The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) (Patreon)

99/100

At least third viewing, last seen 1998. Let's get the massively subjective aspect of my adoration out of the way: For this hetero male viewer, Barbara Stanwyck's Jean (not so much Eve) is the sexiest performance in cinema history, bar none. That's a purely visceral response that I can't really articulate/justify/"argue"—it's just how I'm wired. Which is likely true to some degree of my feelings about any actor (including men, even though I'm a Kinsey 0.2 at most), but failing to acknowledge its seismic impact here would feel truly disingenuous. At the same time, there's no point in belaboring it, especially since my Scenic Routes piece from six years ago addresses The Lady Eve's magnificently unconventional initial courtship minus all the attendant heavy breathing. Just bear in mind that Jean has the same effect on me that she does on Hopsy. I ought to be kept in a cage.

In any case, the film is a masterpiece whether or not your heart flutters in time with Stanwyck's eyelashes. What struck me most forcefully this time around is its unusual structure, which features the standard three acts but doesn't apportion them as one would expect. Sturges spends fully half of The Lady Eve painstakingly building the relationship between Jean and Charles, creating genuine depth of feeling without skimping on the laughs. (It's more or less the Pride and Prejudice dynamic, I just this moment realized—Austen by way of Vertigo.) Not hyperbole: I dreaded seeing him silently reject her again much as I dread, say, Audition's piano-wire scene. Had to steel myself for her pain. Jean's declaration of revenge marks the transition into what would normally be act two, i.e. the bulk of the movie; instead, Sturges barrels through this second courtship, devoting half of it to surprisingly persuasive reasons why Charles would accept Eve as a different person (I especially love his insistence that the total physical resemblance proves that it can't possibly be Jean, because surely she'd make more of an effort to disguise herself) and the other half to a wedding-prep montage. Plus some expert Fonda pratfalls, a horse that's hilariously determined to upstage the two movie stars, and an Eric Blore who's hilariously determined to upstage the two movie stars. Point is, the heavy lifting took place during those first 45 minutes, which allows for blissful coasting the rest of the way. Third act barely even exists, with Charles embracing Jean the instant he re-encounters her and then just stopping to kiss her repeatedly en route to his cabin. It's ruthlessly efficient, like so much of classic Hollywood, but Sturges' particular genius here is placing the emphasis where it truly belongs.

One of the downsides to using the needlessly precise 100-point system is that people erroneously imagine that the points themselves are meaningful—that, e.g., in this case, I've docked The Lady Eve one point for some perceived flaw. That's not really how it works. 99/100 merely indicates that I love this film ever so slightly less than I do those films to which I've allotted my highest rating. (Even then, I made a decision to place this film just below The Night of the Hunter and just above Vertigo, both of which are fellow 99s. That order is somewhat arbitrary—they're all so, so great—and there's zero chance that I could accurately reconstitute it from memory. But it felt right at the moment that I logged it.) That's Ed, it's true that I can't quite 100% embrace a movie that treats a woman's sexual history prior to marriage as inherently scandalous, not incidentally but as the culmination of an elaborate plot. Sturges makes the reveal itself quite funny, cutting to caution signs and screeching train whistles after each of Eve's increasingly "lurid" confessions, and of course I'm fully aware that Charles' outrage accurately reflects the mores of that era (or at least the cinematic mores of that era). The implicit double standard still plays a bit sour for me, though, even if Charles doesn't seem like a man who'd have sewn any wild oats himself. A small thing, and quickly papered over by the film's absolutely perfect ending (by which I mean "But so am I, darling," not "Absolutely the same dame," though that's likewise perfect), but it's the main reason why this is currently my [checks list] 11th-favorite film of all time rather than my 3rd- or 4th-.

Goes without saying but I'll say it anyway just for the record: Preston Sturges, comic genius. What I'd give for a contemporary film with a throwaway, never-quoted line as funny as Jean's when her horse loses at the track: "What do you expect when you bet on a goat called After You?" That caliber of wit now only occupies sitcoms' writers' rooms.