The Lady Eve (1941)
My second Preston Sturges movie after Sullivan’s Travels. Not sure what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t quite such an insane revenge/marriage trap. I think my failing, as a viewer, was not realising very early on that Henry Fonda is supposed to be cinema’s biggest sap. He’s a big handsome dummy, heir to a beer fortune (sorry, ale, even if he’s not very good at actually knowing the difference). He’s been up the Amazon for a year, as he says verbatim several times, and is now going on a cruise back to the US. On the same cruise is Barbara Stanwyck (also my second of her movies, after Double Indemnity) who is a part of a card hustling team with her dad and some other dude who doesn’t do very much. She gives us a fun intro, looking into her mirror describing all the other ladies trying to get Fonda’s attention, until she trips him up and gets it for herself.
What I always struggle with with this era of movie is that everyone has to fall in love and want to get married basically immediately. It works for Fonda because, as I said, world’s biggest sap, but Stanwyck should be more worldly than that. Nonetheless, it happens, and she gently pushes back against her dad scamming him out of $32,000 (which in present day money is $632k, damn). They agree to get married, but Fonda’s butler? bag man? footman? Muggsy discovers who she is and the engagement breaks up. There was some fun back and forth, but it was all fairly routine up to this point. But now they’ve broken up and there’s half the movie left.
So what do you do in this case? She still wants to marry him, evidently, and so the obvious thing to do is pretend to be an English Lady (as in Lady Eve. There’s a whole thing where he’s a snake scientist and she drops an apple on him, but it doesn’t obviously mean anything. I guess she’s tempting him. This is a long aside) and turn up at his house for a party, hope he’s too dumb to recognise you, and seduce him into marriage again. I really got into things at this point, when I realised what kind of movie I was watching. Fonda’s sappishness gets really leaned into when he gets three separate meals poured onto him by accident and has to change his clothes three separate times, and also falls over a table. Fonda proposes to her in a scene which would be beautiful and romantic other than the horse trying to nudge him in the face the whole thing. This is basically the thesis statement of the whole thing.
The plan - somehow - has worked, and they actually go through with it and get married. They have their honeymoon on a train and there’s a genuinely hilarious sequence of Stanwyck listing all the mean she’s been with before while the train goes through various tunnels. Fonda gets too freaked out and leaves her, goes on another cruise, and finds, shockingly, the original woman! Boy, she sure looks a lot better in light of that English lunatic.
Fantastic (second-to) closing line though, up there with Some Like it Hot.