The Lady Eve

The Lady Eve
Tuesday, September 8, 2009, 10:29 PM
(This was originally posted on Moodle in September)
Even as the credits were rolling, it was obvious to the viewers that Peter Sturges wanted us to be thinking about the biblical story of Adam and Eve as we were watching The Lady Eve. Not only is the name Eve in the title, but the snake, otherwise known as "The Devil" is sliding around the screen in the beginning. When Jean sees Charlie, she throws an apple at him to get his attention. She is tempting him to turn around just as Eve tempted Adam to eat from the tree. In the next scene, we see Charlie reading a book called Are Snakes Necessary? which I found particularly amusing. Charlie later tells Jean that he loves snakes and he confesses "Snakes are my life". Peter Sturges, who some could argue that he is supposed to be "God" because he wrote the script, punished both Charlie and Jean in this movie as God punished Adam and Eve. Cavell states, "His (Charlie's) intellectual denial of sameness accordingly 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. He will be punished for this" (61). I also think Sturges was punishing Charlie for his stupidity for falling for the same girl essentially three times without even knowing it! Jean also gets punished because "she feeds him with the fruit of the tree of stupidity" (Cavell, 62). She also pretended to be someone she was not.
As I was watching this movie, I did not feel the same sympathy I had for the characters in The Philadelphia Story. As much as I enjoyed Jean's independence, I thought she was quite cruel for impersonating someone just to get back at Charlie. It would have been different if she only confused him for a day, but she kept on going until he proposed again and then they were married, which I think was too far! Even the horse knew that Charlie was making a mistake. He tried to warn him, but who listened to a horse in those days? I also did not feel any sympathy for Charlie because he was so dim-witted. Mugsy knew that Jean and Lady Eve were the same person and he was "named a mug by the author of the film" (Cavell, 69). Jean was not far off when she called Charlie a "mug". He was as dumb as a box of rocks, and I like Henry Fonda, so it was hard for me to see him in such a stupid role.
One of my favorite quotes from the movie was when Jean said "A man who couldn't forgive isn't much of a man". Charlie wasn't much of a man because he couldn't forgive Jean for being a card shark. He also could not forgive Lady Eve for her previous relationships and he did not even want to here what Jean had to say at the end. Clearly, Charlie was not even close to a man.
The Lady Eve is a hilarious comedy, but I think it is funny in a sad way. Many people are gullible and passive, like Charlie, and they would believe the story that Sir Alfred threw at him. Hopefully the world is full of more Mugsy's than Charlie's.