The Lady Eve is the Sistine Chapel of screwball comedies. A lot has been written about it, but somehow it eludes analysis. When I taught courses on film comedy, I’d warn my students: don’t ever think you’re smarter than Preston Sturges, don’t ever think to yourself “I’ve got this all figured out.” On a third or fourth viewing, a joke that you thought was a throwaway wisecrack will reveal formal wonders. A raggedy piece of editing will turn out to be a piece of brilliant satire. A goofy speech trait will turn out to be a moment of comic theory. The wonder of it all is that this creative brilliance poured out of Sturges, the first great American comic film auteur of the sound era, like elixir spritzing from a shaken up champagne bottle. An even greater wonder is that his best films — the Seven Wonders — were ever made at all. (The Seven Wonders: Christmas in July, The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story, Sullivan’s Travels, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero – seven of the best film comedies Hollywood ever produced, all released between 1940 and 1944. I’d add Unfaithfully Yours [1948], but it would screw up my branding.)
The Lady Eve isn’t my favorite of his films. There are quite a few ahead of it: Palm Beach Story (funnier), Christmas in July (goofier), and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek above all (more original and braver). But Eve is probably a greater work of comic art. Everything in it contributes to it — from casting and acting to Mensa-speed wit, dazzling formal structure, you-can’t-keep-up challenges to the audience to follow the flips from satire to romance to farce, sly allusions, and above all a comic mind sure that it is at one with the Comic Spirit.
Many film historians think it’s the last great screwball comedy, the film that developed the logic of the genre to its limit. I can see that, but so much depends on how one defines screwball. For some people screwball is a kind of humor generated by fast talking women finding some independence after the Depression and a corresponding weakening of male social dominance; or by the cynicism inspired by the censorship of the Hays Code and the social puritanism that engendered it; or a modernist speed-freak acceleration of discourse opened up by new film sound technologies; or a sense of the instability — even violent absurdity — of American social relationships emerging from the anxiety of the Depression years; or even an attempt to recapture the Jazz Age sense of fun and erotic equality in a country already feeling the approach of a new war. And more. For me, all of Sturges’s great comedies are “end of screwball” films, all the way to Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944. What makes The Lady Eve different from the others is that it is the only one of them that fits a conventional idea of a rom-com. That doesn’t mean it’s conventional. It means it’s the end of the conventional rom-com.
The plot: Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), the adult scion of a rich Connecticut ale-baron (Eugene Pallette), is an amateur ophiologist; as the film opens he is just returning home from an expedition to the Amazon, in the company of his bodyguard-since-childhood, the loyal roughneck Muggsy (William Demarest). On board a luxury liner, he is caught in the web of a little gang of card-sharps headed by Col. Harrington (Charles Coburn) and his daughter, Jean (Barbara Stanwyck). Pretending to be wealthy travelers, the Colonel and Jean plan to fleece Pike at cards, a plan that expands into something bigger when Jean puts Pike into a romantic trance. The unforeseen hitch is that Jean also falls in love with Pike (whom Jean affectionately nicknames “Hopsie”). Jean prevents the fleecing from proceeding and plans to reveal her true identity, but a second hitch interferes: Hopsie learns of Jean’s true identity from the ship’s purser, who has been warned that notorious card cheats are on board. Feeling that Jean’s profession of love has been a ruse, Hopsie resentfully punishes her by pretending that he was playing her with his own professions. End of the first half.
Jean is furious that her sincere affection has been abused, and devises an audacious revenge plot. She will pretend to be Lady Eve Sidgwick, an airhead British aristocrat who — as the planted rumor has it — is Jean’s long-lost identical twin. Jean/Eve uses her knowledge of Hopsie’s weaknesses (there are quite a few of them) to elicit a marriage proposal from him. During all this, Muggsy is acutely suspicious that Eve and Jean are the same person, but Hopsie believes the resemblance is too obvious to be real. As newly married Jean and Hopsie head for their honeymoon in a railroad sleeping car, “Eve” pulls the trigger on her revenge plot. She relates a long history of past lovers, all ridiculously lifted from pulp Victorian romances. Hopsie at first tries hard to be forgiving, but it’s too much. He leaves the train (falling into a sea of mud), and insists on a divorce. Jean/Eve refuses to grant it unless Hopsie asks for it directly from her. End of second half — but it’s not over yet.
Escaping from his recent marital miseries, Hopsie heads back to the Amazon on the same liner, only to encounter Jean again. This time, however, he takes initiative and sweeps her away to his cabin, finally appreciative of her — in contrast with the horrors of “Eve.” In the final seconds, he admits to her behind the Lubitschean closed door of his cabin that he is married (to “Eve” of course), to which Jean replies that she is married, too. Thus the couple can simultaneously celebrate their honeymoon while also enjoying an adulterous romance. The end.
Farce loves complicated plots, the crazier the better, and the more logical the craziness, even better. There is something monumental about Lady Eve‘s plot. Its crazy logic relies on expectations built up from Hollywood romances and crime melodramas, and a whole tradition of cheap devices based on doubling: identical twins, characters with good side/bad side splits, gold diggers with hearts of gold and femmes fatales, and farces’ natural tendency to end up where they began. The wonder of the story is that it goes down so smoothly while being so ludicrously implausible. The main reason for this is that every moment is packed with deliriously funny details that fit together like nested dolls. Just as Hopsie is magically manipulated into believing that Eve is not Jean, the audience is magically manipulated into accepting that the outrageously impossible story makes good sense, even though at the end they have to say”what was that?”
Sturges knew comedy. All this farcical play with identity puts Lady Eve in the philosophical tradition of Shakespearean romances. Stanley Cavell detected beautiful Elizabethan depths in the film. At the same time, it’s fair for an audience to see more Loony Tunes in it than Shakespeare. You want proof? Here are the film’s famous cartoon opening titles.
One thing distinctive about Sturges is the way he co-ordinates jokes on different levels in a given scene. (And across scenes.) Here’s an example. Leaving the Amazon (up which he has spent a year studying snakes) Pike/Hopsie on his little tender has hailed a luxury liner on its way to New York. (He can do it because he is filthy rich.) First, his little thing emits a little wet toot, and is answered by the manly boom of the liner — Jean’s ship. (Merrie Melodies cartoon stuff.) Then we get a long horizontal pan of the motley passengers in wonder at events — and get a lot of information in a lot of different registers. Then the camera tilts up a level to a more elegant deck, where await Jean and her father, the Colonel, and Gerald, their partner-in-crime-valet. Together they assay the juicy prospect below of a rich new mark, their sardonic language flipping from elegant to slang and back like the shuffling of a dubious deck of cards. Finally, Jean drops an apple she has already taken bites of — remember Eve? — all the way from the upper deck to sea level to bop Hopsie, singling out her future victim. It moves pretty fast.
We know that Jean is in total command of the situation in the next scene. She watches Hopsie alone at his table reading a book entitled “Are Snakes Necessary? — a ridiculous title, unless you know that James Thurber and E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary? was a monster bestseller in the real world just a few years earlier (one of several Freudian snake gags in the film). Hopsie grows increasingly uncomfortable as he becomes conscious of the many women trying to make moves on him. Jean watches events unfold in her compact mirror, which, as many film critics have pointed out, is a good simulation of a camera view-finder, which makes Jean’s commentary on the scene sound exactly like a director’s ongoing suggestions to her actors. When Hopsie can’t take any more, Jean trips him — and he falls. (Remember the Fall?)
And in case you’re skeptical:
Jean sweeps Hopsie to her stateroom, where he’s to choose a replacement for the shoe that he allegedly broke when she tripped him. Her seduction is a hilarious take on Cinderella — here the poor shoeless girl is really a sly trickster putting the moves on the hapless Prince. Instead of said Prince canvassing the population of eligible young women with a single shoe, Cinderella-Jean intoxicates him with a steamer trunk full of elegant shoes and slippers that he has to choose from. (The frequency of Cinderella parodies in Hollywood comedies of the period is striking.) To fulfill his mission, Hopsie must kneel to the lady — as both a courtly knight and a lowly shoe salesman –, while she gives him an eyeful of Stanwyck’s famous gams.
If there is something monumentally different about The Lady Eve‘s spin on screwball I think it’s in showing the female lead in near total control of her relationships from beginning to end. Cavell remarks that no male comic protagonist from the period is subjected to such relentless humiliation as Fonda’s Hopsie. (Bringing Up Baby‘s David Huxley would surely disagree.) Another way to look at it is that no female comic protagonist from the period resists patriarchal norming as much as Jean does. Even the toughest fast-talking dames ultimately embrace the romantic comic happy-endpoint of marriage and the protection of a male lead. Not Jean.
For example: Jean has full control over Hopsie’s libido.
Before getting too far ahead here, I have to note that this hilarious scene of sublimated sex was precipitated by the one thing that Jean can’t control or turn to her advantage: Emma, Hopsie’s Amazonian serpent pride. In true Sturges fashion, everything about this situation is discombobulated. Jean is terrified by Hopsie’s snake (which slowly emerges from his pajamas), even though in the old story Eve is seduced by one. Then we have to deal with the fact that the unmistakably Freudian phallic substitute is female, and technically an Amazon. I mean literally. The conclusion is unavoidable: Hopsie’s snake and Jean are linked — a connection reinforced when Hopsie pulls not Emma but one of Jean’s stockings from under her bed. If Jean is afraid of Emma, she’s afraid of herself. Isn’t it romantic?
It’s a fleeting moment. Emma barely reappears in the film. It’s just a hint — Jean is not yet The Woman in Perfect Control of her feelings, and she’ll need a romance with an unaggressive, feckless male to deal with them. Sturges has set the scene so that none of the male characters who represent real patriarchal authority can resist her, not even her father, who taught her the tricks of the card-sharp trade.
And certainly not Hopsie, whom she maneuvers into her dream of romantic domesticity expertly — “a moonlit deck is a woman’s business office.”
Only Muggsy, who has no real authority (nobody listens to him), has the awareness that might disrupt Jean’s authority. But nobody listens to him. The real disruption comes from the ship’s purser, who like the censorious cops in musicals represents stifling law-and-order (but even he does so reluctantly). Showing Hopsie a photo of Jean’s little gang and the written warning that they are notorious card-cheats might not be enough, if it weren’t for Hopsie’s resentment and wounded masculine pride. He now wants to punish The Woman.
From this point on, there’s no stopping Jean. The whole patriarchal edifice, built here on the refusal to believe that a woman can change, has been implicated. Jean constructs the epitome of the “Lady” to be her alter-ego and one male after another falls in line: Papa Pike, Connecticut plutocrats, and most wonderful of all, Hopsie, who believes Eve is too much like Jean to be the same woman. The exception that demonstrates the rule is again Muggsy, whose homosocial adherence to Hopsie protects him from Jean’s enchantments, but he gains no power from it at all. (A good comic schtick: a character whose main trait is that he’s right and nobody cares.)
I had a student some years back who wrote a brilliant seminar paper on Jean’s character. Using Lacanian ideas, she argued that Jean/Eve’s source of power, her control of the comic phallus, comes from her flexible sense of identity — how unconcerned she is about maintaining a solid, unwavering sense of self. She’s a player — she can slip from role to role with ease, inhabiting both Jean and Eve without friction, and content with the freedom of not having a fixed sense of self. Comedy is ultimately always about freedom. Theorists have different frameworks for it. For Bergson it’s about being free of mechanistic, habitual behavior. For Freud, it’s about being free of implacable superego repression. For Northrop Frye, it’s about being free of “ritual bondage.” Jean fits the bill on all counts. And her romantic task is to free Hopsie, too — a task that she accepts only in the closing scenes.
If The Lady Eve is really the end of a type of comic theme, I think it’s the last redoubt of the sympathetic gold digger. The character goes back to the silents, and had a heyday during the Depression. A few camped-up examples appear in the early 50s (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire), but they’re clearly nostalgic throwbacks. Sturges had a genuine affection for the urbane female realist player in a man’s world — Claudette Colbert also plays one in Palm Beach Story, and makes a strong case for herself. In Lady Eve Jean’s manipulations are doubly justified: practically, by her skill at it, and morally by her just application of her skills to get revenge on a faithless male lover. In the final scene, as post-Eve Hopsie is reconciled with post-Eve Jean (the “posts” mean different things for each of them), through the “definitely the same” shipboard ruse as in their first meeting, Jean has circumvented the authority of her father, her “mate,” the ship itself, and, on the z-axis, the censors of the Hays Code. Like a trick deal of cards the two partners appear to be married, but since Hopsie doesn’t know that Jean and Eve are the same dame, he’s about to commit adultery in the eyes of the Law. And since Jean married Hopsie as Lady Eve Sedgwick, they aren’t actually married after all — so they are both committing adultery in the eyes of the Law. When Muggsy emerges from the stateroom one last time to state his obvious truth — “definitely the same dame” — nobody is listening.
