TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 @ 09:45 PM (ET)
In 1940, Preston Sturges sold a script to Paramount for one dollar—on the condition that he be allowed to direct the film. The script became the movie The Great McGinty; the movie won for Sturges the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and received two more nominations. The rest is history.
The Lady Eve is peak screwball comedy, and it’s Preston Sturges at his best: it’s a sexy, funny, and in the end, sincerely romantic, well paced film. Henry Fonda is the bumbling heir to an ale brewing empire, who’s been up the Amazon for months pursuing his study of snakes. Stanwyck is half of a father-daughter grifter team who target him on a transatlantic cruise. According to plan, she’s able to seduce him; But as with the best laid movie plans, this one goes comically awry and–wait for it–she ends up falling for him. Fonda is at his comedic best, showing some physical comedy chops I never knew he had. Stanwyck “commands the screen with easy, brassy sexiness.” In one hilarious scene, Stanwyck does a play-by-play call of the action as she watches, in her make-up mirror, the various hopeful young women trying to get Fonda’s attention as he sits at his dinner table, blithely unaware. When he walks by her on his way out, she sticks her leg out and trips him, then blame him for breaking the heel of her shoe. Here and elsewhere in the film Fonda shows a knack for slapstick comedy you might not expect of him.
As with any Sturges film, this one is peopled by his usual universe of character actors, including William Demarest, Eric Blore, Robert Grieg and Eugene Pallette, as well as the phlegmatic Charles Coburn as Stanwyck’s partner-in-fleecing.
Preston Sturges’s reputation rests on the seven films he made in the next four years: Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). Half a century later, four of these were chosen by the American Film Institute as being among the 100 funniest American films. The Lady Eve was one of them.
The Lady Eve was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”