Some of it is slapstick; a little of it is impossible the wrong way; but in general its pleasures come from the characters as found.

| Dec 29, 2022

The Lady Eve cinches Sturges as an important personality in films... It is highly entertaining movie fare -- the kind that keeps the box offices busy.

| Dec 29, 2022

[The Lady Eve] is by all odds the best and breeziest thing at which Sturges has turned an impish hand and an equally impish pen.

| Dec 29, 2022

A psychologist might deduce that the author-director of The Lady Eve had taken a fiendish delight in upsetting the Fonda dignity. Be that as it may, the latter goes through his assignment valiantly.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 29, 2022

Fortunate, too, are Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda to be in such select company; for while their ability is unquestioned, the seriocomic situations with which The Lady Eve is so generously endowed are shaped into superlative smartness.

| Dec 29, 2022

Both [Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda] are made to seem brilliant players in a dazzling comedy, so well and so wittily are their words, actions, interruptions, and misunderstandings ordered and contrived.

| Dec 29, 2022

Moviegoers can put it down in their little notebooks right now that The Lady Eve is one of the most delightful pictures they will see in 1941.

| Dec 29, 2022

The note that prevails is one of spontaneity and naturalness, no matter how artificial the happenings in themselves. There is as a result an overtone of warmth and humanness which is bound to captivate, and that lends a glow to a boy meets girl story.

| Dec 29, 2022

Fonda does his stuff beautifully -- and so does Miss Stanwyck. It's her best part for a long time.

| Dec 29, 2022

Primarily this is a comedy, and a funny about a fellow and a girl; what makes it extraordinary are the breathless vitality and the intuitive perception with which its creator.

| Dec 29, 2022

The Lady Eve is a strange film, long on production value; short on story and ideas. Sturges previous efforts have been long on the latter items; short on the former.

| Dec 29, 2022

With his third assignment for Paramount, Sturges -- stimulated rather than stymied by a generous budget and his first important name cast -- achieves one of the most delightful farces to liven the screen in a long time.

| Dec 29, 2022

The picture does two things amazingly well -- it is funny and appealing to low-brows and its sends high-brows off into paroxysms of mirth at the same time.

| Dec 28, 2022

A frivolous masterpiece. Like Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls. Barbara Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg, and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it.

| Dec 28, 2022

Funny, fast and graceful, an exuberant mixture of wit, physical comedy and inventive plotting, The Lady Eve sets a benchmark for romantic comedy.

| Dec 28, 2022

Henry Fonda [is] seldom associated with unrestrained merriment. Fortunately, Preston Sturges films qualify as special situations. Fonda, particularly, emerges in The Lady Eve as the funniest deadpan comedian since Buster Keaton.

| Dec 28, 2022

Two things make it this director’s best film. One is this acknowledgement of actual hurt, and the spite that comes with spurned affection... The other thing is the supporting cast.

| Dec 28, 2022

If you've never understood Stanwyck's appeal, this is the movie to see. Her worldliness is bracing; more than any other movie heroine of her day, she makes tartness and dash seductive.

| Dec 28, 2022

A solid film with phenomenal performances that’ll leave you thinking amongst the slapstick. It’s certainly a film I’d recommend, but it’s far from one of my favorites like I’d anticipated.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2022

If the end of comedy is, as Johnson declared it was, "to make men merry" there is not very much wrong with this comedy of courtship. All its incidents, whether normal or fantastic, are comic because their consequences are never what we expect.

| Nov 15, 2022