In ‘Lady Eve,’ Barbara Stanwyck’s Romantic Pain Is Our Gain

A woman deeply in lust--is it a comedy or a tragedy?

It’s both, of course, as you can see tonight and Friday on Orange County’s alternative screens.

The 1941 comedy classic “The Lady Eve” plays tonight at Chapman University as part of its screwball comedy series.

Considered by some to be the best of the films written and directed by Preston Sturges, “The Lady Eve” contains both sophisticated humor and all-out slapstick.

Henry Fonda plays a shy, unworldly heir who spends his time researching snakes. Barbara Stanwyck plays a con artist who falls for him even as she is trying to fleece him.

Though Fonda’s performance is first-rate, Stanwyck commandeers the movie. Previously known as an accomplished dramatic actress, she plays her comedy role with surprising depth. “There has rarely been a woman in a movie who more convincingly desired a man,” wrote critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert cites one scene in “The Lady Eve” as the sexiest and funniest in all of romantic comedy. For nearly four unbroken screen minutes, Stanwyck toys with Fonda’s hair, part of an all-out campaign to seduce him. It is, Ebert wrote, “one of her greatest performances, a flight of romance so graceful and effortless that she is somehow able to play different notes at the same time.”

* “The Lady Eve” screens tonight at 7 at Chapman University, Argyros Forum, Room 208, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Not rated. Running time: 97 minutes. Free. (714) 997-6607.

The Pain That Follows the Fling

The other side of that coin is tarnished very dark indeed in “Post Coitum,” 1997 French film presented Friday by the UCI Film Society. The film caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival and brought its star and director, Brigitte Rouan, a best-actress nomination for a European Film Award.

She portrays Diane, a 40ish book editor who is successfully if boringly married to an attorney but whose lust is triggered by a chance encounter with a younger man.

They give themselves over entirely to their fling; they’re even thrown out of a restaurant. When he cools, but she does not, her life disintegrates.

Rouan said she wanted to show “how painful passion can be and how stupid it can make you.”

Times critic Kenneth Turan called the film “hauntingly honest and provocative.”

The sensual pleasures are not moralistically degraded by Rouan, who refuses to second-guess her characters, Turan wrote. “We may ache for Diane in her vulnerability, but we also see how difficult it would have been for her to act otherwise.”

* “Post Coitum” screens at 7 and 9 p.m. Friday at UC Irvine’s Student Center Crystal Cove. Unrated. Running time: 97 minutes. $2.50-$4.50. (949) 824-5588.

A New Tack for Kate Winslet

The young woman in “Hideous Kinky,” a new though relatively obscure British-French film, just wants to get away from her life in middle-class England, so she heads to Morocco with her two young daughters, her colonial preconceptions and her 1960s naivete.

She is played by Kate Winslet, who after “Titanic” can afford to take a role outside the mainstream to show what she can do.

It is her best performance yet, wrote British film critic Antonia Quirke. In one scene, Winslet learns that friends have moved away and taken her children with them. She has no idea where they are. Her wordless reaction, subtle, nearly invisible, but powerful all the same, “lasts for two seconds, maybe three, but I’m still touched by the thought of it,” Quirke wrote.

* “Hideous Kinky” opens today at Edwards Town Center, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Rated R for sexuality and language. Running time: 98 minutes. (714) 751-4184.

Elsewhere

Saddleback College--”Bitter Sugar,” a fervently anti-Castro political yarn and love story directed by Cuban American Leon Ichaso in 1996. 7 p.m. Friday in the Science Math Building, Room 313, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Unrated. Running time: 75 minutes. Free. (949) 582-4788.

Chapman University--”Sambizanga,” a 16-millimeter Angolan film produced in 1972 and set during that nation’s uprising against Portuguese colonists. 8 p.m. Tuesday in the Argyros Forum, Room 208, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Unrated. Running time: 102 minutes. Free. (714) 997-6765.

Irvine Valley College--”Straight From the Streets,” a 1998 documentary about street life and urban gangs. 6 p.m. Tuesday in Room B-110, 5500 Irvine Center Drive. Running time: 110 minutes. Free. (949) 451-5232.