Barker’s Classic Movies #12: THE LADY EVE *****
Maybe every year is a great year for celebrity centennials and I’m just noticing, but at my house, 2007 is particularly rich. Example: July 16 is the 100th birthday of Ruby Katherine Stevens, perhaps my favorite actress of Golden Age Hollywood, better known to the world at large as Barbara Stanwyck. Frequently dismissed as nothing more than a good technician or, as a callow film “buff” once described her to me, “not that pretty” (immediately disqualifying his opinions on the craft of acting in perpetuity), Stanwyck was the greatest, most believable seductress of her time, a slim, cool and omniscient stick of dynamite.
She was more than cute enough for anything you had in mind, and game for it, too, but caveat emptor, here was a creature with a core of mystery too deep for mortal travelers, a real woman who was beyond possession — which is, of course, the very quality that keeps ’em coming back for more.
Charles: You’re certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet
who’s just been up the Amazon for a year.
Jean: Good thing you weren’t up there two years.
For most of the 1940s, an upstart screenwriter named Preston Sturges made complete nonsense of the idea that there’s no such thing as an auteur filmmaker, and while he was at it, continually transformed Nonsense itself into Art, just for good measure. As soon as Paramount Pictures gave him a chance to direct his own scripts, after a decade of providing great material for other moviemakers, he unleashed a seemingly impossible flow of creative energy, turning out hit after hit as if he’d found a way to bottle genius. It may be a cliché that the brightest star burns briefest, but in Sturges’ case it was decidedly, woefully true. Not, however, before he’d given us five or six of the funniest movies of all time.
His third film, The Lady Eve, is the best of his best by a hair, which means it’s likely the best comedy of its decade, as well. A silly masterpiece about a wealthy ophiologist (a, uhm, snake expert) who falls for a beautiful con artist and vice versa, The Lady Eve packs more truth about the ways men and women treat and mistreat each other into its 97 minutes than any half dozen dramas that I could name — all the self-deceptions and misguided projections and betrayals and emotional vengeance — and it gets away with it because every moment is a sheer, giddy delight.
Sturges had no compunction about mixing the ridiculous and the sublime, it was his métier, and so The Lady Eve jumps out of the gate with a goofy title sequence, one of his trademarks, this one adorned by a grinning cartoon snake who coils and winds his way down and through the list of credits, getting them over with as quickly as possible while leaving no doubt about the biblical origins of the title. It’s going to be a retelling of the fall from grace, all right, and the corruption of innocence, to be sure, but just whose innocence will be in serious doubt. If you thought Sturges was going to take any of that purity stuff seriously, you came to the wrong theatre.
Ophiologist Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) emerges from the jungle with a new species of snake, after a year of searching on the Amazon, the socially inept heir to an ale empire (“Pike’s Pale, The Ale That Won For Yale”). Charles is ridiculously innocent, a white male stereotype that was prevalent in the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties, which equated intellect and chivalry with weakness and naiveté. When he boards a cruise ship in mid-course, he’s immediately the target of fun-loving femme fatale Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), who travels the world with her card sharp father, hustling rich suckers into giving up little chunks of their fortunes. But Preston Sturges never met a stereotype he couldn’t turn into flesh, and in Jean’s attempts to deceive the unwary Charles, she hustles herself, getting a contact high off of his instant infatuation with her and falling in love right back.
And who wouldn’t? It’s Henry Fonda in his prime, for God’s sake — he’s Tom Joad, he’s Young Abe Lincoln, he’s as beautiful as she is — and no one at this stage of movie history could portray aw-shucks virtue any better than him.
But Jean is clearly the protagonist of The Lady Eve, which turns the Boy-Meets-Girl/Boy-Loses-Girl conventions of all love stories around 180 degrees, while seeking bigger game. Not only does she think faster than anyone else in the film (except her father), a Mistress of the Universe nine steps ahead of her nearest competitor, it’s hard not to admire the way she negotiates a world busy with all kinds of deception. We’d all like to be as smart as she is. But when Charles discovers her true identity, minutes before she intends to reveal it herself, he automatically assumes she intends to bilk him, just like all the others, and he cruelly dumps her while she is at her most vulnerable, a woman in love, possibly for the first time.
For Sturges, and for Jean, “Knowledge” truly is a pox on humanity, especially overrated when it comes to love, opening our eyes to everything that’s wrong with our object of affection just when we should wade in happily, willingly and knowingly blind to their faults. As a matter of fact, a man who would dump Jean has to be a complete idiot, stupefied by an unearned sense of moral superiority perhaps, but in any case ignorant about the ways of the world. She’s Barbara Stanwyck for God’s sake — she’s Stella Dallas, Annie Oakley, a freakin’ force of Nature — you’re not merely lucky she gave you a second look, you’re lucky to still be in one piece. There’s no morality here, and there never has been, except that which she has ordained.
I wouldn’t dream of revealing any more of the film’s expanding complications, except to say that if Charles thinks he’s suffered a fall from grace just because he was a manipulated a little by a beautiful woman, he doesn’t yet know what a fall is (pun intended). Like any spurned lover, comedy or tragedy, Jean sets her cap on winning him back in one of the most unpredictable, outrageously funny third acts you’ll ever see in a movie, launched by her immortal line “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”
The Lady Eve is an exemplar of screwball comedy, or what film historian Stanley Cavell called the Comedy of Remarriage, wherein a complacent couple sabotages their often symbolic marriage, only to realize they’ll never find another partner who is half as good for them. So, the genre might also be called the Comedy of Open Marriage, or Playing the Field. It’s a territory that Sturges traveled more effectively than any other filmmaker of his time (he would do it again with the hilarious The Palm Beach Story) because he possessed a genuine, educated insight into human behavior. His films are not only chaotic romps for the sake of a laugh, though there’s always enough chaos and romping to disguise their intent, they’re also funhouse mirrors exposing the ways we deceive ourselves and each other about what’s really important in life. He was endlessly creative in exploring those deceptions, hardly ever repeating himself, though he worked in a narrow range of comic genres. Every line of The Lady Eve returns persistently, like the coiling snake of the opening titles, to the idea that love is a con game in which we are our own patsy; we’ll tell ourselves anything to make it work, and at the end of the day, who could ask for anything more? If love makes us blind, it’s because we will it to happen.
The Lady Eve has a perfect script, directed by its author with an infectiously light hand, but the film’s brilliance is doubled by 33 year-old Barbara Stanwyck, just reaching the peak of her stardom and talent, as Jean Harrington. It was pure serendipity that landed her in the role: Sturges had originally cast the intermittently talented Paulette Goddard, also reaching the zenith of her popularity and under contract to Paramount, which would have made things easier and less expensive. But Goddard pulled out of the film at the last minute and Stanwyck, a bigger star with a higher salary, was available quite by accident, having recently recovered from a minor illness that sidelined her from another project.
Stanwyck did not astonish with pyrotechnics the way that, say, Davis or Hepburn could in their tailor-made star vehicles, and she was never particularly noted as a sex symbol (at least, not prior to this film), but like many of her characters Stanwyck-the-actress was a first-rate enchantress, embodying her characters with a skill that non-actors usually mistake for ease. In the first and second acts of The Lady Eve, she seems to tap directly into a quality I’ve rarely seen portrayed by any other actress from any era, though I’ve seen it often enough in life: the bemused interest of a woman of the world as she leads her “snake scientist” down, well, yes, the garden path. The scene where she makes an already infatuated Charles change her shoes for her is both riotously funny and surprisingly erotic, Charles almost swooning at the nearness of her, Jean looking on with the flattered, aroused indulgence of a goddess pleased with one of her best creations.
And that’s just one moment in a performance full of comic marvels, keenly observed little quirks that could only have been taken from life, the kind of thing that might be written in the script, but still must be made real by a professional actor. Stanwyck comes perilously close to stealing the entire film, the way she actually did steal a few others, and is only kept in check by a magnificent supporting cast of equal talents: Henry Fonda, showing an aplomb with pratfalls and buffoonery that no one could have suspected from his previous roles; Charles Coburn as Jean’s urbane, delightfully crooked father; William Demarest as Charles’ suspicious valet Muggsy; and the priceless Eric Blore as Sir Alfred McGlennon Keith, a.k.a. Pearlie, a fellow con artist who assists the Harringtons in seeking revenge. His diversionary monologue, “The Sorrow of Sidwitch, Secret of the Century” is alone worth two or three rental fees. “Silence! To the grave!…and even beyond!”
A simply fantastic film from an exceptional year — 1941 also saw the directing debuts of two more, pretty good writers, Orson Welles and John Huston, who rocked Hollywood one way or another with Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, while Sturges himself turned in another outstanding classic, Sullivan’s Travels, and that’s just the new kids — The Lady Eve glows with barely controlled hysteria and stinging perception, a love story that still bites in all the right places. You’ll have to see it twice in order to catch all of the one-liners, but I don’t think you’ll mind.
Highlights include: Jean’s commentary, in the ocean liner’s dining room, as she watches other women try to flirt with Charles; the big love scene, a delirious three-minute dialogue in a single shot, as Jean and Charles discuss their dream partners; Jean’s makeover into the Lady Eve; the planned wedding night disaster; the film’s last three lines; much more.
The Lady Eve (1941)
running time: 1 hr., 37 m. / original studio: Paramount
written & directed by Preston Sturges; from a short story by Monckton Hoffe; director of photography, Victor Milner; edited by Stuart Gilmore; musical director, Sigmund Krumgold
with: Barbara Stanwyck (Jean Harrington), Henry Fonda (Charles Pike), Charles Coburn (‘Colonel’ Harrington), Eugene Pallette (Mr. Pike), William Demarest (Muggsy), Eric Blore (Sir Alfred McGlennon Keith)
NOTES:
KING OF COMEDY: Preston Sturges (1898-1959) was one of the most intelligent and creative men to ever direct a movie. He was born into a wealthy East Coast family, educated in Europe, and after serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWI, first tried being an inventor, coming up with a kiss-proof lipstick. He wrote a successful play in 1928 and moved to Hollywood, where he was a popular script doctor for a decade before finally convincing Paramount they should let him direct. He would later say, “The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”
Sturges’ first film as a director, The Great McGinty (1940), was a phenomenal debut, launching him on a four year run of masterful satires about American politics and “values”: Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (both 1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero and The Great Moment (all 1944). In addition, two of his close friends, John Huston and Billy Wilder, were also given a shot at directing their own scripts during this time, thanks to Sturges’ support.
Sturges, unfortunately, did not fare as well as they did. He left Paramount in 1944 to become an independent and his next three films were not as well received. He wound up exiling himself to France for much of the remainder of his life, after a disastrous partnership with Howard Hughes. Though he never gave up trying, he made only one more film after leaving the States. He was working on his memoirs when he died in 1959, at the age of 63.
See also: the underrated Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949).
THE QUEEN: Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) didn’t have a pretentious bone in her 5’5” frame. She rightly claimed that film acting is all in the eyes, and many of her greatest onscreen moments happened because she used nothing more than a look or glance to project the complexities of, say, a mother’s love (Stella Dallas), or a showgirl’s hip amusement (Ball of Fire), or the bloodlust of a murderer (Double Indemnity).
Born in Brooklyn, she was an orphan at the age of five, a Ziegfeld girl at 17 and the toast of Broadway at 20, a career arc that only suggests the extent of her ambition and will power. Her climb to movie stardom was steady and inexorable. By the mid-thirties she was a top box-office draw; by 1944 she passed Bette Davis to become the highest paid woman in America. The camera doesn’t lie; though she may not have been a “great” actress, she was an excellent one, naturally conveying a strength of character few of her contemporaries ever matched, her background as a survivor radiating from every performance.
She was renowned in the Hollywood community for her generosity; William Holden, in particular, credited her with saving his career during the making of Golden Boy (1939), after she convinced the studio heads not to fire him, while tutoring him in acting for the camera when the director wasn’t looking. Meanwhile, the one verifiable love of her life was second husband Robert Taylor (1939-51); when their marriage ended, she refused to remarry. A terrific businesswoman, Stanwyck became an independent in every sense of the word. Taylor and Holden, who was a frequent visitor at her ranch, used to call her “The Queen.”
Often cited as “the best actress never to win an Oscar,” she made over seventy films before switching to a lucrative second career on the small screen. Besides The Lady Eve, essential big screen Barbara Stanwyck: Baby Face and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), Annie Oakley (1935), Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire and Meet John Doe (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Clash by Night (1952). She finally received an honorary Academy Award in 1982 for her “superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting.”
It was widely rumored that her first marriage, to the abusive alcoholic Frank Fay (from 1928-35), was the original inspiration for A Star is Born.
THE DVD: one of the Criterion Collection’s best-selling discs, with a superior transfer and their usual thoughtful extras, particularly the audio commentary by Marion Keane, who is one of film studies’ best kept secrets. Check out the special section at DVD Planet, where Criterion’s entire catalogue is always 35% off the list price.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID:
“[Barbara Stanwyck was] beloved by all directors, actors, crews, and extras…Naïve, unsophisticated, caring nothing about makeup, or hairdos, this chorus girl could grab your heart and tear it to pieces. She knew nothing about camera tricks. She just turned it on — and everything else on the [sound] stage stopped.” — Frank Capra
“Here was an actress that never played just one side of a character. She always played the truth. I once asked Barbara Stanwyck the secret of acting, and she said, ‘Just be truthful, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ ” — Walter Matthau
“Barbara Stanwyck, amenable and considerate, who could put more real meaning into one lifted eyebrow than Monroe into an entire script, got it all over within one take and zero tantrums.” — Kenneth Anger
“In the world according to Barbara Stanwyck, all the mice are men. She was something else, with claws, and her genius was to show us plenty of fur but never let us agree on what that something was…Listen to her in Clash by Night, fending off a dolt: ‘What kind of animal am I? Do I have fangs, do I purr? What kind of jungle am I from? You don’t know anything about me.’ ” — Anthony Lane (a beautifully written biographical essay, by a critic who writes with great power when he takes off his bitch, as he does here)
CLASSICS RECENTLY RELEASED ON DVD:
Dragon Dynasty, a new shop in The Weinstein Company’s DVD division, gives first-time proper treatment to Liu Chia-ling’s The 36th Chamber of Shoaling (1978), the vanguard production of second wave martial arts films…
That campy human body ride from 1966, Fantastic Voyage got its own DVD release on June 5, from 20th Century Fox. Originally it was paired with the much lesser Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on a single disc. Fantastic Voyage is still fun in its own loopy way, featuring Raquel Welch in a half-zipped wet suit and spectacular sets in one of the last films shot in CinemaScope…
Also from Fox: a special edition of the excellent war drama Twelve O’Clock High (1949) with Gregory Peck…plus, Paul Newman’s breakthrough star performance in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), another CinemaScope film getting its first double-disc, and most pleasing, a double-disc of The Verdict, Newman’s greatest performance, and one of the best films of the eighties.
Criterion recently released Jean Pierre Melville’s French Resistance drama Army of Shadows and Lindsay Anderson’s If… (both 1968), one of the signature films of the anarchic sixties…And from Criterion Eclipse, a boxed set of overlooked late films by Japanese maestro Yasujiro Ozu, featuring Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower and The End of Summer…
MGM released new two-disc sets of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More on June 5, with artwork to match other recent discs honoring Sergio Leone. There is now a four-film boxed set of these movies that also includes the restored versions of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Duck, You Sucker…
And finally, for the first time in any video format, Billy Wilder’s searing, brilliant, unforgettable Ace in the Hole from (who else?) Criterion, a film about a media feeding frenzy that was once regarded as over-the-top, but which now looks austerely, serenely prophetic.
COMING IN AUGUST ON DVD:
Also from Criterion, David Mamet’s superb directorial debut House of Games, featuring Lindsay Crouse (Mrs. Mamet at the time) and an electrifying performance by Joe Mantegna…
Here is your
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CLASSIC MOVIE THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” — Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Barker’s Classic Movies #11 was 2001: A Space Odyssey
