The Lady Eve (1941)
Please stop and watch this trailer and tell me if you hear anything that lands rather oddly on the ear.
Those of you who have not closed this tab in outrage may be interested to hear that The Lady Eve is one of those “available to watch instantly on Netflix” selections. Anyhow, the cake you’re looking at is wrought during a giddy montage sequence to celebrate the nuptials of two characters who are getting hitched under false pretenses — which is to say, Barbara Stanwyck is a twisted con-artist who is out to grab Henry Fonda’s fortune. How twisted, you ask? When her first seduction is foiled, she disguises herself as another person in order to take a second crack at it, without the benefit of a fake Facebook page or anything.
The opulence of the cake is part of the gag, commenting on the huge, conspicuous to-do made over a wedding which is obviously doomed to failure. There is some Tower of Babel thinking at work here. As in: the bigger a deal you make out of something, the more prone you are to attracting the attention of forces which will undermine your attempts. Such as gravity, for example, or Yahweh.
In this case the cake is never actually eaten, nor destroyed, though it does cast a very long shadow over the rest of the film.
