A Film Canon

The Lady Eve refines screwball miscommunication from cross-purposes to cross-nuances, conjuring up a universe in which every utterance possesses an irreducible openness, and conversation is anchored more in inflection than content. Hence the pervasive fascination with minor, pedantic differences, as well as the more surprising revelation that most differences are minor ("He isn't backwards, he's a scientist!" "Oh...I knew he was peculiar"), both of which ensure that Barbara Stanwyck's most enduring screen persona - the romantic strategist - seems less paradoxical than in any of its previous incarnations, reaching its (comic) apotheosis. This transforms romance into something which requires only the most subtle inflection to become repellent, or ridiculous (yet also ensures that a profound romantic potential inheres in every triviality and banality) - specifically, via a series of awkwardly probed (by an uncomfortable divan, a quizzical horse, a half-open door) embraces; generally, via the creation of a screwball-slapstick circuit that grounds the most potentially transcendent romantic encounters in crude, frequently grating, physical comedy. It is in this circuit that Sturges' taste for enlarging common denominators finds its clearest outlet; or, rather, in the aristocratic-bourgeois circuit to which it corresponds, and in which card shark Jean Harrington (Stanwyck) cons her millionaire lover (Henry Fonda) for the second time - a collision of worlds that finally "look too much alike to be the same".