[7]

Barbara Stanwyck’s a card shark and Henry Fonda’s a naive millionaire. They meet and fall in love aboard an Atlantic cruise in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a romantic comedy made tolerable with its sizzling sexual teasing and moderate slapstick humor. Stanwyck is great in her multi-faceted role. She starts the film as a deceptive villain, but turns into a very sympathetic character when she decides to come clean with Fonda — how was she to know she’d fall in love with the victim of her scamming? Once he rejects her, she sets an elaborate, preposterous trap to win back her man, ending the film on an odd but joyous high.

Fonda’s part bothers me, though. Men in romantic comedies from the late 30s and 40s are expected to be ridiculous (it’s part of the screwball’s appeal), but Fonda’s character doesn’t meet Stanwyck’s half-way. He’s more of a plot device in a one-woman show – but at least this woman’s worth watching. The scene where Stanwyck cradles Fonda’s head and strokes his hair is probably one of the sexiest scenes from the ’40s. With Charles Coburn.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Story