I have always dreaded old movies. When I was little, I didn't like black-and-white. No idea why. Then I grew up (relatively speaking), and suddenly I loved black-and-white movies but whoops also feminism. Movies made now are bad enough in the way they treat ladies, but most of the pre-1960 stuff I've seen is nightmarish. (This may be because I haven't seen that many old movies. Because I avoid them.) Anyway, I went into The Lady Eve assuming that the gender politics would make me miserable, but they didn't! They were decent enough that I could just pay attention to whether I liked the movie or not, and I did because it's awesome.
Charlie Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to an ale (not beer) fortune. Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and her dad are card-sharps: she reels rich men in, and her father takes them at poker for large sums of money. Charlie is their mark on a cruise from South America to… North America. But OH NO Jean falls in love with this sucker, and she insists that they not steal his money, and she's going to marry him but OH NO he finds out the truth (minus the she-loves-him part) and wants nothing to do with her. Then she goes after him--for revenge? Or to win him back? THE LADY EVE coming soon to computers near you.
The timeline of their romance is insane, but I assume they don't call the genre "screwball" because of its realism. Speaking of screwball, Henry Fonda delivers some pretty decent physical comedy in this movie, you guys! I didn't know Juror #8 had it in him. He's always tripping over stuff (get it? The Lady Eve. The fall. Get it? Get it?), and there's one scene where he keeps getting food all over his nice jackets. Haha! Fonda also manages the impressive trick of making his character seem likable and reasonably intelligent. Pause for a moment and consider: that is an amazing feat. The most casual examination reveals that Charlie Pike is a bland, credulous boob. Have you seen the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing? It's like that: Claudio's a piece of shit, but Robert Sean Leonard's performance makes the character seem more decent than really makes sense. Charlie (Fonda) is a less-horrible Claudio figure--gullible, boring, jealous (but not so jealous and angry that he publicly humiliates his fiancée and doesn't mind causing her apparent death SPOILER ALERT). I've digressed. What I was trying to say is that, in defiance of reason, Henry Fonda sells this character as a cool guy who maybe even deserves Barbara Stanwyck, which he doesn't because no one deserves Barbara Stanwyck.
Oh, Barbara Stanwyck, you electric being. I am in love now. Stanwyck's character is so quick, so sexy, and so confident, and watching her, I could only imagine that Stanwyck was more Jean than Jean. Which she might not have been because acting is not the same as living, but the performance was good enough to make me think stupid thoughts.
Circling back to the gender shit at the beginning of this post, I really want to express my gratitude to this movie/Preston Sturges/everyone involved for not being awful. Charlie Pike does not spend the movie talking down to Jean--you know, the "listen, little lady" bullshit. Also, he gets really mad at her at several points in the movie, but he never threatens to hit her. Holy fucking Moses. How incredible is that? Thanks, It Happened One Night, for making me astonished by basic humane behavior in olde tyme pictures.
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