The Lady Eve

A female con artist falls in love with her target in Preston Sturges’s comedy, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.

A female con artist falls in love with her target in Preston Sturges’s comedy, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.

‘You’re certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet who’s just been up the Amazon for a year,’ Henry Fonda’s ingenuous young millionaire Charles Pike says to Jean Harrington (Stanwyck). He’s right. The two are on a luxury liner returning from South America, and Jean is a con artist, though he may encounter her again more happily in other guises. ‘Very funny, strangely erotic, utterly endearing, this may be the Sturges film that outlasts all others’ (David Thomson).