The Big Idea Behind THE LADY EVE

Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood's top screenwriters but also wanted to direct, feeling that too many other directors had ruined his work. He wrote the political satire The Great McGinty (1940), then offered to sell it to Paramount for $1 if they would let him direct it. They did, although the film had only a modest budget. Then they let him direct Christmas in July (1940), again with a modest budget. When both films proved hits with critics and audiences, they gave him a much larger budget for his third film, The Lady Eve.

Sturges had first met Barbara Stanwyck when he wrote Remember the Night (1940), a romantic comedy in which she plays a jailed shoplifter forced to spend Christmas with D.A. Fred MacMurray. Writer and actress became friends, and he promised to write her a great screwball comedy, a genre in which she was rarely cast because of her image as a hard-luck character.

Sturges originally wrote the screenplay that would become The Lady Eve in 1938, but kept it to himself until 1940. Then he re-worked it incorporating ideas from Irish writer Monckton Hoffe's story "Two Bad Hats." He also tailored the film to Stanwyck's talents.

The plot was inspired by Sturges's mother, a female entrepreneur who had always managed to find a wealthy husband whenever her finances slipped, and by the biblical story of Adam and Eve's temptation. To underline the latter source, Sturges made his leading man an ophiologist (a scientist studying snakes).

The leading lady's nom de guerre and the film's title were inspired by a woman with whom Sturges had been involved as a young man, Lady Eve Waddington-Greeley.

Executives at Paramount wanted to save money by casting one of their contract leading ladies -- either Paulette Goddard or Madeleine Carroll -- in the lead. Sturges insisted on using Stanwyck. Her salary and the fee to borrow Henry Fonda from 20th Century-Fox cost almost as much as the entire budget of Sturges's first picture as a director.

It was partly luck that resulted in Stanwyck appearing in The Lady Eve: an eye infection requiring surgery had forced her to drop out of another film, Reaching for the Sun (1941), which ended up starring Ellen Drew. Sturges visited her in the hospital and told her he'd have a script ready for her by the time she recovered.

For the supporting roles, Sturges turned mainly to a group of actors who followed him from film to film and earned the collective name "The Preston Sturges Stock Company." Among them were William Demarest (Muggsy), Robert Greig (Burrows) and Jimmy Conlin (Third Steward).

by Frank Miller