The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941)
My Winter Movies # 15
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The implicit undercurrent of the film, in these scenes of wooing and seduction, is that love is a con like any other. At one point, Jean gives Charles a speech about how cleverly women must win over men; she’s talking about love, about the ways in which women use their feminine powers to subtly ingratiate men to them, but she might as well be talking about her con jobs and plots. It’s all the same, and the methods she uses to get the guy she wants to fall in love with her overlap conspicuously with the methods she would use to cheat him out of his cash. In one of her more candid moments, Jean admits, “a moonlit deck is a woman’s business office.” Sturges has a lot of fun with this basic conceit, turning games of love into games of trickery and deceit, games of lies and truths, with the increasingly floundering Charles obviously in over his head, whether he’s being swindled out of money or tricked into love. The name Eve, which Jean takes on as her alias, is particularly well chosen, because in this film the woman has all the power, the woman is in control, the woman guides the man into folly and then, if she chooses, back out again. (More here.)
