Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
It's no accident when wealthy Charles falls for Jean. Jean is a con artist with her sights set on Charles' fortune. Matters complicate when Jean starts falling for her mark. When Charles suspects Jean is a gold digger, he dumps her. Jean, fixated on revenge and still pining for the millionaire, devises a plan to get back in Charles' life. With love and payback on her mind, she re-introduces herself to Charles, this time as an aristocrat named Lady Eve Sidwich.
Preston Sturges's screwball masterpiece benefits from a razor-sharp, intricately constructed plot full of reversals and comic escalation, and Barbara Stanwyck delivers one of the defining comic performances in Hollywood history — witty, sensual, and utterly in command. Henry Fonda is the perfect foil. Cinematography is competent studio work, well-lit and composed but unremarkable. Novelty is solid — the film perfects the gold-digger-turned-romantic screwball formula with Sturges's unmistakable verbal wit and subversive edge, though the template itself was well-established. The ending is satisfying and fun but not especially surprising by the genre's conventions.