tripping
by Douglas Messerli
Preston Sturges (screenplay, based
on a story by Monckton Hoffe), Preston Sturges (director) The Lady Eve / 1941
Given the hectic comic beat of
Preston Sturges’ films, there are nearly always moments in each of his works in
which the flow of his deft timing speeds up, momentarily tripping up both his
characters and plot. There is something almost old-fashioned about these
cinematic moments, as the director switches from the careful flow of his
sophisticated jokes and scenarios into a style that seems more at home in Mack
Sennett’s slapstick presentations. Sometimes these slightly discomforting and
awkward scenes occur in the opening credits (as in the madcap wedding switch of
the matching twins in The Palm Beach
Story) and, at other times they emanate from the increasing momentum of the
story itself (as when the Marines of Hail
the Conquering Hero get carried away in their plans to return Woodrow
Lafayette Pershing Truesmith to his hometown as a full blown hero, or when, in
the midst of his labor camp imprisonment, wealthy director John L. Sullivan
witnesses the almost clinically hysterical laughter of his fellow prisoners
upon their witnessing Walt Disney’s Playful
Pluto—the latter one of the most unbelievable displays of laughter outside
of Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka. As I
suggest, these moments, which we might describe as demonstrative releases of
the boiling comic energy or stimuli to the comic thrusts of Sturges’ films, do
not always make for comfortable movie watching, as they are seemingly at odds
with everything that follows or precedes them. It is almost as if the witty and
clever dialogue and situations of the director’s “play” had exploded into a
burlesque as cheesy and corny as something presented at Minsky’s most lurid
competitors.
Sturges’ 1941 masterwork The Lady
Eve stands throughout at the very verge of these oppositions in the
director’s work, as he presents, first, a sort of hard-boiled, wise-cracking,
sophisticated comedy that represents a high point in Sturges’ art, which, in
the second half of the film, he completely unwinds in a purposely clumsy, often
overacted parody, in which his major actor Barbara Stanwyck is forced to
impersonate a British “Lady,” Lady Eve Sidwich, while Henry Fonda is asked to
take dive after dive—over a couch into a creamed appetizer, into the remains of
a platter of roast beef while he sits at the dinner table, and through a
curtained doorway with which almost brings down the house. Yes, these maneuvers
also make for some discomfort; but since they are intended to do precisely
that; as part of Eve’s punishment of Charles Pike for his having abandoned her
after she had fallen love, they cannot help but make
us also laugh. If everyone is made
to look foolish, so, we must conclude, everyone in this long scene—which
includes nearly all the major character actors of the day—is a fool, pretense defining his or her major courses of action.
And if these burlesque routines represent a bow to past cinematic
stylization, in this instance we must necessarily also perceive Sturges as
being far ahead of his time given his thematic set up. If the first half of
this confection skillfully presents us with a kind of inverted screwball
comedy, the second half takes us entirely into new territory.
The heroine, Jean Harrington (Stanwyck), seems to be in control of
nearly all the events in the first half of this film. A secret conman,
Harrington, with her card shark father, “Colonel” Harrington (the always
watchable Charles Coburn), and partner Gerald (Melville Cooper), plan to make a
killing on the ship’s journey from South America to New York. And when suddenly
the boat is stopped to pick up the wealthy heir of the American Ale fortune
(“The Ale That Won for Yale”), they switch plans, as they lure the handsome
young snake expert, Charles Pike (Fonda) into their clutches. Sturges
brilliantly demonstrates their swindling skills by having Jean observe the
failed flirtations of several other women aboard before she takes over by
boldly tripping Charles up as he passes by her table. With that first fall to
the floor, the falling and tripping never end. Within moments, of course,
Charles, intoxicated by her perfume (he has been up the Amazon for months) and
dizzied by her beauty, falls in love, declaring that he would like to marry her
almost before she can lead him to her room in her search for another pair of
shoes (he has broken the heel of one of her shoes in the fall). Even though she
has begun her actions in order to help her father trap the young man into a
card game, we quickly perceive, she is also touched by his gentle
vulnerability. And while she readily uses her hard-nosed feminine wiles in
order to literally make him grovel at her feet and snuggle up to her breasts,
she is also surprisingly honest and open about her motives, admitting that
everyone in the room knows who he (Charles) is, and, later, admitting that she
purposely tripped him to get him into her room. As Charles himself puts it, she
is a strange girl, knocking him down only to build him up.
If Jean seems in control, however, it
soon becomes clear that in his utter innocence, Charles has the upper hand. He,
after all, has the snake (a species he has brought back from the Amazon) which
terrifies her. And despite all of her machinations, it is Jean who falls head-over-heels
in love, tripping up not only her own but her father’s nefarious plans. In
order to win Charles, she is even willing to thwart her own father’s gambling
tactics, which almost permits the wealthy young Charles to stay out of debt to
the card shark.
Just as she has “tripped” Charles,
however, Jean too is eventually “tripped up” by the truth, as Charles’
companion Muggsy (William Demarest) reveals that she is a member of the
criminal team. Charles’ predictable rejection of her leads to her own fall—as
she sobs, laying prone upon her bed.
“Tripping,” indeed might be the way to
describe the events these two woebegone lovers experience in their plights.
They are both literally “on a trip” throughout the film, traveling from South
America to New York, on to Connecticut, back to New York, and, finally taking a
train to nowhere and another ship into the future. Already in the first half,
both are tripped up by love, to say nothing of the numerous pratfalls of which
I have already hinted in the second half of the film. Finally, they both lurch
forward from event to event almost as if they were on drugs. Charles’ father
even asks the younger Pike, at one point, whether or not he is drunk. With all
the shifts of personas and realities he is facing, he might as well be
inebriated. In the high and lows of their remaining love affair, moreover, they
surely experience something akin to responses of various kinds of addicts.
In reaction to having been betrayed by
Charles and serpent, Jean—as a new-born Eve—is determined to seduce and punish
her Adam in the gardens of the Nutmeg State. With a feminist like fury, she
lashes out by playing her own self in drag, transforming the beguiling
con-woman she was previously into a kind cackling, wise-cracking, schemer. For
his part, Sturges releases his characters and actors from comedic control,
encouraging them to act out a parody of their own small-minded plots. The more
outrageously Eve behaves, the higher her American counterparts hold her in
regard.
The only question is how Charles might
possibly fall in love with this “new” version of Jean. He is so blind at this
point, we can only surmise, that the very fact that she looks like his previous
love proves that she is not the same woman—despite Muggsy’s insistence that
“She is the same dame”—a woman perhaps more worthy of his love.
That “worthiness” becomes the issue of
his wedding night, as, one by one (a bit like Rebecca admitting her wicked past
to new husband, Maxim de Winter in Hitchcock’s film of the year before) she
names her previous lovers, unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally)
defenestrating her former lover from the train. The long, slow, roll down of
the curtain of her compartment window ends the burlesque, returning us to the
more standard comedic elements of Sturges’ film. And so the film ends, back
aboard the ship, as Charles re-encounters Jean, being so relieved to see her
again that he takes her in his arms for the movie’s first truly passionate
kiss. Despite the restrictions of the Hays Code, Charles follows her into her
room for what we recognize will not simply be a replay of this film’s earlier
scene. Not to worry.
Charles: “I’m
married.”
Jean: “But so
am I darling. So am I.”
Los Angeles, June 12, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2014).
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