To bury Caesar

All About Eve

(1950)

One thing that has always stuck in my craw about this is that an element of Eve's [spoiler alert!] villainy is the clear implication that she's a lesbian. One might argue that what's really villainous is not her sexual preference per se but the additional layer of mendacity it adds to her exploitation of her sex appeal vis-à-vis men, but I don't buy it: the presentation of her going back upstairs intertwined with her housemate after the incriminating middle-of-the-night call to Lloyd suggests lesbianism as an element of a sort of holistic wickedness. Likewise the second-generation seduction of the final scene.

Yeah, yeah, yeah--different time, different sensibilities, different expectations; I get it, and I'm not condemning the film for being a product of 1950; just saying that sticks in my craw. My craw is like that; it's sticky.