Please join the BVFCC Film Club for the first film in our June Screening Series, THE LADY EVE (1941), showcasing the films of director Preston Sturges. The reels roll at 7 pm and entry is FREE to members/$7 for non-members. The Best Video Coffee Bar will be open for beer, wine, café drinks and FREE POPCORN.
The Lady Eve is a 1941 American screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.
The film is based on a story by Monckton Hoffe about a mismatched couple who meet on board an ocean liner. In 1994, The Lady Eve, which is included on many "Top 100" films of all-time lists, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Preston Sturges, born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic and mature, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene.
Prior to Sturges, other figures in Hollywood (such as Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts; however, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to establish success as a screenwriter and then move into directing his own scripts, at a time when those roles were separate. He sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $10 in exchange for directing it. Anthony Lane writes that "To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed 'Written and directed by Preston Sturges,' and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny." For that film, Sturges was the first person to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Sturges went on to receive Oscar nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). He also wrote and directed The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), each considered classic comedies, appearing on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs.