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; or, rather, only exhibits content insofar as it explicitly touches upon inflection. Hence the pervasive fascination with minor, pedantic differences (ale and beer), 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. In this way, Sturges transforms romance itself into something which requires only the most subtle inflection to become repellent, or ridiculous - most memorably in an impassioned declaration of love that is textured by an intrusive, quizzical horse, but more generally in his complete disassociation of the remarriage trope from marriage itself, as card shark Jean Harrington (Stanwyck) falls in love with millionaire herpetologist Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), is found out and discarded before being given the opportunity to declare her true feelings, and so disguises herself as the 'Lady Eve' in order to exact a revenge-by-marriage that, once again, gives way to genuine feeling, which she satisfies by reverting to her original identity. Just as this collapses the critical distinction between first and second marriage, so it fuses romance and suckerdom, concluding with an ambiguity that could either be sublime or ridiculous, and is foreshadowed in one of Sturges' most remarkable long takes, in which Fonda and Stanwyck share a prolonged embrace that is both erotic and detached, natural and clumsy. The result is a condensation of Fonda's taxonomical gaze to Stanwyck's's body, whose grace is only ever one step away from violence, and whose genius lies in knowing how to disguise this, as Fonda inadvertently realises: "They look too much alike to be the same".