The Lady Eve (1941)
Written by Monckton Hoffe (story), Preston Sturges. Directed by Preston Sturges.

Positively the Same Dame: The Lady Eve

"A man who can't forgive isn't much of a man."

The Lady Eve is part of a larger genre of screwball comedies that Staley Cavell has termed the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. In his book, Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell identifies a number of these films, including It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam's Rib and The Awful Truth. An important characteristic of these films is that the protagonists reunite with the same people they rejected earlier. What happens in the transformation from the first union to the second is an important subject. The characters rarely become better people; they are just seen differently. Rather than being blinded by love, true (actually, truthful) lovers are given far better vision.

From the opening credits of The Lady Eve, when a cartoon serpent in a top hat gets bonked on the head by a falling apple, we understand we are in for a comic rendition of the fall of man. The primordial story of Adam and Eve is further referenced when we discover the leading man, Charles Pike (played by Henry Fonda), studying snakes in the Eden-like Amazon. Pike is a reptile specialist whose primary value is the "pursuit of knowledge." His pursuit of knowledge is what will undo him, as it did, according to Scripture, the first man, and the first woman. Preparing for a trip home, Pike reveals he hasn't really known any women and insinuates a lack of trust, though later he'll admit he "should have married. My father wanted me to."

In counterpoint, the woman he is about to meet, Jean (Barbara Stanwyck), seems to know all about Pike. She's done extensive homework on his weaknesses and his considerable assets. In the ship's dining room, Jean holds a tiny mirror over her shoulder and places herself in an omnipresent and omniscient position. She is a con artist, ready to fabricate a story that will trap the gullible Pike. "From your lips to the ears of the almighty," responds her partner and dad, "Colonel Harrington" (Charles Coburn). Clearly, Jean is ready to read the minds and to evaluate the behavior of all the others on board, as she hovers above them with savage cynicism. She assumes "knowledge" that will be used to control Pike.

However, as she begins to love him, she surrenders her knowledge, and with it control. She says as they walk along the deck, "The air makes you feel all clean inside." She's a new woman, so to speak (which is of interest since the liberated "new woman" of the 1930s was such a controversial issue). She decides to trust Pike and make herself vulnerable to him, ironically vowing to become "everything he thinks I am," just before his thinking turns against her. The shift in his attitude is also the result of newfound knowledge, gained when Pike learns the "true identity" of his beloved. But Jean has just declared to Harrington "a man who can't forgive isn't much of a man". She trusts Pike to forgive her. Astonishingly, Pike believes she's a crook, plain and simple, and the identity he thrusts upon her destroys their union. Now it is she who will not forgive.

She takes her revenge by intentionally changing her identity to the Lady Eve, a lofty, aristocratic ideal for whom Pike falls head over heels, literally. He falls not once but many times, and has to go upstairs repeatedly to clean himself up. However, it is positively the same woman. The only reason he does not recognize her, according to Jean is "because we don't love each other any more." When he marries "Eve," Jean is prepared to prove to him something she stated naively during their earlier courtship, "The best [girls] aren't that good and the bad aren't that bad. Not nearly." He will be given something false to believe since he won't accept the true.

He has traded an actual woman, Jean, with her confessed sins, for a manufactured woman with a phony past to whom he recites the same script: "I feel I've known you for a long time." His approach to his marriage partner "lets him spiritually carve her in half, taking the good without the bad, the lady without the woman, the ideal without the reality, the richer without the poorer," in the words of Cavell, who adds, "He will be punished for this." Similarly, Sturges makes this point: When we allow ourselves to be duped by cinematic, corny, phony tales in which one perfect person finds another perfect person with whom to share a perfect life, that too will cost us.

Historically, mistaken identities are a staple of countless comedies, particularly romantic comedies. Yet Sturges offers another spin. In The Lady Eve, ones identity can be mistaken, that is misunderstood, merely by the perceptions of another. We are all bound to mistake one another's identity when we assume the worst about each other, when we think we know a person better than we do, or when we don't allow that person to be the human they were created to be. Paradoxically, the only way to identify a person accurately is to trust him or her before we know everything, and thus to make ourselves vulnerable in some way. This requires faith. When we decide to make judgments based upon our woefully inadequate knowledge, without faith, we reenact the fall of man daily.

Marriage is a spiritual transaction. Adam knew Eve, not merely because he had a sexual encounter with her, but because he had a psycho-spiritual encounter. He understood her; he "got" her at the most profound level. And this knowledge happens only when we surrender what we think we know, that is, our judgment of each other. If we'd stop trying to be God, we might stand a chance at being pretty good humans. In this film, people can only become good people when they are forgiven for being bad people.

The media, according to Cavell, make much of erotic scandals, "but what they mean by erotic scandals consists of triangles, crimes of passion, sensational marriages and ugly divorces. What our films suggest is that the scandal is love itself, true love." Likewise the scandal of a gospel that dispenses grace to the undeserving is that people can be made innocent, not because they are guiltless, but because they are forgiven. Jean and Pike finally forgive each other. That is the really happy ending that finds Pike once again in Jean's arms, and why they can honestly say, "I'm married." "So am I."

Monica Ganas, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Communication Studies, (Film, Theatre and Television) at Azusa Pacific University, a 20-year-veteran of the entertainment industry, and a pastor's wife.
©Monica Ganas