The Lady Eve
Short description
Charles Pike, heir to a brewing fortune, has spent a year in the Amazon studying snakes and returns home on an ocean liner with little experience of women. Aboard ship he meets Jean Harrington, whose father makes a living cheating at cards. Jean sets out to fleece the shy millionaire, but her feelings for him become genuine, and his feelings for her are just as real until he learns how she and her father earn their money. Humiliated and angry, Jean reinvents herself as an English aristocrat, Lady Eve Sidwich, and arranges to meet Charles again, determined to settle the score.
Preston Sturges directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Monckton Hoffe, following Sullivan's Travels the same year and preceding The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and Unfaithfully Yours. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean, Henry Fonda plays Charles, and Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest and Eric Blore appear among a credited cast of seventy-six. The picture runs ninety-seven minutes and was produced by Paramount.
On IMDb the film holds 8.9 out of 10 from 104 critics' reviews, noticeably higher than its 7.3 out of 10 from 413 votes on TMDB, a gap that suggests critics have long rated it above the general audience.
What's left behind the scenes
- Paulette Goddard auditioned for the role of con artist Jean Harrington, but Barbara Stanwyck ultimately landed the part.
- The scene where Eva tells Charles she will grant him a divorce only if he says he wants it while looking directly into her eyes is taken from the life of film director Preston Sturges (1898-1959). He once demanded the same thing from his second wife, Eleanor Hutton (1909-2006), whose wealthy family believed he had married her only for her money.
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