnaciousness close to the level of mental imbalance and throws in some fearless physical comedy on top of it. All in all, truly a thing of comic beauty, complete with all of the human ugliness that's a part of such beauty.