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| Monday, January 14, 2008 10:26 AM |
| On the Viewer - The Lady Eve |
 by Fëanor |
Completely without planning it, poppy and I ended up with two movies in a row from Netflix that are classic Hollywood black and white romantic comedies by famous Hollywood romantic comedy directors that both featured introductions on the DVDs by Peter Bogdanovich. The first was Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, and the second was Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve. Eve stars Henry Fonda as Charles Pike, the well-off heir to an ale empire who actually hates ale and instead is obsessed with the study of snakes. As the movie opens, he's just leaving from a year studying the reptiles up the Amazon, and is coming back to civilization via a ride on a cruise ship. On the ship, he meets a group of seemingly nice folks that includes Colonel Harrington (Charles Coburn), his daughter Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), and Gerald (Melville Cooper, whom you may remember as the Sheriff of Nottingham from Adventures of Robin Hood; in fact it's a bit of a Robin Hood cast reunion, with Friar Tuck [Eugene Pallette] showing up later on as Charles Pike's gruff but loving father). But in reality they're a bunch of con artists who specialize in robbing dumb rich guys in card games, and they've settled on Pike as their next mark. Problem is, as Jean is busy making Pike fall for her, she's also busy actually falling for him. But just as she's decided to go straight and really marry him, he learns the truth about her and breaks the whole thing off.
So far, so good. Pretty typical romantic comedy stuff. But this is where the movie takes a bit of an odd turn. Some time goes by and Jean runs into a fellow con artist named Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore) who happens to have a good thing going in Pike's neighborhood. So she decides to show up quite brazenly at the Pike house as Keith's niece, the Lady Eve from England. She is entirely undisguised except that she now has a fake English accent. Pike falls for it like a lead balloon, and also falls for her, all over again. In no time at all she has him ready to propose all over again, but this time they actually go through with it. And then on the wedding night she tells him a whole bunch of horrible stories about all the other horrible men she's been with before him, to torture him, and he resolves to divorce her and never see her again.
And which point she finally realizes she actually wants him back for real. So she meets him again, this time in the persona of the con artist that he first met on the boat, and he immediately falls directly into her arms, and they live happily ever after - maybe. She's just about to explain what really happened, and that she's actually already married to him, when the movie ends.
It's an entertaining film, clever, well acted, and funny. But that ending sequence is somewhat... unsettling. It's pretty easy to feel for Fonda's character in the first part of the film, but from the wedding night sequence onward he shows himself to be so stiff, clumsy, humorless, and stupid it's hard to like him all that much. Stanwyck's character remains lovable throughout, but it's hard to tell exactly what their life together will be like - if they indeed do have a life together after she reveals to him the extent of her treachery.
It's a strange and rather surprising movie, but also, as I've said, quite entertaining. I suppose the ultimate lesson is that when it comes to love we should be flexible and forgiving, and it's hard not to agree with that. |
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