All About Eve (1950)

All About Eve opens with an awards banquet, as an esteemed critic narrates over voiceover while a young upstart actress accepts an award.

“Some of us are privileged to know her. We have seen beyond the beauty and artistry that have made her name resound through the nation. We know her humility, her devotion, her loyalty to her art, her love, her deep and abiding love for us, for what we are and what we do, the theater. She has had one wish, one prayer, one dream — to belong to us. Tonight, her dream has come true. And henceforth, we shall dream the same of her.”

The critic is speaking about Eve, the ascendant starlet played brilliantly by Anne Baxter. But the sentiment is easily applied to a common narrative of Monroe’s career, of an actor brimming with beauty and grace who elevated her art form and reached the pinnacle of success in her industry in exchange for being perpetually known and observed by the whole world over.

It’s fitting that Monroe passes through the film like a comet, on the periphery of an elite strata that would soon become her own. Before she was the biggest star in Hollywood she appeared in a film that castigated the folly of chasing notoriety, that condemned the vapid nature of show business — a film that Hollywood then turned around and, seemingly without any self-awareness, awarded Best Picture at the Oscars. Monroe would later come to represent the archetypal rise and fall of a Hollywood studio star as shown by Bette Davis’ Margo in the film. But the plot of All About Eve confirms that this arc was the story of Hollywood long before Monroe hit the scene, and the film’s Oscar win echoes the industry’s posthumous treatment of Monroe’s image, cannibalizing any knowledge of its own evils into self-aggrandizing pageantry.

Monroe’s character, Miss Casswell, first shows up at a party, a guest of the critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), brought to schmooze with film producers. It works; she lands an audition. As the party winds down DeWitt lauds Casswell’s ambition, telling her, “I can see your career rising in the east like the sun.” Monroe is mesmerizing in the party scene, radiant even standing beside the enduring grandeur of Bette Davis. It’s no accident that, working beside movie stars like Baxter and Davis, director Joseph Mankiewicz placed Monroe at the center of the frame.

In an ironic turn, Miss Casswell soon comes to be the hopeful actor who just doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the business. During the audition scene, after Casswell flunks her chance and leaves dejected, Margo makes a passing mention of Arthur Miller, who would be Monroe’s husband six years later and her ex-husband five years after that. Eve gets the part but eventually becomes just like Margo, worn down by the hollowness of the stardom cycle.

“Is it over, or is it just beginning?” a character asks Margo earlier in the film. All About Eve is an endlessly fascinating portrait of how it is never really either in Hollywood, how everything is circular and collapsing in on itself. The industry continues to tell the same stories and foment the same heartbreak in the name of entertainment.

Rating: 4.5/5