tgibbs279 wrote:
But the last third of the movie didn't make a lot of sense to me.I just thought there were plot twists, especially at the end, that felt arbitrary, or at least weren't explained very well. I don't want a movie where things are OVERexplained. But there were plot twists here that weren't explained at all.
The movie does makes sense given some understanding of human behavior and psychology and of the conventions of romantic comedy.
1) As others have said, I simply don't believe Henry Fonda wouldn't recognize Barbara Stanwyck after meeting her the second time. Yes, we're supposed to believe he's naive, shy, etc. But nothing we've seen suggests he's flat-out stupid. She looks the same and sounds the same. It's not plausible he would think she's a different person.
Charles is
told that she is a different person, an English woman. He knows her uncle, and he is not cynical enough to wonder if the uncle, who is a friend of his parents, is a complete fraud. (On the boat, Charles knows nothing about Jean and her father except what they tell him. Eve's uncle is accepted by the community in Connecticut.)Eve does not sound anything like Jean, and it is not just the accent. Her vocal patterns are different and the quality of her voice is different. (And her mannerisms and facial expressions are different.) Barbara Stanwyck is very good at making Eve a completely different person without changing her appearance except for the hair.The compelling reason that Charles does not recognize that they are the same woman is that
he does not want to. Eve seems to give Charles a second chance at the woman he loves (and he would not woo Eve if he did not love Jean), but this time a woman with an impeccable background. A "good" Eve rather than a "bad" Jean.
2) I don't understand Stanwyck/Lady Eve's motivation to want to marry Fonda.
On the boat, in order to save face, Charles tells Jean that he knew before he wooed her that she was a crook, thus implying that he was just playing her. He is not telling the truth, but Jean comes to believe it, and wants revenge because she was being honest with him and thinks he deliberately hurt her.
Jean: You mean you were playing me for a sucker?I don't believe it.But if you were...If you were just trying to make me feel cheap and hurt me, you succeeded handsomely.You ought to be very proud of yourself, Mr. Pike.Very proud of yourself.
But when they do plan to divorce, she doesn't want any money. Some will say she had a change of heart. Fine, but we don't see anything on screen to explain what caused that change of heart.
Why does Jean have a change of heart? Well, because she is not happy after getting revenge. (We see that in the brief glimpse of Eve after Charles leaves the train.) Because she realizes that she went too far. Because she did not really mean to hurt Charles that much. Etc.Whatever the actual details, after getting her revenge, Jean realizes that she loves Charles, and that she has probably lost him forever. (People frequently have a "change of heart," without anything explicit happening, when they realize that they may lose the person that they love.)I don't think that this is so hard to understand that it needs to be spelled out.
3) In the last third of this movie, characters' feelings seem to change without any motivation or explanation. Why does Fonda love Stanwyck/Jean again at the end? The last time he was with the person he knew as Jean, he had just learned she was a con artist, and he was furious with her. Then, at the end, he loves her again. Why? Something had to happen to change his mind. But what?
Charles's traumatic experience with Eve, whom he initially believed to be a better version of Jean, and who turned out to be much worse, causes him to understand just what he lost when he rejected Jean.
Charles: It would never of happened except she looked so exactly like you.
Charles pursues, and marries, Eve because she
looks like the woman he loves. But look at his expression right before and after he enters the compartment on the train. He knows he married the wrong woman even before Eve starts to
talk.At the end of the movie, Charles is ready to accept Jean as she is. (He is even willing to lose money at cards to her father.) He is willing to take the chance, which he was not earlier, that she does love him and is not just marrying him for his money. (As the movie ends, Charles is about to find out that Jean and Eve are the same woman, and that Jean does love him as she declined to fleece him as Eve.)Jean and Charles love each other all along. Through it all and underneath it all, they love each other. It just takes a certain amount of turmoil before they both recognize it and admit it.This should not be hard to understand as it is perhaps the most fundamental pattern in romantic
comedies.To summarize:A boy and girl fall in love; they fight, break up and hate each other; they then realize that they love each other and get back together again. It happens all the time both in real life and in romantic comedies._______________
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Phillip Marlowe
12 years ago
Those who criticize the logic of the plot for having Charles fail to recognize Eve as Jean (as if logic were a requirement of screwball or Sturges films anyway) always seem to forget that he was given a perfectly good explanation for their resemblance. In one of the funniest scenes of the filem ("Let us meet at yon window embrasure. And tell no one!"), the great Eric Blore recounts the tale of the handsome stableboy to a credulous Charles. If you listen closely to this tale (which, in typical Sturges fashion, gleefully polevaults over the Production Code), Eve and Jean are at least half sisters and (dare we say it!) possibly full sisters. I agree with those who argue that Charles desperately does not want to recognize Jean in Eve, and this only bolsters his refusal to do so.
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