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This chapter analyses performance in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story with comparisons and contrasts to several other Sturges comedies. It examines performative choices by Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, and Charles Coburn in The Lady Eve and acting choices by Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, and Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story. Using Laban methodology, it describes the affective qualities of expressions, gestures, and voices as well as the impact of costuming. Consideration is given to Sturges’s cinematic presentation of actors’ movements and physical attributes with particular attention to how differences in gesture and expression shape audiences’ perception of characters. The essay also considers characteristics of screwball comedies and gender representation within them.

This chapter looks at Preston Sturges's accomplished study of America's finest comic specimen: sucker sapiens, in the film The Lady Eve. In it, heroine Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) is a fast-talking dame never at a loss for a word or a palmed card, whereas the hero, Charles “Hopsie” Pike (Henry Fonda) has a shy demeanor and halting speech, making him an easy mark for Jean. The end of the film concludes with a paradoxical moral: the hero must be swindled in order to be enriched, venturing all chances for happiness on a gambler, a dissembler, and a sexual cheat. This is seen as a moral that needs to be impressed upon the American character, whose faith in democratic manners is attached to the belief that moral innocence is ultimately superior to cunning, that the plainspoken are valued over the quick-witted. The Lady Eve, then, is Sturges's exposition of the naivete that authorizes such a disingenuous view of how the world works and how people are formed within it.

This chapter examines and puts into context the ‘modernist turn’ of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a popular fashion magazine marketed to middle-class female readers in the interwar period (1919-1929). While many of its society columns and features unquestionably endorsed traditional, patriarchal values, the fact that editors also reviewed and commissioned work by modernist women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, shows that the magazine was fashioned as a dialogic space that aimed to address the various, at times contradictory, experiences and interests of women in the interwar period.  By analysing the particulars of this productive dialogue between conservatism and progressiveness in Eve, the chapter advances research on interwar periodical culture, suggesting that some existing critical designations such as ‘little,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘service’ inadequately describe the heterogeneity of the printed materials found in this particular 1920s magazine.