Charles Coburn makes a man's expectation of being listened to a source of comedy. We rate his unforced authority, and Preston Sturges knows how to use it in The Lady Eve.
Fi1m perspective
In The Lady Eve (1941), Charles Coburn's ‘Colonel’ Harrington speaks with the ease of a man who expects everyone else to listen. Preston Sturges sensibly lets him speak, giving Coburn room to make that assumption funny. We laughed at his untroubled confidence: he expects a hearing and sees no reason to work for it. The pleasure is in the ease, and in how little the actor needs to insist on the joke.
His move into films came at around sixty, after a long theatre career, and he continued in supporting parts through the 1950s. The businessmen and patriarchs, often crusty or monocled, offered a useful home for that authority. In The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), he plays a wealthy store owner going undercover; in The More the Merrier (1943), Benjamin Dingle is a retired businessman given to matchmaking. These are parts built to let an older man interfere. The warmth and eccentricity in Coburn's comic work stop that familiar type from becoming merely tiresome.
Sturges puts that assurance beside the less dignified business of Henry Fonda's slapstick in The Lady Eve. Not every pratfall earns its keep, and the repetition occasionally makes Fonda's character less interesting than he is in conversation. We would happily lose a few of those tumbles. Coburn's ease helps explain why: the film is already funny when it allows its actors to talk. There is no need to hurry them towards the next physical joke.
Ernst Lubitsch also used him in Heaven Can Wait (1943), as Hugo Van Cleve, while Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) casts him as Sir Francis ‘Piggy’ Beekman opposite Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. The recurring grand older man is a limitation worth acknowledging: familiarity can do some of the actor's work for him. We recommend starting with The Lady Eve. Listen carefully when Harrington speaks; he has already assumed that you will.
Biography
Charles Coburn (also credited as Charles Douville Coburn) was an American actor who worked in theatre and film. He made his Broadway debut in 1901 and formed an acting company with Ivah Wills, whom he married in 1906; the couple performed regularly on Broadway until her death in 1937.
After relocating to Los Angeles, Coburn began a film career in the late 1930s. He appeared as 'Colonel' Harrington in The Lady Eve (1941) and played supporting roles in films including The More the Merrier (1943), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Heaven Can Wait (1943), The Paradine Case (1947), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956).
