The Lady Eve
Description
Join us for a lively conversation with Thomson and author Geoff Dyer followed by a screening of a film selected by Thomson: Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve.
Here is a screwball romance in which she needs him “like the axe needs the turkey.” Charles Pike, tall, handsome and stupid, is heir to “The Ale that Won for Yale,” except that he’s been up the Amazon researching snakes. She is Jean Harrington, medium height, delectable and very smart, a con artist on the ship that picks him up. She snares him in the ship’s dining room. She seduces him. She calls him “Hoppsy” and saves him from being fleeced at cards. But when he learns she’s a grifter, he drops her. Cut to Connecticut, chez Pike. She turns up again as Lady Eve Sidwich. Now she charms his father and sets out to teach Hoppsy a lesson. Written and directed by the phenomenal Preston Sturges, this was released in February 1941 when the US was still standoffish about World War II, and I was one week old. No, I didn’t see it straightaway, but I have caught up since. This is Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, with grace notes from Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore and William Demarest. The world was not merry in 1941, but you wouldn’t know it from this. So it opened mere months before Citizen Kane—and it’s funnier. –David Thomson
Screwball maestro Preston Sturges (1898-1959) honed his gift of dialogue as a screenwriter in the 1930s, before making his directing debut with The Great McGinty (1940). Over the next nine years, he wrote and directed some of the finest classic comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age, including Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Unfaithfully Yours (1948).
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/89749728?autoplay=1Film Details
Language English
Year 1941
Runtime 94
Country USA
Director Preston Sturges
Producer Paul Jones
Writer Preston Sturges
Editor Stuart Gilmore
Cinematographer Victor Milner
Cast Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette
Print Source Universal/ Paul.Ginsburg@nbcuni.com