All About Eve was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards in 1951, including four female acting nominees – a feat unmatched even today. While the leading ladies were disappointed, All About Eve won in multiple categories – and in her only Oscars appearance, Marilyn presented the award for Best Sound Recording to Thomas T. Moulton.
More than 70 years later, All About Eve has retained its exalted place in movie history, as Stuart Husband writes for The Telegraph.
“It’s got no thermonuclear dynamics, no looming icebergs, no song and dance showpieces: just glittering wit and a juicy seam of domestic noir. It’s even got the temerity to be set on Broadway. Yet it picked up six awards, including Best Picture, at the 1951 ceremony, and was ranked 16 on the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 Best American Films. That film, of course, was All About Eve.
‘It’s all about women… and their men!’ ran the tagline for the movie’s poster, on its release in 1950. But in reality All About Eve is about much more imperishable stuff: ambition, artifice, venality, and the fine art of faking it till you make it … The potency of All About Eve’s protégé-usurps-mentor plot arc has inspired numerous homages … What none of those efforts could boast, however, was the original’s breezy sophistication and dazzling dialogue, buffed to an immaculate sheen by writer-director Joseph L Mankiewicz.
All About Eve has been lauded as the world’s most quotable film, and while it’s certainly not without its zingers – Bette Davis’s ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,’ Thelma Ritter, as Margo’s assistant Birdie, drolly opining to Davis that ‘She (Eve) studies you like you were a set of blueprints,’ and Marilyn Monroe, cameoing as hapless starlet Claudia Caswell, being introduced as ‘a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts’ – it’s the heightened theatricality of the piece as a whole that sets it apart.
In fact, so embedded was Mankiewicz in Hollywood that he’d been the one to introduce Katharine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy. He may only have been 37 when producer Darryl Zanuck gave All About Eve the green light, but he knew how to assemble a cast that could give his scenes even more brio than they had on the page – and put them at their ease. In her 1962 autobiography, The Lonely Life, Bette Davis wrote of Eve: ‘It was a great script, had a great director, and was a cast of professionals all with parts they liked. It was a charmed production from the word go.’
Thelma Ritter, meanwhile, was a stage veteran who’d come late to movies … Both Anne Baxter and Celeste Holm were recent supporting actress Oscar recipients, Baxter for 1947’s The Razor’s Edge and Holm for Gentleman’s Agreement a year later. And Monroe’s va-va-voom ingénue – ‘I don’t want to make trouble. All I want is a drink’ – jump-started her career.
In the end, its Oscar haul – Costume Design, Sound Recording, and Supporting Actor for Sanders, alongside Best Picture, Screenplay, and Direction – left its actresses empty-handed. In a deliciously Eve-ian twist, it’s thought that Davis and Baxter lost out because the latter insisted on being included in the Best Actress rather than Supporting Actress list, thus splitting any potential vote; further proof, if any were needed, that the film’s verities are eternal.”
The Marilyn Report 
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