Synopsis: 40's comedy - female con-artist tries to rip off rich adventurer but falls in love, blah, blah, blah..
Director: Preston Sturges
Actors: Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Charles Coburn
Date: 1941
How viewed: already in my collection
Rating: 3/5
David Meyer says:
The smartest of all screwball comedies, with dialogue that flows so smoothly you may not notice the best lines until after the movie's over
I say:
Essentially a 2-act play - Stanwyck and her dad (Coburn) are on a liner back from S America to New York and try to fleece the richest man they can find (Fonda, heir to an ale company, travelling back after a year up the Amazon). But they start to fall in love, the plan wavers, he finds out and dumps her. She's out for revenge, and in the 2nd half manages to pass herself off as another woman and get him to marry her. Then she dumps him. But eventually it all ends happily... Stanwyck is great, the 2nd half is much better, but Fonda is weak (just imagine what Cary Grant would have done with the role) and the supporting characters just are generally simply not eccentric enough. Perhaps I'm too harsh - Preston Sturges (writer, director) was clearly pushing the envelope. This is what wikipedia says: In recent years, film scholars such as Alessandro Pirolini have also argued that Sturges' cinema anticipated more experimental narratives by contemporary directors such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Robert Zemeckis, and Woody Allen, along with prolific The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder: "Many of [Sturges'] movies and screenplays reveal a restless and impatient attempt to escape codified rules and narrative schemata, and to push the mechanisms and conventions of their genre to the extent of unveiling them to the spectator. Perhaps I should watch it again!
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