The Lady Eve (1941) — Preston Sturges’s Sleight of Hand There are some movies you come back to again and again, and each time they reveal something new. Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve is one of those films. I’ve watched it more times than I can count, and what amazes me is how fresh it feels, how sharp, how alive. Sturges was a writer first. That’s important to remember. He had this gift — dialogue that moved like music, fast, syncopated, perfectly timed. And then he did something very unusual f

Directed by Preston Sturges ❣️ Now playing on the Criterion Channel! https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-preston-sturges From capitalism to patriotism to politics to marriage, there was virtually no pillar of American life that escaped unscathed during Preston Sturges’s whirlwind heyday in the 1940s. One of the first Hollywood filmmakers to write and direct his own scripts, Sturges took screwball comedy to new heights of sublime absurdity with his elegantly cockeyed dialogue, free-form