So when we watched Sullivan’s Travels during the AFI watch-through, I learned that it was one of two movies that Preston Sturges released in 1941 alone, during his most creative period. This is the other one, and is also considered at least a minor classic, apparently.

As it begins, Barbara Stanwyck is on a cruise with her father and his friend; they’re con artists. Mostly they swindle rich people at cards, but y’know, they’re flexible. And so Stanwyck singles out Henry Fonda, the very rich heir to an ale (not, he is careful to observe, beer) fortune, and comes up with a scheme (involving tripping him and breaking her shoe) to pull him into playing cards with her and her dad.

But given that this is a screwball comedy, you will not be shocked to learn that it doesn’t remain a simple gambling con. She goes to his room and sees his snake (this is not innuendo), yadda yadda, she unexpectedly falls in love with him. Matters advance quickly, she gets her dad to stop trying to scam him (which he only reluctantly goes along with), and within a few days, Fonda proposes marriage. Because sure, why not, you’ve known her for like 48 hours, that seems reasonable.

Well, his suspicious valet, who hasn’t liked her from the beginning, eventually obtains proof that she’s part of this card sharp ring, which he shows to Fonda. Who of course takes the only sensible action for someone who discovers he just got engaged to a con artist, and breaks off the engagement.

Then act two begins, and things get even screwier. Stanwyck is pissed at Fonda for breaking the engagement off. (I think she’s so pissed because they had sex after they got engaged, and she feels unfairly used; but old movies are so coy about when people are having sex that I might be wrong, and she might just be upset about being dumped in general — which honestly seems a little unfair if so, given the whole con artist thing.)

So anyway, she’s pissed, and to get her revenge, she goes to Fonda’s hometown and pretends (with the collusion of a con artist friend who’s been pretending to be a British noble himself) to be a fancy British lady, the titular Lady Eve. And thus begins a scam of fiendish complexity that doesn’t actually quite make sense, I don’t think.

But it’s a lot of fun along the way. Fonda plays his character as this completely earnest naif, and Stanwyck plays a bad girl with a heart of gold, able to be wryly cynical and yet still believable as a lovestruck woman with genuine feeling. The writing is sharp, the movie is surprisingly sexy for the Hays Code era, and there are some genuinely funny scenes (especially one where a horse keeps intruding on a would-be romantic moment).

Sullivan’s Travels is by far the better movie; it has whole layers of social commentary and satire, where this is a straightforward romcom. But once again, this is praising with faint damns. If this feels more like an evolved version of It Happened One Night, and belongs in conversation with the great Howard Hawks screwball comedies, that’s still some great company to be in.