The Lady Eve (1941) disappoints because it lacks a Joel McCrea moment. It needs at least three of them.

Writer/director Preston Sturges also created Sullivan's Travels (1941), in which McCrea stars as a successful movie director disillusioned by what he believes are the triviality and irrelevance of his profession. His quest to find the inspiration to make an important movie goes astray and he ends up in jail. As he and his fellow inmates end a long, hard day by watching a cartoon, the laughter of the other prisoners makes the director realize that even seemingly meaningless entertainment can be valuable.

At first, McCrea is mystified by the raucous response to the cartoon. Then he is caught up in it himself. Bafflement clouds his face until it is replaced by a smile and then by laughter, tentative at first and then hearty. The scene is touching and revelatory because Sturges gives McCrea the time needed to make us feel what his character is feeling.

Sturges should have done the same in The Lady Eve. Barbara Stanwyck's character is a professional gambler who intends to take advantage of the naive wealthy man played by Henry Fonda. Things get complicated when she falls in love with him. We know she does because she tells us. The transformation from scheming to lovestruck happens in a single line of dialogue that comes too suddenly out of nowhere. To be convinced, the audience needs to see the change rather than take her word for it. This should have been the first McCrea moment.

Sturges should have given his audience the second moment when Fonda has discovered her plan to fleece him, accepts that she has abandoned it and realizes he loves her anyway. Poor Fonda doesn't get even that one line of dialogue to try to make this believable.

Even more fleeting and fake is the part that has Stanwyck, after Fonda has dumped her, plotting her revenge and then again abandoning her scheme because she loves the guy. This part cries out for a third McCrea moment.

What we get instead of anything remotely believable as a complicated romance coming to a happy ending is a comedy that trips over itself in its attempts to be fast-paced and a romance that never comes close to seeming plausible. The Lady Eve does not make us want the two to end up together. We accept the Stanwyck/Fonda pairing not because the movie has shown that it's a good one but because we have an instinctive desire for people to fall in love and be happy together. There are thousands of movies that better nourish this desire.

The Lady Eve has a few amusing moments when Stanwyck and Fonda first meet on a cruise. Most of these come from Fonda's convincing suggestion that he is frustrated by his powerful attraction to Stanwyck and her not surrendering immediately to passion. These scenes are sexually suggestive in a way that was daring for such movies in the early 1940s, but they highlight one of the romance's unsurmounted obstacles: What Fonda's character feels is lust, not love.

Later the movie devolves into tedious bits of slapstick in which Fonda trips, stumbles and gets splashed with food far too often to be amusing and into long stretches in which Stanwyck pretends to be an English aristocrat. The deception is so transparent it is less convincing than when Bugs Bunny or Milton Berle put on wigs and dresses. That Fonda's character is fooled by it is the most implausible element in a movie loaded with too many of them.

It Happened One Night (1934) is superior both as romance and comedy because it takes some time to let its lovers move convincingly from being repelled by each other to being smitten. Such a leisurely pace in at least a few of its scenes would have enhanced The Lady Eve.

Delightful romantic comedies sweep us up in their characters' attractions to each other and they carry us along. The Lady Eve demands that we play along. The rewards it offers are too modest for the effort we must invest.


Recommended:
No