All About Eve (1950)

All About Eve is a theater meta-movie told primarily in a flashback format of the title character Eve’s rise to stardom on the Broadway scene.  Over the course of a year Eve, a fanatically devoted fan of aging Broadway veteran Margo Channing, insinuates herself further into Margo’s personal life and affairs.  Expressing herself as devoted to the art of the stage, she does as much as she can to learn about Margo’s performances and lifestyle.  Things come to a head when Margo begins to sniff out her real motivations as the threat to her career becomes clearer.

I like movies about good ol’ fashioned manipulation and scheming.  At first it’s pretty easy to call out Eve, what with her ostensible and smothering niceties and all.  As the audience, we know something is a little off with her approach and one of the goals of a film like this is to convince us that a genuine sociopath is doomed to fail; it’s like becoming a witness to the scene of a crime.  All About Eve convinces us to buy into this premise with hook, line, and sinker.  At the same time, it provides some pretty scathing commentary that could probably be applied even to our modern starlets who may not always be who we think they are.

I’d like to think that we could be smart enough to know if someone isn’t really meant to be there.  Additionally, I cheer at the idea of someone being able to come in right off the street in order to ‘beat the system.’  Surely, we all have it in us to rise to such greatness.  This is a movie with drama and depth.  Don’t let its age fool you; it’s definitely one for the ages.

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