All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

I had no idea Marilyn Monroe was in this movie.

I had heard all about Bette Davis' performance, and once I saw George Sanders, who I remembered as being excellent as a total ass in Rebecca, I knew I was in for some delightful bitchiness from him. But when Monroe appeared as Sanders' date at the party Davis was hosting, I almost had to run to the computer to check if it was really her. She was playing a similar role here as in her first movie, The Asphalt Jungle, earlier that year -- appear in a few scenes subject to the whims of a man older and more powerful than her, breathy and befuddled, and that was it.



To be fair, though, she wasn't completely the object of derision here, even if she was "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art." She got off a few good lines, one about theatrical producers looking like "unhappy rabbits" and one about the guy who usually abuses her, Addison DeWitt (played by Sanders): Eve Harrington says she's scared to talk to DeWitt because she's afraid she'd bore him. "Don't worry," Monroe says cheerfully, "You won't even get a chance to talk."

Of course, Davis is the showstopper here, and I don't really need or want to write about one of the most written-about roles in movie history. I'll just say that I enjoyed Mankiewicz's dialogue coming out of her mouth and Sanders' mouth (hey, and Monroe's, too, I guess) much more than from any of the other characters. Fortunately, they both talk a lot.

Besides those characters' dialogue, the thing I liked best about the film was that it never showed either Margo or Eve, one a consistently huge star and the other a rising star, actually acting. It's almost as if whether they were actually that good or not on stage was beside the point -- the whole point of the film is that Margo begets Eve, who at the end begets Phoebe, and on and on. Each might have special talents on stage, but they all have (or had, in Margo's case) the same ruthless and selfish ambition. The implications of the last shot of the film are pretty obvious -- the multitude of reflections of Phoebes in the mirror show how all these actresses are essentially alike, and that the cycle will continue ad infinitum. The film isn't about acting, it's about actors.

I can't believe it took me flipping through the channels to get my mind off the baby's closet I'd just marred with my ham-handed handyman skills in order to see this movie for the first time. To (very loosely) paraphrase Margo Channing, there are several holes in the closet where a shelf should be.