The Lady Eve (1941)

This one is apparently known as Hollywood’s most notable screwball comedies of the era though I don’t believe we’ve watched anything from this director Preston Sturges before. However I found that the plot to be so outrageous and the male lead character so stupid that it’s unbelievable. Still there is a certain charm in this kind of lowbrow humor that we haven’t seen in a long time and I suppose it must have been quite novel at the time to have the female lead character be so dominant throughout the entire film.

Charles Pike is the rich heir of a family with a fortune in beer brewing but he prefers to spend his time studying snakes in South America. After a year-long expedition in the Amazon jungles, he is returning to America on a cruise ship. All of the eligible women on board know who he is and try to catch his attention. Among them is Jean Harrington who is on the ship with an older man who is supposed to be her rich father. In reality they are part of a gang of three who are there to swindle money from the other guests playing cards. Jean uses aggressive tactics to get Charles to fall in love with her but she ends up falling in love herself and protects Charles from the predations of her fake father. Charles’ loyal valet and bodyguard investigates and exposes the group, leading him to break up with her. Enraged, she decides to take revenge by pretending to be someone else, this time an English aristocrat named Eve, and get him to fall in love with her all over again.

The plot really is as dumb as that, relying on the character of Charles who, due to a combination of naivety, an extended lack of contact with women and sheer stupidity, is unable to be certain whether or not Jean and Eve are one and the same person. His character is portrayed as being so stupid that even Eve is shocked by the audaciousness of the lies that they are able to get away with, which really raises the question of why she would even be in love with him in the first. Well, apart from the money anyway. The ineptitude of he and his valet are played for laughs throughout the whole film. The running joke during the dinner in which Eve is introduced to American high society being how Charles is so clumsy that he keeps dirtying his suit and spends the whole night changing clothes. It’s dumb as bricks and yet the film is persistent at it that it manages to wrangle some laughs out of you anyway.

The only redeeming value the film has is that it is astonishing how unequal the relationship between Charles and Eve is here, with Eve having all of the agency. From the very moment she sets eyes on him, she is in full control, coldly assessing the other girls vying for his attention and efficiently trapping him in her company by faking a series of accidents. Apparently this film interprets the Biblical story of Eve bringing about the fall of man literally by having Charles physically bumble about and fall, again and again and again. But as I noted earlier, it then becomes incomprehensible why she could genuinely love such a hopelessly clueless man. That such a smart and powerful woman must in the end still be motivated solely by getting herself attached to a useless man is proof that despite the gender inversion here, this is still a film of its time when the patriarchy reigns supreme.

I believe I originally put this on my watch list because it is considered one of the best screwball comedies ever and appears on many of the American Film Institute’s best of lists. But I take that to mean that it is significant mainly for historical reasons as it is hard to find much merit in it by modern standards. Skip this.

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