The Lady Eve (1941)
Directed by Preston Sturges
It's no accident when wealthy Charles falls for Jean. Jean is a con artist with her sights set on Charles' fortune. Matters complicate when Jean starts falling for her mark. When Charles suspects Jean is a gold digger, he dumps her. Jean, fixated on revenge and still pining for the millionaire, devises a plan to get back in Charles' life. With love and payback on her mind, she re-introduces herself to Charles, this time as an aristocrat named Lady Eve Sidwich.
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What critics say influenced The Lady Eve
A more charming or distinguished gem of nonsense has not occurred since "It Happened One Night."
The Lady Eve is a relatively late addition to the screwball canon, and although it contains many of the same elements as earlier films like Bringing Up Baby , It Happened One Night , My Man Godfrey and others, its mood is a little darker than its predecessors.
Howard Hawks once said that the flaw in his "Bringing Up Baby,” one of the great screwball comedies, is that everyone in it is a screwball; there's no baseline of sanity to measure the characters against.
The Lady Eve is a relatively late addition to the screwball canon, and although it contains many of the same elements as earlier films like Bringing Up Baby , It Happened One Night , My Man Godfrey and others, its mood is a little darker than its predecessors.
The Lady Eve is a relatively late addition to the screwball canon, and although it contains many of the same elements as earlier films like Bringing Up Baby , It Happened One Night , My Man Godfrey and others, its mood is a little darker than its predecessors.
And high-energy prattle is one of the great weapons in The Lady Eve's quiver; all screwball films rely on a female lead who can speak a mile a minute, and the absolute best of them use that as a character and story device as much as a comic element (what is His Girl Friday without Rosalind Russell's rapid-fire newspaperman argot?), but I don't think there's another film out there where the high-speed delivery is so clearly a choice made by the character as a way of getting the upper hand on a mark.