All About Eve

I didn't know it, but I had imported the whole arc of this story into my vocabulary years ago, by condensing it into a derivative that I actually don't know firsthand: "single white female." I'm not even sure where I first picked up the phrase; it might have been Buffy ("Maybe I'm overreacting...but I'm the one getting single white femaled here!"), though I have a sense it was earlier. It's such an important idea, that of the pod-person taking over your identity. Important enough that I felt licensed to use the expression without having watched the movie. Well, now that I've watched Eve, perhaps I'll rotate it into my vocabulary.

Odd movie. Most of it was very epic and dramatic (I'm sure the monologue by Bette Davis on womanhood is one for the textbooks), but then at the end it puttered off into the kind of absurd and improbable world you would find in a musical comedy. I would even call it self-parody, except that I think it was meant to be taken dead seriously. Marilyn Monroe has a little cameo in this movie, much less over-the-top than her later persona, and so sort of cute and realistic in a way you wouldn't expect.

Best quote ever:
Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's speaking and HER thoughts she's expressing?
Margo Channing: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!
Lloyd Richards: It's about time that the piano realizes that it has not written the concerto!

Took the words straight out of my mouth.