150 Word Review: 'The Lady Eve' (1941)
Place your bets
Have there ever been two better-looking people than Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck? That's a rhetorical question. In director/writer Preston Sturges’ respectfully horny 1941 screwball comedy The Lady Eve, Fonda and Stanwyck are black and white stunners, delicate like marble, witty and sophisticated, demigods but earthbound. Sturges' movie is as frothy as whipped egg whites on a gin fizz, as quick as a card shark’s fingers.
The plot is pure champagne: Fonda is an heir to an ale fortune but his real passion is exotic reptiles on a cruise from South America to New York City. Stanwyck is a charming scam artist who sets her sites on goofy Fonda, because there's no way a worldly, zinger-slinging dame like her would fall for a stiff, right? Wrong. They fall in love, they fall out of love, they fall back in love. Meanwhile, they both generate enough heat to power a steamboat.
not to answer a rhetorical question, but: Catherine Deneuve in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. that is all.