The Lady Eve is a brilliant piece of writing by Preston Sturges, and playing by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Screwball comedy you could call it, or a comedy of remarriage, maybe, except nobody remarries. But that is the guiding idea – two people who have been together and possibly will be again, if fate can be encouraged to remove the many obstacles in their path.
Fonda plays a wealthy brewing heir who meets a young woman and her father on board a ship sailing back from the Amazon, where he’s just spent a year indulging his passion for snakes. Jean (Stanwyck) and the “Colonel” (Charles Coburn) are a pair of con artists determined to win big at cards at the expense of the unworldly Charles Pike (Fonda). But instead of taking Charles to the cleaners, Jean falls for him, and he for her, only for him to find out who she really is just as she is about to come clean. The relationship is over.
Furious – but probably more at herself than she understands – Jean decides to make Charles fall for her again, except this time she poses as Lady Eve Sidwich, a new arrival in society just off the boat from England.
So a film of two halves. In the first half we watch Jean and Charles falling for each other, trading innuendo like this was a 1930s pre-Code movie – much is made of his snake – while Jean’s father tries to con Charles out of his money, with Jean trying to stop that from happening without giving the game away.
In the second half we’re more watching Sturges, who has wound his characters into a ridiculous situation. How will he dig himself out of this hole? I will not ruin it except to say Sturges adds further complications, waiting until Charles and Eve are married (whether they legally are or not is moot) and on their honeymoon before beginning the process of revelation and unwinding as Eve torments her new husband with tales of past indiscretions while the train they are in charges into the night.
She the operator and he the dizzy professor type, the characters have the Bringing Up Baby dynamic. There’s even a screwball-comedy animal in the snake to indicate rogue activity and unpredictability, though that also reminds us of the Garden of Eden. In this Paradise Eve is the second woman, in Charles’s life anyway. Though neither Stanwyck nor Fonda are particularly remembered for their comedy they are dynamite here, Stanwyck excellent as a woman divided against herself, while Fonda is a demon of deadpan, a prince of the pratfall.
Great cast all round though. Charles Coburn as the scheming old rogue the “Colonel” – another of those superb dependable character actors of the era. Eugene Pallette as Charles’s father, the usual fat, bluff but decent Pallette character. William Demarest (a Sturges regular), as Charles’s plain-speaking and highly suspicious minder, a furious half beat behind Jean/Eve all the way, and particularly suspicious when Eve turns up, what with her being the spitting image of Jean. Not forgetting Eric Blore, a reptilian fellow con artist in cahoots with Eve/Jean and posing as a dithery silly-arse member of the British aristocracy. Blore’s speaking of the line “Meet me in yonder window embrasure” is enough reason to watch the film on its own.
A noticeable Sturges trope, in this film it’s the lower orders who are smart. The upper class have lost their edge, blunted by gossip and dull dinner parties. He is an unusual figure in Hollywood at that time. After ten years of successful screenwriting, Sturges managed to break out into directing.
This was his third directorial effort, after The Great McGinty and Christmas in July, both hits, as was this. He followed up the same year with Sullivan’s Travels. That’s the way to do it.
The Lady Eve – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
