Making it to the top of the heap in the show business world requires guts, stamina, talent, and above all, determination and ambition. Is it any wonder that All About Eve is the quintessential Bette Davis movie, as well as the ultimate backstage soap opera?
Merrill, Davis, Sanders, Baxter, Marlowe and Holm—a powerhouse cast
Based on a 1946 Cosmopolitan magazine article, “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr and reportedly inspired by true events, All About Eve has a simple and timeless plotline: A mature actress’s career and relationships are threatened by the machinations of a scheming young acolyte.
It’s incredible that Davis was not the first choice to play Margo Channing. Indeed, the great Claudette Colbert had signed on to play the role, but she fractured her back and was unable to rise to the occasion. But it’s hard to imagine the calm, cool and collected Colbert performing Margo’s iconic set pieces-- getting drunk and belligerent at her own cocktail party, or screaming like a fishwife at her younger director paramour. With Claudette, it would have been a different character and film entirely, and we can assume writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz tailored the role to suit the talents of the more histrionic Davis.
Bette Davis as Margo Channing
Colbert’s misfortune was a big break for Davis, whose career had recently hit the skids after more than 15 years as reigning queen of the Warner Brothers lot. By the late 1940s, the choicest female roles were now being offered to Warners newcomer Joan Crawford. (Davis had actually turned down the role of Mildred Pierce.) 1949 had been a nadir. After appearing in the tepid melodrama Beyond the Forest (in a black fright wig, no less), Bette’s best days seemed to be behind her. Until Eve--and the glorious Margo Channing.
Anne faces off with Bette, as Marilyn, Hugh and company look on
Bette imbues the role of Margo with her own unique brand of piss and vinegar. Like Davis herself, Margo is a tough broad, a big personality, but she just as successfully reveals her character’s vulnerability and neuroses in her multi-layered performance. In every scene, Davis dominates, pulling out all the stops to give this iconic, tour-de-force performance. (In fact, poor Anne Baxter, playing the title role, sort of fades into the background in her few face-to-face scenes with Davis.)
Eve revitalized Bette’s career, but she did not win the Oscar that year. Davis was nominated opposite costar Anne Baxter and Gloria Swanson’s acclaimed comeback role in Sunset Boulevard, but despite (or maybe because of) all this dramatic star power, the Oscar ultimately went to comedienne Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday. (Eleanor Parker was nominated that year, too, for Caged, not that anyone remembers!)
But Bette did not triumph alone. All the leading performances in Eve are essayed by skilled actors in their prime and pack a powerhouse punch, bringing writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s sparkling screenplay to life.
Celeste Holm brings warmth and humanity to the film as Karen Richards, wife of celebrated playwright Lloyd, with “no talent to offer, except for loving her husband.” Though Holm was well-known to be something of a grand diva herself, here she’s down to earth as Margo’s best friend. (Davis and Holm were not at all friendly in real life, despite their onscreen chemistry. According to Holm, her cheery “good mornings” to Davis on the set would always be met with stony silence.)
B movie actor Hugh Marlowe (who years later found a home on television on the long-running soap opera Another World) enjoys his most high-profile film role as playwright Lloyd Richards. His shouting match with Bette Davis across the theater is one of the film’s most well-written and well-played scenes: “All playwrights should be dead for two hundred years!”
Gary Merrill is perfect as the passionate theater director who espouses a high-minded philosophy of show business and the peculiar breed of people attracted to it: “All of the religions of the world rolled into one.” During the filming, Davis and Merrill fell in love offscreen, too, and were married for 10 tempestuous years. (Like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the Davis-Merrills couldn’t seem to stop playing the argumentative characters they had perfected even when the cameras weren’t turning.)
Addison (George Sanders) advises Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe)
The ever soigné George Sanders won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his turn as the cynical and acerbic theater critic Addison DeWitt, who lacerates his opponents with his inimitable brand of erudite male bitchery. (Unhappy George, once married to an effervescent young Zsa Zsa Gabor, suffered from crippling depression and alcoholism, and took his own life in 1972.)
Anne Baxter—after the understudy's performance
Though the picture belongs in many respects to Miss Bette Davis, Anne Baxter does indeed have some unforgettable and well-played moments as the two-faced Eve Harrington (née Gertrude Slovinsky). Her best scene is in the powder room of the Cub Room with Celeste Holm, where Eve starts by apologizing tearfully but ends by attempting to blackmail Karen into giving her the starring role in Lloyd’s new play. Baxter also scores in her face-off with Addison DeWitt near the end of the film, sparring verbally with her acid-tongued benefactor before collapsing in a crumbling heap at his feet.
The unforgettable Thelma Ritter as Birdie
Even the smallest roles are beautifully drawn and well-cast by Mankiewicz. The redoubtable Thelma Ritter is unforgettable as the sarcastic maid who is wise to Eve’s overweening ambition, stealing every scene she’s in. Gregory Ratoff is deliciously comic as the hypochondriacal producer Max Fabian. And in a small but showy early role, superstar-to-be Marilyn Monroe displays impeccable comic timing as the talentless but enterprising showgirl Addison DeWitt uses for arm candy.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Eve is the film by which director/writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz will be forever remembered. A true film artist, he can be described as an undoubtedly straight man with a gay sensibility. (Indeed, he had a passionate affair with gay icon Judy Garland, who married two or three gay men herself.) He had a flair for bitchy, witty dialogue and strong female characters, and was as much a “woman’s director” as was the effete George Cukor. Mankiewicz brought out the best in every actress he worked with (including elevating Elizabeth Taylor to goddess status in Cleopatra). Some of his best films include A Letter to Three Wives, The Barefoot Contessa and Suddenly Last Summer. But All About Eve is his finest of all.
Lauren Bacall as Margo, on Broadway in Applause
In 1970, the film was adapted into a Broadway musical called Applause, which won Lauren Bacall a Tony Award for her contemporary “mod” interpretation of Margo Channing. But Eve’s basic plotline, the ambitious newcomer out to supplant the established star, is still an archetypal trope pregnant with dramatic possibilities and can be seen in dozens of other films and plays of yesterday and today, from Valley of the Dollsto Showgirls, from All About My Mother to Black Swan.
Oh, I can’t wait to watch it...again. “Fasten your seatbelts...it’s going to be a bumpy night…”
In the 2011 film, Eddie Redmayne’s character enjoyed A Week with Marilyn, but I have had a lifelong obsession with her...and as a result, no actress who ever attempted playing her in a film has ever satisfied me. All have been disappointments, until I saw Michelle Williams’s characterization of the iconic star.
It started before I had ever seen her on the screen or heard her tremulous voice. While visiting a neighborhood bookstore when I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother told me I could have any book I liked. I gravitated to a beautiful white coffee-table-type book with a close-up of an ethereal and angelic woman with a wispy white-blonde bouffant, blood red lips and sparkling blue-green eyes on the cover. Inside were lots more pictures of this supernaturally attractive woman. When I brought the book, Norman Mailer’s Marilyn, to my mother at the checkout counter, I swear I remember her rolling her eyes. “You sure this is the one you want?” she asked, rhetorically. In retrospect, I think she knew her young son was going to grow up gay in the 1970s...
The cover of Norman Mailer's book
Thus began my fascination with Marilyn Monroe. After reading the Mailer, I obsessively bought, borrowed and devoured every book about her life and career, searching for clues as to what had made her so legendary and so famous, and why this lovely young woman had died so young. I still had not yet ever seen a movie with Marilyn Monroe in it, but I read about her performances in all of them. Our TV fare in those days was limited to four channels--the three major networks and PBS. A fuzzy parade of what were called UHF stations were also accessible if you carefully turned the dial and adjusted the antenna, but the picture quality was still so poor that no one in my family could stand watching them. But finally I was given a small black-and-white TV of my own, so I could start watching old movies in the privacy of my room...wavy, blurred and indistinct, panned-and-scanned, cut up with dozens of inane commercials and edited for length and content, all in contrasting shades of snowy gray. There, I first caught glimpses of the motion picture magic that was Marilyn Monroe. It wasn’t until the VHS Blockbuster era of the mid-1980s that I was able to see great old films in their entirety, among them Marilyn Monroe’s iconic performances in films like Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Prince and the Showgirl. Monroe was an utterly unique presence on screen. Like many gay men, I intuitively understood her appeal on many levels. She was a mass of contradictions--a love goddess who could not find lasting affection, a sex symbol who reportedly could not have an orgasm, a serious actress who never got a role that could fully realize her potential, yet she excelled as a self-satirizing comedienne. Her delicious sense of humor, quick wit and lightning-fast comic timing were juxtaposed against an equal measure of sadness and dark despair. She was the embodiment of the American Dream, a rags-to-riches fable of the poor orphan girl who rose to heights most people only dream about, and a cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for. Like her Gemini soulmate and fellow gay icon, Judy Garland, she transmuted her pain and insecurities into art and beauty, leaving the world too soon. In short, Marilyn Monroe is a near-impossible character for an ordinary mortal actor to play.
Catherine Hicks
Poppy Montgomery
Mira Sorvino
Over the years, many a brave and talented and actress has made the valient attempt, including Catherine Hicks in Marilyn: The Untold Story (1979), Constance Forslund in Moviola: This Year’s Blonde (1980) and Poppy Montgomery in an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde (2001). But to me, not one of them did my idol justice. Most decent female impersonators can imitate the most obvious facets of Monroe’s persona clearly enough, but the familiar gestures, mannerisms and breathy voice do not even begin to plumb the depths of Marilyn’s mysterious magnetism. How does one capture the essence of someone whose appeal still can’t be fully explained by her photogenic beauty, mannerisms or physical measurements? So complex and seemingly schizoid was Monroe’s personality that often two actresses are cast to portray her in the same film, one as the young Norma Jean and the other as the star persona Marilyn Monroe—think of Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in Norma Jean and Marilyn (1996) or Misty Rowe and Paula Lane in Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976) and Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn (1989). (Tellingly, almost all Monroe bio pics have been made for television, as if the producers knew that to splash a less-than-mythic Marilyn across a vast and wide cinema screen would fail miserably in conjuring movie magic and reveal their mere sleight-of-hand and legerdemain.)
Michelle
Before My Week with Marilyn, I must admit I had been underwhelmed by Michelle Williams. I had barely noticed her on Dawson’s Creek, and her much-lauded performance in Blue Valentine had left me cold (apparently, blank expressions and halting dialogue are enough to earn Oscar nods, I thought), and I approached seeing this movie with trepidation. But it was a movie about Marilyn, and I had to see it. On the whole, I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film. With its literate and historically accurate script by Adrian Hodges, who obviously drew on a wealth of source material and not just the two memoirs by Prince and the Showgirl assistant director Colin Clark (The Prince, The Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn), the film details a slice of Monroe’s personal and professional life in an entertaining and absorbing manner. Kudos are likewise owed to director Simon Curtis who keeps the action moving at an engaging pace and allows all the actors to shine. Painstaking attention to period detail also pays off for Monroe scholars like me...the recreation of the sets and costumes from the 1957 Olivier/Monroe film is truly uncanny. The story is rooted in truth, whether or not you believe the protagonist’s claims that he had an affair with Monroe during the ill-fated filming of the souffle-light Terrence Rattigan comedy, and the movie’s brilliant ensemble cast does an impressive job, giving a birds-eye view of what might have really happened at Shepperton Studios all those years ago.
Sir Laurence
Sir Kenneth
As the uptight and egotistical Sir Laurence Olivier, more comfortable on a theater stage than a soundstage, Sir Kenneth Branagh (who inherited Olivier’s mantle as “the world’s greatest living actor”) is a delight, spoofing the image of Shakespearean actor as supercilious, sulking, pompous ass. Branagh also weaves in some vulnerability and compassion to his characterization, grudgingly acknowledging his impossible costar’s talent and accomplishments. Sir Kenneth received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting actor for his performance as Olivier.
MM and Paula Strasberg
Zoe Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg
The mysterious figure of acting coach Paula Strasberg (wife of iconic Method guru Lee) is brought to life by the talented Zoe Wanamaker. Swathed in black caftans (she was nicknamed “Black Bart”) she resembles a witch whose over-the-top flattery casts spells that conjure Monroe’s ephemeral gifts from the ethos. Dominic Cooper is subtly effective as disgruntled photographer Milton Greene, who reinvented Monroe’s public image and helped her establish Marilyn Monroe Productions, and is now losing his grip on the star.
Marilyn took Vivien's role for the film version of the Terrence Rattigan play
Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh
Perfectly played cameo appearances by Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, terrified of aging and losing her husband (she eventually did, to lovely young actress Joan Plowright), and Dame Judi Dench as compassionate costar Dame Sybil Thorndike, add dimension to the storyline. Dougray Scott as a cold and preoccupied Arthur Miller, and Toby Jones as beleaguered publicist Arthur Jacobs (who later produced the megahit Planet of the Apes film series), are equally on the mark. As Colin Clark, the privileged and seemingly naive young man who serves as the third assistant director and personal assistant to Olivier, Eddie Redmayne gives a charming performance, as does Emma Watson in one of her first adult roles as a studio wardrobe mistress.
Emma Watson and Eddie Redmayne
In short, the cast is uniformly excellent—but it’s Michelle Williams who is truly remarkable and holds the entire picture together. Without resorting to a cheap imitation, Williams closely approximates Monroe’s voice, gestures and famous walk. She recreates scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn’s uncanny quirkiness and joie de vivre. Obviously building the character from the inside out, Williams channels Monroe’s mercurial essence in a startling multilayered performance--here is a
troubled yet talented girl, obviously suffering from anxiety, depression and overwhelming stage fright but determined to give her public its money’s worth. She is equal parts villainess and victim in the unfolding plotline, alternately adorable and exasperating. This is a miraculous performance by a skilled actress who clearly understood the complicated woman she was playing. I was entranced. The only suspensions of disbelief a die-hard Monroe fan might mention involve the musical numbers "Heat Wave" and "That Old Black Magic" which are given fresh contemporary restagings and arrangements—but Williams’s musical stylings as Monroe are so startling you would swear this is exactly how Monroe had performed them. When Oscar nominations were announced that year, I was rooting all the way for Williams to take home the gold, and was appalled when Meryl Streep was named Best Actress for her lifeless, cardboard portrayal of another real-life legend, Margaret Thatcher, in The Iron Lady. (Had any of Streep’s other 5,000—ok, 17—nominations given her that third Oscar, I would have said she deserved it, but not this one!) As far as I’m concerned, Michelle was the winner that year. Today, I’m an unabashed and bonafide fan of Williams and feel she can do no wrong. (I even loved her sweetly underplayed Glinda the Good in the universally panned Oz the Great and Powerful.) So thank you, Michelle Williams: Your stunning portrayal achieved the impossible. You brought Marilyn back to life for a few precious hours for stalwart fans like me...and you’ve introduced her to a new generation of eager fans, proving that, in the hands of a keenly sensitive artist, nostalgia can still be a relevant art form. Marilyn herself would be proud!
Some Like It Hot (1959) was a film Marilyn Monroe hated making, but you’d never know it. This comic gem of a picture was Monroe’s all-time top-grossing crowd pleaser, and contains one of her most memorable performances. As the dizzy Sugar Kane, Marilyn cavorts gleefully with two horsey girlfriends who turn out to be guys in Billy Wilder’s frenetically funny Jazz Age farce.
She had to be talked into doing the film in the first place. There was no completed script when Billy Wilder started placing pleading calls to Monroe, semi-retired in New York City and unenthusiastic about playing yet another not-very-bright blonde bombshell. But husband Arthur Miller persuaded her to take the part. “I think he secretly likes dumb blondes,” she joked to a friend, but the truth was that with Miller suffering from writer’s block and Marilyn also not working, the Miller household needed the income. So Marilyn relented and took the role, but was then determined to make it her own.
A Method actor who drove her director and costars to distraction as she struggled to “make contact with the character” and breathe life into the role of the bubble-headed ukelele player, Marilyn took her work very seriously. Determined to achieve perfection despite a near-neurotic lack of confidence, she relied heavily on her drama coach Paula Strasberg (wife of Actors Studio director Lee) for support, inspiration and guidance. This irked director Wilder, an old-school chauvinist who liked to run his movie sets as a benevolent dictator but could not control his female star. Costars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon suffered too, in uncomfortable drag and heavy makeup, waiting for the perpetually tardy Marilyn to show up on the set. Yet together, the creative team succeeded in creating a movie classic.
Looking at the film today, it’s Marilyn who shines brightest of all. Her souffle-light characterization has unexpected depth and dimension: Sugar is an alcoholic who has always been unlucky in love; a giggling girl who always looks on the bright side but ends up “with the fuzzy end of the lollipop;” a seductive satin doll spouting rapid-fire quips and wisecracks at director Billy Wilder’s preferred lightning speed. What could have been a flat, one-dimensional character becomes the sparkling apex of the film, elevating a potentially hackneyed cross-dressing farce to a new level of wit and adding some much-needed heart—and that indescribable Monroe magic.
I don’t think Marilyn could have crafted this role with nearly as much tragicomic nuance without the training the Actors Studio gave her...true, dumb blondes had been her stock in trade for a decade, but with each successive part she played, Marilyn added layers of eccentric detail that brought each character into more vivid focus. For her performance in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe won the Best Actress in a Comedy Golden Globe Award.
True, Marilyn did not endear herself to the cast and crew of Some Like It Hot, but they paid her back with plenty of well-publicized vitriol themselves, accusing her of unprofessional behavior verging on madness—refusing to learn her lines, ruining take after take, showing up hours late. Wilder, Curtis and even the ordinarily menschy Jack Lemmon publicly questioned not only her discipline and professionalism but her talent as well, dismissing her gifts and contributions to the film. Tony Curtis went so far as to say kissing Marilyn had been akin to “kissing Hitler.” (Even years after Monroe’s death, they continued to repeat the same unkind remarks about their most famous costar.)
The public criticism devastated Marilyn, and husband Miller gallantly defended her. But ever since becoming a star, Marilyn had been the target of vicious attacks on her talent, her character and her unconventional approach to life. She was a free spirit and a feminist long before the women’s movement, and she always marched to the beat of her own inner drum. It’s interesting that some of the harshest criticisms leveled at her came from the men she worked with--directors, producers and studio heads. Men of the 1950s were obviously threatened by a woman with as much potential power and influence as a Marilyn Monroe. So they brushed off her contributions by labeling her as difficult, impossible, or just plain crazy.
Seeing the finished product up on the screen, the viewer must ask how much of all of that fabled Some Like It Hot stürm and drang is true and accurate, and how much is trumped-up publicity or mere sour grapes? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter, except to appreciators of the sensitive artist known as Marilyn Monroe. Some Like It Hot is great film, a comedy classic, and Marilyn is an integral part of that film’s timeless appeal.
Dark and downbeat, poignant and profound, The Misfits (1961) is an unflinchingly clinical examination of the inner psyches of a group of disparate unfulfilled characters played against a backdrop of the arid and cheerless Nevada desert, filmed in silvery black and white. To some film fans, it’s a masterpiece of motion picture truth. To others, it’s an unrelentingly dry and joyless two hours and four minutes, difficult to watch in one sitting.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, All My Sons) and directed by the legendary filmmaker John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), The Misfits assembled some of the greatest talents of the mid 20th century for this original story about a group of cowboys whose lives are touched by a beautiful, lonely divorcee. The cast includes Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe (the final film for both stars), Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter and Montgomery Clift.
The performances are faultless, the characters well-drawn, and some of the language among Arthur Miller’s best and most perceptive observations of the human experience, but this is far from the perfect movie, and the fault rests chiefly with the author himself.
Miller and Marilyn on the set
Miller’s recent years had not been productive or artistically satisfying. He had spent more time fighting House Un-American Activities inquiries into his supposed Communist leanings, and playing nursemaid to a needy and narcissistic movie star wife, than he did creating theater magic. By 1960, his four-year marriage was crumbling. As he adapted his 1957 short story, originally published in Esquire magazine, into a vehicle for Marilyn, he was obviously in a state of deep depression.
Clearly written by a man in need of a prescription for one of today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Arthur Miller’s screenplay for The Misfits is a negative and gloomy tale of lost hopes, unrealized dreams and an inability to change—almost everyone we meet finds their life frozen with regret and despair. Artfully articulated, yes...but entertaining? If you are a fan of fine acting, perhaps.
Clark Gable in his final film role, as Gay Langland
Gable’s portrayal of disillusioned cattle rustler Gay Langland plumbs the depths of the actor’s capacities. He hasn’t had a juicy acting role like this since Rhett Butler, and we see moments of surprising vulnerability from one of Hollywood’s most iconic he-men. The brilliant Eli Wallach is intense and raw as Gay’s sidekick Guido. The reliable and real Thelma Ritter adds a much-needed dose of ironic humor to the often lugubrious proceedings, but she is also touching and wistful as Roslyn’s Reno landlady. Monty Clift’s physically ravaged rodeo rider Perce reminds audiences of the actor’s own horrifying car accident three years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and hooked on pain medication. His scene in a phone booth speaking haltingly with his mother is among the very best Montgomery Clift moments ever captured on film.
Montgomery Clift as Perce
Veteran character actress Thelma Ritter as Isabel
Eli Wallach as Guido
Roslyn and Gay follow the star that will take them "right home"
Monroe is a revelation as over-30 divorcee Roslyn Tabor. If you’ve never seen The Misfits, this is truly a Marilyn Monroe you’ve never encountered on the screen. Here is one of the few performances in which she was able to fully use her Actors Studio training to realize a character who is more than a cartoonlike depiction of beauty and seductiveness. Monroe’s Roslyn is disappointed with life and can find little to hold onto or believe in...yet her sheer life force has the power to bring magic to the moment. To use Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio technical jargon, we see Marilyn “make contact” perfectly with her character, particularly in the scenes where she describes feeling abandoned by her mother and let down by her ex-husband. Though Monroe disliked her character and the story, feeling Miller stole intimate details from her own life and their marriage, her performance in this dark film strikes a poignantly incandescent note.
Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn
Much has been written about the filming of this movie, and in the ensuing years the surviving players all seemed to point to Marilyn Monroe as the reason for the film’s failure. Marilyn was difficult. Marilyn was ill—drinking—overweight. Marilyn was late. Marilyn was mean to her soon-to-be-ex. That may all have been true, but the real culprits in the film’s failure to entertain are the author and the director, who were reported to have indulged in countless gambling and drinking binges during location filming in the Nevada desert. The drama offscreen was far more exciting than the action being photographed, and Miller used Huston as a surrogate therapist and confidante as his marriage fell to pieces.
All the major players involved in putting together this quirky film displayed behavior perfectly in keeping with the movie’s title. It's a fascinating film, but only if you're in a deep and reflective mood.
Three misfits—director Huston, star Monroe and writer Miller
