-Devdutt Trivedi
The Lady Eve (1941), the third of Preston Sturges’ seven Hollywood masterpieces, is essentially about transforming the gaze of love to Hollywood’s discourse on entertainment as a form of seduction. The film works on the idea of difference between actors playing double roles, classes of society and the difference in audiences’ perceptions of stereotypes around comedy and film watching in general. In this way the film adapts the sophisticated thinking of the modernists, particularly the Cubists and their discourse on different sides of the fragment destroying the whole, in a way that is completely unique to Preston Sturges vision but on par with the most important works of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.
Sturges was a late bloomer, and directed his first film The Great McGinty in 1940 to begin his exploration between the negative and the positive and how a moment of one of the two can spoil its other for the characters. This discourse between the good and the bad and the bad and the good continues in the most important sequence of The Lady Eve where Jean played by the great Barbara Stanwyk; in arguably her most outstanding part alongside her part in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1946); whispers to Charles Pike, played by Henry Fonda in his only comedy part, the absurdity of inversion between a ‘bad girl’ and a ‘good girl’; that ‘a bad girl isn’t as bad as she seems, and a good girl isn’t as good as she seems.’
The film belongs to the specific genre of studio produced comedies known as screwball comedies and the term ‘screwball’ came from a spectator’s ecstatic response to Carole Lombard’s part in My Man Godfrey. The genre was an odd mix of farce and romance which finds its best works in the comedies of Sturges, Hawks and Lubitsch and would pave the way later for those of Wilder. Other important entries in the screwball genre include Howard Hawks’ Bringing up Baby (1939), His Girl Friday (1940) and Ernest Lubtisch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). The Lady Eve features around a number of the madcap screwball comedies that centered on marriage such as Bringing up Baby, His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night (1946).
According to his wife, Sandy Sturges, Preston Sturges dictated the screenplay and would have his secretary write down the script in short hand, while both dictating the story as well as acting out all of the parts at the same time. Before he began controlling the production of comedies by directing them, Sturges worked as a screenplay writer for the very first of the screwball comedies which included The Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks,1934), The Good Fairy (William Wyler,1935) and Easy Living (Mitchell Liesen,1937). He was the first Hollywood director who began as a full fledged screenplay writer and only later turned to direction.
The Lady Eve was completed in 1941, perhaps the most important year in the Golden Era of Hollywood sound cinema. The same year saw five textbook masterpieces competing for the Oscar for Best Picture: Orson Welles’ iconic Citizen Kane, John Ford’s How
Green Was My Valley, Hitchcock’s Suspicion, Hawks’ Sergeant York and Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. The Oscar eventually went to Ford’s film.
The film begins with the animated titles with the character of the snake, which represents Christian myth of The Fall from Paradise, when man and woman were created in their human forms. Sturges plays on the human-humane theme instead of divine beauty and suggests marriage as a struggle for equality between man and woman. This struggle is split between male or female characters that either have a wish for knowledge or a wish for love. This is best denoted in the sequence where Pike leaves the desert island where he has been working on obscure species of snakes. Pike says goodbye to his professional colleagues depicting a wish for knowledge whereas the otherwise circumspect Mugsy says goodbye to his beloved native woman with a garland. Sturges, according to Mariane Keane1, seems to indicate that there are ways of saying goodbye that go beyond the quest for knowledge. With respect to the film, this quest for knowledge can be linked to the quest for transforming the actors into characters, for allowing them to enter the realm of the audience’s idea of the known.
The most enigmatic character which Sturges ensures is within the realm of the unknown throughout the length of the film is the one played by Barbara Stanwyk, who has two names, either Jean or Eve. The audience will pass through the film without deciphering the difference between Jean and Eve beyond superficial characteristics, echoed also in a film made in the same year, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. In her opening sequence on the ships deck, Jean continues the theme of the fall with the symbol of the apple from the legend of Adam and Eve’s fall from Paradise by striking Charlie with it as he ascends from the boat to the ship.
The initial sequences in the ship which establish the courtship between Jean and Charlie, also further Sturges’ own cinematic concerns which link back to his consistent philosophical views on relationships and the act of seduction, and their linkage to the film’s relationship with the audience and the act of seduction to trick the audience, as in Melies2.Sturges uses the character of Jean to further his concerns, by indicating the meeting of Charlie and her, through her voyeuristic gaze. Sturges is exploring the gaze of love as being different from an ordinary gaze between Eve and Charlie in the sequences at the Pike house.
The remarkable sequence in the deck room, where Charlie admits his love for Jean by saying that’s he’s befuddled ‘cockeyed’ by her perfume and personality, are adapted from the much more sardonic class-ist techniques of that great inventor of Hollywood comedy, Ernest Lubitsch. Sturges begins his use of the close-up in a way reminiscent of Lubitsch, and in this sequence here adds to the Lubitsch technique by using the mid-close up to show two characters in an intimate setting. Sturges seems to think of cinema as a language and if this were the case, he is certainly building on the ‘screwball comedy’ technique vocabulary.
Within this logic of the close up, Sturges uses the actors to make the face serve as carrying denotation on the class to which the character belongs to so as to continue his
theme of the act of conning within this class system, so that the rich are conned by others without ever knowing it through an act of seduction. The act of tricking the other actors with cards, linking the act of play in poker to the poker face and its relationship with the face of Stanwyk-Eve-Jean and its ‘true’ identity denotes Sturges is at his very best, balancing social comment with comedy. The magic tricks both by director Sturges and through the actors and their antics at card playing trace the falseness of the Hollywood studio system right back to Georges Melies attempt at practicing a medium designed to perform magic tricks through its form.
Sturges presents the concept of sameness and difference, as correctly pointed out by Keane3, through his study of repetition in film form, with Charles-Fonda falling in similar slapstick situations and the difference in the same appearance of Barbara Stanwyk. This approach to film aesthetics derives from the same concept that would later build the best work of arguably the most significant French formalist film artists, and according to this author the two singularly important artists in the 20th century, Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. Robert Bresson denotes the Deleuzean idea of Difference and Repetition4 through the Bressonian model in place of the actor and ellipse and the sparse use of soundtrack, whereas Godard does through the in-between space, mediating the inside and outside, documentary and fiction and with reference to the film actor, the actor, the character and both of them as being matter accommodated to the moving image.
Godard and Bresson approach their aesthetic concept through different philosophical modes, Godard through the recently proposed ideas by Merceau Merleu Ponty on an approach to philosophy known as Phenomenology, where as Bresson comes from a religious approach from a specific sect of Christianity known as Jansenism. Godard and Bresson are engaging in developing conditions for the taking of the shot that vary like fractal formations, whereas Sturges and Lubitsch before him are, as mentioned above, developing film form like a language.
Sturges uses the character of Stanwyk to develop his plot. Stanwyk gives her best performance alongside her role in Wilder’s noir Double Indemnity (1946). Stanwyk establishes the theatrical quality of the acting, and Sturges, largely a scriptwriter is inspired by the comedies of Shakespeare in his ability to portray a theatre of grandeur to denote the act of grand deception through the form of theatre. In Colonel Harrington’s words Fonda’s character Charlie Pike is a ‘specimen of the suckersapiens’ who is deceived first by Stanwyk’s personality and later, by her identity. Sturges pokes fun the higher classes with his discourse on the upper classes. The waiters and the stuff on the ship and at the Pike mansion seem to be befuddled by the stupid preferences of their masters. Sturges himself seems to be on their side as he pokes fun at the formality of the upper classes in the choreographed dinner sequence where Charlie changes as many as three blazers.
This approach that would be developed as brought out, by the European masters, will also be developed in Hitchcock’s work, within the Hollywood syntax, most notably his ‘50s works with Cary Grant. Hitchcock, through the absence of logic inspects the logic of absence in the MacGuffin plots i.e. the inessential plots in thriller novels, which
Hitchcock makes the subject of his thrillers. This quality is best seen in North by Northwest which Hitchcock described as a ‘Pure MacGuffin.’ This quality between actor and image is brought out in the sequence where Fonda is given the package with the photographs of Jane and at the pier. Sturges is pointing out that the photograph is one of the actors in the film, Stanwyk and Charles Coburn. All character development is stripped down to the body of the actors, emerging out of their character parts. This development through the still image is taken to the phenomenological level in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Passenger (1975), where the photograph of the actor becomes a tool for Antonioni to explore the post-structuralist approach to reality and its variable, discontinuous dimensions.
The Lady Eve belongs to that category of the Hollywood studio comedies centered on re-marriage. According to the commentary on the Criterion Collection of the film, the three genres of ‘Remarriage screwball comedies’5 are the either the comedies of childhood love as in George Cuckor’s Philadelphia Story (1940), the comedies where the characters have undergone a divorce and fall in love again as in Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1941) or as in The Lady Eve, where the formal having gone through the signifiers of marriage, realize something about nature of the receiver of the love-gaze.
1 Courtesy: Mariane Keene, Criterion Collection 2 Courtesy: Mariane Keene, Criterion Collection 3 Courtesy: Mariane Keene, Criterion Collection 4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). French edition: 1968 5 Courtesy: Mariane Keene, Criterion Collection