Originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XLVI No. 1 (Winter 2020).
Film critic Robin Wood once described The Lady Eve as a “perfect film.” Peter Bogdanovich in his introduction to the new Criterion Blu-ray says that “you can’t get a better movie,” and indeed it is a standout comedy in Preston Sturges’s short career, in Barbara Stanwyck’s long career, and among early Forties studio releases. The writing is sharp, smart, and loaded with double entendres that provocatively challenge the mores of the Production Code. Sturges’s script, very loosely based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, takes an elliptical, allegorical detour through the Garden of Eden, aka the Amazon, where there are women, but none of them “white.” Outside that garden is a world inhabited by con artists, a seductive white woman (Stanwyck), and a snake exported from the Amazon as a sign of the deception awaiting the travelers—Charles “Hopsy” Pike (Henry Fonda) and Muggsy (William Demarest), his bodyguard, keeper, and “very bad valet.”
The “perfection” of The Lady Eve is already compromised by what is easily seen today as its racist opening. The fall from innocence is indeed an elaborate trick that can be played only on someone who is already tarnished, and, in this case, Hopsy is indeed tainted by excessive wealth as the heir to a beer…excuse me, an ale empire. The entire film is an elaborate stunt, pulled by Sturges and Stanwyck on this poor sap of a rich boy. Stanwyck plays Jean Harrington, the daughter of a card sharp, and a con artist in her own right. Halfway through the film, Stanwyck appears as a completely different character, the British aristocrat Lady Eve Sidwich, and everyone except Hopsy can see the con, including viewers, who can only marvel at Stanwyck’s portrayal of another woman who is, in fact, the same woman.
