Screwball and the Masquerade
2001; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoTHE LADY EVE AND TWO-FACED WOMAN 1. Resemblances Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve and George Cukor's Two-Faced Woman both appeared in 1941. I have long been struck by the fact that they share an identical basic trajectory. In this they are closer to each other than either is to any other screwball comedy. The resemblance, as far as I am aware, has gone unnoticed, and I can account for this only with the widespread (and to my mind quite erroneous) assumption that Cukor's film is so bad as to be not worth discussing. I also cannot account for the resemblances beyond the feeble explanation 'coincidence': there appears to be no tangible connection between the two productions--different studios, different directors, different writers, different stars--and, unless there exists other information with which I am not familiar, insufficient time to hypothesize direct influence or deliberate imitation. The basic resemblance from which all the rest follow--woman empowered by the 'masquerade'--is not of course a device common only to these two films: it was foreshadowed in two of the earlier great screwballs, by Katherine Hepburn's inspired improvizations (notably her 'Swinging Door Susie') in Bringing Up Baby, and more closely by Irene Dunne's climactic masquerade as her own sister in The Awful Truth. But it is much more fully developed in the Sturges and Cukor films, being central to the plot development of both. Their common trajectory can be summed up as follows: i. A man and a woman from quite different 'worlds' meet and fall in love, the meeting taking place within the woman's domain. ii. They separate, the man returning to his own world. iii. The woman follows him, infiltrating his world while masquerading (unknown to him) as her own sister (illegitimate in Sturges, twin in Cukor), a totally different personality of extraordinary charisma. (In both films the comedy highlight and core of the movie is clearly the masquerade itself, the prelude and coda thinner in texture and invention, though Sturges, the practised specialist in his own idiosyncratic brand of comedy, can cram every sequence with 'touches', interplay, inspired bits of business). iv. The man falls in love with the 'twin'. v. The woman returns to her own world and her original persona. vi. The man follows (deliberately in Cukor, inadvertently in Sturges, where the woman sets up the reunion unilaterally), facilitating the traditional 'happy end'. Readers who know Two-Faced Woman only from the commercial video, the only form in which the film is currently available, will object that this account ignores a crucial difference: the man sees through the masquerade from the outset and knows throughout that the 'twin sister' is a fiction. But if you only know Cukor's film in this version, then you don't know Cukor's film. Explanation follows: 2. Two-Faced Woman: a tale of two versions The sad story of what happened to Cukor's movie has been told already in CineAction 35, very thoroughly and eloquently, by Richard Lippe, and for a full account readers are directed to his article. I have carefully refrained from rereading it because I prefer to rephrase matters in my own words, in the interests of freshness, and a clear understanding of the whole sorry affair is crucial to my argument here. But all the detective work was done by Richard, and our estimates of the film are I believe very close. The story of how we became aware of the gulf that separates the two versions is curious enough to be worth telling. One summer a number of years ago Richard and I left for our annual vacation, leaving the apartment in charge of our resident cat sitter. Shortly before we departed we found that a commercial TV channel was telecasting Two-Faced Woman, at that time unavailable in any version and virtually a lost film, so we left instructions for its taping during our absence. Our cat sitter carried this out but taped at low speed and of course included all the commercial breaks. …
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