Opposites attract. The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) is equal parts hopeful and cynical about romance. It’s a screwball comedy about the love that strikes between a virgin scientist nepo bookworm and a sexpot grifter career criminal. Yet it does stick with one creative choice that links the two through a similarity. At its midpoint when the couple awake to the reality that their dream of sharing a life together happily ever after has ended, they both suffer equally from the cruelty of it all.
JEAN’S (Barbara Stanwyck) seduction of HOPSY (Henry Fonda) lays it on pretty thick. The dialogue in which they finish each other’s sentences gets risky dangerous at the part about her wanting to be taken by surprise like a burglar. I won’t spell out what that innuendo means for me but in the context of the scene it works well.
Act III is a gaslight melodrama that really throws you off any attempt at guessing what Jean’s motives are. Because we the audience are being conned. There’s this red herring involving why Jean’s alter ego EVE SIDWICH has wedged her way back into Hopsy’s life. Is she imposing herself as a British aristocrat imposter into his social circle in order to humiliate him? Rob him again? Harass him out of spite? What kind of revenge does she have in mind we wonder. Because of that line right before the end of the second act: “Unfinished business. I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”
After Hopsy and the Lady Eve are married, she confesses to him. She tells him about several sordid sexual partners she’d had in an elliptical anecdote montage. And we think that makes them even. She wanted to hurt him like he hurt her. But after a tacked on shockingly thrillingly random bumping back into each other encounter we learn what the third act was really all about.
Jean created Eve as a proxy to get Hopsy to reevaluate her. After having his heart broken by the royal teen slut, the crooked felon hustler in comparison now looks to him ideal. So The Lady Eve is telling us a man can forgive being swindled out of vast sums, lied to, used, and tricked, but not a woman who’s slept around alot. It’s funny in a screwball context. So its moral is: whatever it is keep it to yourself if you want to build a relationship on trust.
Lastly, I don’t know why but I’ve always hated Charles Coburn as the COL character inordinately. Like just how this grifter family is out to scam the poor Henry Fonda character just aggravates me because I have to see it coming and he can’t maybe. Also I’ve always liked Coburn in anything else I’ve seen him in. Which brings me to ask myself how I feel at the midpoint when Jean gets busted and subsequently broken up with. Something that always works in movies is having a character vow to reveal some immoral spot from their past to a loved one, and the other party finding out just a little too soon. I know she’s good, which is why this plot point probably works so well. So can we really buy the ending? Or do we buy it because we’ve been conned and don’t realize it? In which case would that also possibly be intentional? To on some level equate falling in love or being moved emotionally by a love story as falling for a grift?
Act III is a gaslight melodrama that really throws you off any attempt at guessing what Jean’s motives are. Because we the audience are being conned. There’s this red herring involving why Jean’s alter ego EVE SIDWICH has wedged her way back into Hopsy’s life. Is she imposing herself as a British aristocrat imposter into his social circle in order to humiliate him? Rob him again? Harass him out of spite? What kind of revenge does she have in mind we wonder. Because of that line right before the end of the second act: “Unfinished business. I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”
After Hopsy and the Lady Eve are married, she confesses to him. She tells him about several sordid sexual partners she’d had in an elliptical anecdote montage. And we think that makes them even. She wanted to hurt him like he hurt her. But after a tacked on shockingly thrillingly random bumping back into each other encounter we learn what the third act was really all about.
Jean created Eve as a proxy to get Hopsy to reevaluate her. After having his heart broken by the royal teen slut, the crooked felon hustler in comparison now looks to him ideal. So The Lady Eve is telling us a man can forgive being swindled out of vast sums, lied to, used, and tricked, but not a woman who’s slept around alot. It’s funny in a screwball context. So its moral is: whatever it is keep it to yourself if you want to build a relationship on trust.
Lastly, I don’t know why but I’ve always hated Charles Coburn as the COL character inordinately. Like just how this grifter family is out to scam the poor Henry Fonda character just aggravates me because I have to see it coming and he can’t maybe. Also I’ve always liked Coburn in anything else I’ve seen him in. Which brings me to ask myself how I feel at the midpoint when Jean gets busted and subsequently broken up with. Something that always works in movies is having a character vow to reveal some immoral spot from their past to a loved one, and the other party finding out just a little too soon. I know she’s good, which is why this plot point probably works so well. So can we really buy the ending? Or do we buy it because we’ve been conned and don’t realize it? In which case would that also possibly be intentional? To on some level equate falling in love or being moved emotionally by a love story as falling for a grift?
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