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Eden is not a garden but a jungle, the top-hatted serpent in the animated opening credits becomes the new specimen brought home, "let her out of her box to play." The explorer (Henry Fonda) is a brewery scion (his is "the ale that won for Yale"), quite unworldly, his appearance aboard the ocean liner triggers the kind of string of verbal firecrackers favored by Preston Sturges. ("Puke?" "Pike." "Peekaboo!") To the fetching swindler (Barbara Stanwyck) he's a pith-helmet target (her bitten apple lands on its bullseye) and a reflection on her pocket mirror, she cushions his tumble by fingering his hair in a remarkably sustained two-shot close-up. "You're certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet who's just been up the Amazon for a year." Instead of helping her father (Charles Coburn) fleece the "sucker sapiens," she falls in love with him and is heartbroken when he discovers the con. Not so heartbroken that she doesn't readily embark on a revenge plan, however: "I need him like the axe needs the turkey," a line delivered by Stanwyck with the quiet fury of Laclos. A comedy of famous perfections, of the pratfall that seasons the shimmering repartee, of the magical character actors who crowd the frame as if in a Phiz illustration. (William Demarest's high-speed gravel launching into a Hitlerine rant, Eugene Pallette croaking out "Landlord, Fill the Flowing Bowl" on a staircase, Eric Blore buzzing around drawing rooms like a pixelated mosquito.) An accent is all there is to the masquerade, the cardsharp turns British lady and dares the fellow to recognize her. "If she didn't look so exactly the other girl, I might be suspicious." The honeymoon express in and out of tunnels followed by the happy acceptance, the dame that any mug can see. Hitchcock and Buñuel surely appreciate Sturges' punchline. With Melville Cooper, Martha O'Driscoll, Janet Beecher, Robert Greig, Dora Clement, Jimmy Conlin, and Luis Alberni. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |